A short telling of my mother’s last two years re politics. My mother and father were dyed in the wool Roosevelt democrats. My father thought Franklin went to Warm Springs, Georgia not to swim in the waters but to walk upon them. My father died in 1966 but my mother remained steadfastly a democrat voting for Humphrey in ’68, in ’72 she decided not to vote Republican but she couldn’t vote for McGovern. She enthusiastically supported Carter in 1976 but realized during his presidency that character, while important, did not override all the other necessary traits for running a country. She admired his altruism but she had grown up on a farm during the depression and that had made her a pragmatist. She knew about hard work and the necessity of accepting the environment in which that work must be done.
She knew that you didn’t just broadcast your seeds and expect nature to deliver you a crop. You had to pray for rain, not just rain but the right kind of rain. Then you had to work hard every day with a hoe and rake to fend off the weeds that would guzzle the nutrients your crops needed. Then you had to harvest the crops before the first frost that would start the rot to set in. Yes, she believed that you should work for your keep. Still we had political emotion in our family. I remember my father’s daily prayers at night that the party would select John Kennedy as the nominee. He might have been a Yankee but he was “Our Yankee.”
With Johnson and then Carter she began to understand that her party, the party of the demigod Franklin Roosevelt, had created an environment that rewarded fully a third of society for not working. She referred to that segment as baby birds that were always loudly chirping in their government provided nests, their mouths open demanding to be fed and cared for. This went against her life experience and after the disaster that such a good man as Jimmy Carter created she voted for Ronald Reagan finding him a much better manager of resources and a pragmatist who changed what he could while keeping the rest at arms length.
She was a supporter of the draft because she saw it as a great leveling mechanism, at least for males within the society. She was a fan of the concept of national service for all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three believing that would do much to fill in the cultural rifts that had developed between the subcultures pressing themselves forward, not just in society but politics as well. Although she grew up on a farm she became the contracts manager for first the Titan missile fuels program, and then the space shuttle fuels program. She was a small but vital part, first of the ICBM defense mechanism and then the space exploration mission. Her logical and pragmatic approach saved the U.S. taxpayers a lot of money and she helped us deliver on John Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Her life experience led her full circle from the idealism of the Great Society to the realism of putting a man on the moon. The first was a wish and the second a deed.
Thus, color me surprised when bed bound in her last two years of ninety-nine and one hundred that when I asked if she wanted me to turn the television on she would fix me with her by then watery blue eyes and say. “NO! I might have to see that man.” “Not even the weather channel or the Nashville channel?” I would ask. “NO! They might have a political ad for him and he makes me so angry.”
Now, I thought this might be a touch of Trump Derangement Syndrome since so many other of my PhD learned friends at the gym or Rotary or the grocery store were so vociferous in their opposition to Trump. I could imagine them saying much the same thing. Finally, one day in her hundredth year I asked. “What man, Mom? What man don’t you want to see?” “Why that man who lies so much. The one the party wouldn’t pick for years because he lied so much. You know him. The President. He calls himself Biden but I call him Lieden.”
That caught me off guard for my mother and I had not spoken much about politics in her waning years, although she would sometimes mention something stupid those politicians were pushing again. She equated most politicians with drug pushers only you didn’t have to physically ingest their drugs. You just set back and dreamed about how they were going to make you better off than you are. She was never all that emotional about it, just dismissive of politicians pushing the concept of nirvana vice the street pushers whose drugs would take you, albeit temporarily, to that nirvana. For her to become so emotional about one politician in particular was certainly out of character for someone so firmly rooted in the traditions of hard work and pragmatism. Although I put it down to her aging, I wonder if the emotional swell was the only way she could express the wisdom she had gained in her hundred years of hoeing weeds in the bean rows of the farm and the government.