Personal History

Rooting for Democracy

One less, bell to answer, one less egg to fry, one less man, to pick up after..And all I do is cry.. —The Fifth Dimension, 1970

My eight year old self deemed One Less Bell to Answer the corniest song ever. I held on to that disdain over the subsequent decades. Then the other day I found myself weeping as a fellow volunteer DJ played it on her mid-morning shift on our local public radio station.

Of course it wasn’t the lyrics that got me. It was the time to which it transported my heart. Back to a sleepy suburb north of San Fransisco called Terra Linda, beautiful land in Spanish. We lived on a quiet culdesac with a sprawling backyard where my siblings and I lay on the grass counting stars on balmy summer evenings. Like many families, we had struggles and disagreements. Still, life back then seemed less complicated and not as overwhelming.

A fleeting moment of empathy for the nostalgia behind Make America Great Again gave way to highlights of my public school education.

As a fifth grader, I weaved my bicycle up steep Trellis Drive, dressed up as Johnny Appleseed for Great Americans Day, a party given to us by our teachers. For weeks we’d turned in written reports about people like Betsy Ross and in my case, Georgia O’Keefe. For those of us in Mrs. McGovern’s classroom, this was our introduction to the study of Americans making history decades before we were born.

“Betsy Ross”

Silver-haired 7th grade science teacher Mr. Silverman showed us how to grow protozoa in pond water. He taught us the scientific method: form a hypothesis, test it, confirm the outcome. Mrs. Stang was our civics teacher. She wore big glasses and had long stringy hair. Through buck teeth she broke down the three branches of government—explaining the executive, congressional and judicial wings of our democracy — “checks and balances to insure separation of powers, to prevent no individual or group from having too much power.”

As I depart my Southeast Alaska home this week for my 45th high school reunion in California, I’m looking back at societal milestones over the course of my life.

I was in Junior High in 1974 when President Nixon was disgraced via Watergate. Petty cash when you compare it to the blatant corruption of the current POTUS, from sending innocent immigrants to private prisons to $TRUMP-his personal crypto coin.

The Supreme Court and Congress have all but ceded their power to the President.

Meanwhile half the population apparently never heard of the scientific method, eschewing vaccines that saved millions of lives since I was a kid, and denying climate change even as hurricanes, fires and floods destroy homes and take lives.

I was born in 1962. Eighteen months later President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965. I turned six in 1968, as war raged in Vietnam, enraging protesters across this country. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King suffered the same horrific fate as JFK. More than six decades later, racism is rampant and voting rights are under attack.

It strikes me that I was born into a time of unimaginable American tragedies. Today is a time of unimaginable destruction of the very foundations on which our nation was born, led by a wannabe dictator-narcissist. It feels like a fast train going backwards, witnessing the dismantling of a democracy devised by escapees from royal tyranny.

The crown jewel of the president’s delusion recently took place in the state we’ve called home for 33 years. He invited an indicted war criminal who attacked a sovereign nation unprovoked in 2022 to a so-called peace summit in Alaska. Three years later, casualties add up to roughly 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians and more than a million Russian soldiers; sacrificed for nothing more than the psychopathic pride of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

As the brilliant fellow substacker Mary Geddry put it, the leader of the free world was deduced to a lapdog: “For Putin, the whole production was pure theater. He even broke out his English for the cameras, “Thank you, Donald. See you in Moscow”, delivered with the satisfaction of a Bond villain who knows the hero is in on the scam.”

The debacle, from which the president emerged empty-handed, was a far cry from 1987, when President Ronald Reagan ordered Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” that had divided a repressed Eastern Europe from a free Western Europe since 1961.

Reagan also fired striking air traffic controllers ( weakening unions), repealed landmark legislation funding community mental health centers (putting more homeless on the streets), and cut taxes on the richest Americans by 42%.

In 1980 I graduated from highschool and reached the voting age of 18. In my first semester of college and first election, I voted for Reagan’s democratic opponent out of common sense.

Our grand twins were born the year before Donald Trump was elected for a second term. I can only hope that during their lifetime common sense returns and our fledgling democracy is restored.

Maybe they’ll even learn about the separation of powers and the scientific method.

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Peace and Love, Katie B.

Me, Junior Year, Terra Linda High School