Turns out to my surprise that I'm getting old and grizzled, and while the current government shutdown threat is an interesting development, it's nothing I haven't seen before. Which is why I'm not particularly worried about this time - if Obama and Dems hold the line (which I expect they will), Republicans will end up owning an increasingly unpopular shutdown. I remember it from the Clinton era, back when Newt was the Craziest of the Crazy. I don't zactly remember what it was about at the time, but I remember a lot of people being mad about that for a long time.
Which brings us to now. I'm not sure what the demographics here on DK are, but I was curious about how our younger members (twenty-somethings and under) are experiencing this. The same thing that's drawing Cruz et al to this like a moth to flame is also likely capturing the attention of the younger members of this community, and I wanted to hear their thoughts.
But that got me thinking back to my last gov't shutdown experience, and I realized by then I was already an entrenched Democrat. That got me thinking about how I ended up where I am, and wondering about how you all ended up where you are. So after the jump, you tell me your story, and I'll tell you mine!
Reagan was the first US president I noticed. I would have been six or seven at the time, living out of country, and I remember a tangible gasp from my parents. America was somewhere else, but their reaction told me that this was something Important, that Required Attention. I started paying attention to the news, and trying to read the paper (although the comics were by far the best part...).
Unfortunately (or not), I came to political awareness while living in Jamaica, where elections were at the time accompanied by street fights between the PNP and the JLP...with machetes. You'd get daily tallies on how many people had been killed or had a limb cut off the day before. It was peculiar to me, but I expected that I would one day grow up to care enough about one party or the other enough to be out there with my machete, so I tried to pay attention.
I ended up in a small town in Canada when the Cold War started heating up, and I'm pretty sure I actually got drilled on the importance of hiding under my desk if the nuclear sirens went off. I wasn't anywhere worth bombing, but somehow it was made clear that we were on the "flight path" between US and USSR nukes, and that a nuke dropping out of the sky was a possibility.
We had air raid sirens go off peridically. Sometimes they were practice events, sometimes we just stood around not knowing what was happening. Sometimes they were connected with natural gas releases/accidents. But sometimes we'd smell natural gas without hearing the sirens. But then the grown-ups at the time weren't any good even at predicting the weather. Sometimes we'd walk to school in the snow, and a chinook would swoop in, and we'd be out playing in the mud at morning recess, and walking home for lunch in t-shirts, our feet sweating in our snow boots.
A year later I was to my surprise living in Ground Zero, in the DMV as we call it now, DC, MD, VA, but back then it was just close enough to DC to be doomed. I wrote President Reagan a letter in 5th grade, questioning the validity of nuclear brinksmanship. "How can we win a war by destroying the world?" was how I put it, to my memory. Air raid sirens never went off in the states like they did in Canada, so I'd just accepted that I could die at any point in a nuclear exchange without even knowing.
I had a rough time as a child accepting the logistical validity of nuclear warfare. I asked a lot of adults to explain it to me and none of them could. I still wanted to believe that grown-ups were responsible adults who were running the world well, so I assumed that I wasn't quite getting it.
Two or three years later, AIDS came up, and that's when I lost all faith in the Republican party. I was at a French Immersion School, a Lycee Francais at the time. AIDS was SIDA. My first year in the system had been profoundly disorienting. English, Gym, and Math were the only classes that made sense to me, and Math only once I realized they used ,s for .s ("virgules" for periods). I held my own on the playground, accumulated vocabulary, learned about the existence of grammar while learning French grammar, had my mind flipping blown 17 times over learning about the French Revolutions while learning French (Tip: study the pictures in your history books really hard and try to make up reasonable interpretations when the teacher asks you questions about a text and lecture that you can't understand.).
Why did AIDS do it, the same school year when I got into (what felt to me at the time) a profound battle with the French Educational System over whether there were 9 or 10 planets? (It turns out that the French had discovered a tenth planet, and were so committed to it that they weren't considering alternatives. But neither was I, who knew there were 9 planets, and was committed to being an astronaut. Even after the Shuttle crashed that year).
Because AIDS was a threat to me, and everyone around me. It's hard to describe how scary that time was to a child who had no idea what was going on, except that I'd just been through it with nuclear brinksmanship, and every child went through it at 9/11 or some other traumatic mass media event that made clear that nowhere was safe.
At the time, I was 11 or 12. AIDS was clearly a mostly gay disease, and gayness was a pretty shocking concept, but AIDS was also killing people who weren't gay. It wasn't clear at the time whether AIDS could be passed on by toilet seats, or by handshakes, or kisses. Literally any kind of physical interaction might infect you with a deadly disease, and you wouldn't necessarily know until weeks or months later.
Again, as a child, I wanted to believe that responsible adults were running the show, and when President GODDAMNED Reagan denied the existence of AIDS, when I KNEW that people where dying of it, when French scientists (with whom I'd recently indirectly argued about the tenth planet in the solar system, but had conceded the existence of alternate interpretations of data.), had proven the existence of SIDA, I lost faith.
I wouldn't have minded if Reagan had just left the issue open to debate. I would have expected him to invest funding for scientists to investigate a disease that I KNEW was killing people who weren't gay. And I saw NO REASON not to commit resources to protecting people who WERE GAY, even though until that point in my life, no-one had explained to me that it was OK to by gay, that it wasn't a weird psychological disease, and I hadn't yet met a single person who was openly gay (to me), or a single person who had said that it was OK to be gay. They were people too.
I didn't want any more people dying from a disease that wasn't understood, and I didn't want to die from a disease that wasn't understood. But at that time, PEOPLE WERE DYING FROM AIDS. Reagan denied something or other, and I remember the crush of learning about it, while walking across campus. I was profoundly angry, and had nowhere to go with that anger.
Three years later, when I knew that AIDS was communicated by a transfer of bodily fluids, I let a dentist work on me without gloves., I knew that he was gay because he kept on asking me (15 years old at the time) to go out to lunch with him, and he was unprofessionally affectionate. I was polite with him at the time, because I recognized that he was gay and I wasn't, but I was too young to recognize at the time that he had Karposi Sarcoma, and likely full-blown AIDS.
FUCKING SCIENCE would have prevented that. RESEARCH would have prevented that. REAGAN could have prevented that. But he didn't, because reality was less important than whatever BULLSHIT he was drowning in at the time, as well as all his enablers.
For those of us who've been through this before, a government shutdown over bullshit is outrageous but not shocking. We've already had our shocks. Mine was after I'd accepted that a Republican President was willing to destroy the world over a fight with the USSR. It happened for me while walking to class at age 12 or so and learning that President Reagan had denied the existence of a disease that was killing thousands of people.
Maybe the best thing that will come out of the next month or so is a generation of young people being exposed to the brutal fact that people in authority are not necessarily committed to their wellbeing, and that it's worth supporting those who stand for Justice. To my memory, NO ONE STOOD UP FOR GAYS AND AGAINST AIDS at the time. I'm sure many did, but the only news I got at the time was the Washington Post. Which to their credit, did present a relatively balanced report.