I was born in 1969, so I was 11 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. I don’t know if my family was more or less political than other families of that era. My grandmother did have a picture of JFK on her living room wall next to her Catholic crucifix and I can remember she and my father refusing to call President Nixon by any name other than “Shithead.” Both of my parents were outraged by the anti-gay comments of Anita Bryant and my mother treated me to a daily dose of the Phil Donahue Show (knowingly or not) which covered many social and political topics of the time.
Maybe that's why I recognize the echoes of Reagan's policies in the rhetoric of the GOP in general and the Tea Party in particular. Following below the squiggly rabbit hole if that's as unsettling to you.
Maybe I did, because of that, pay more attention than most kids to political news. Or maybe it’s because I lived in NYC which, like all large urban cities, were of little interest or concern to Ronald Reagan. Maybe that made me more aware that the number of families below the poverty line increased by a third under Reagan and among these families, the numbers who were depending on subsidized housing swelled from 6.2 million to 8.9 million. But in the wake Reagan’s attempts to dismantle the federal housing assistance program, cutting the budget first in half and then in half again, over 2 million Americans were left homeless including families with children. During all of this, I recall the “teflon president,” who (along with many of his staff) openly mocked or ridiculed the poor.
Because of what I recognized, even as a pre-teen, as indifference and casual cruelty, I enjoyed when journalists and commentators would lampoon the sneering disregard that Reagan and his administration seemed to show toward everyday, working-class Americans. I especially liked the political cartoons in the Daily News, which was my parents’ newspaper of choice in Brooklyn where I grew up. One of the cartoons that still sticks in my mind to this day was one concerned with the president and his administration’s assertion that there was no real hunger in America unless the people were dieting, a lame rehash of a comment made while running for office in California in the 1960s . The editorial cartoon showed a gargantuan Edwin Meese, Reagan’s Attorney General and one-time executive secretary, glancing around while masses of poor, starving and homeless Americans huddled by his feat, obscured from his view by his enormous girth. Meese’s captioned opinion stated, “There is no hunger in America.”
It seems that those same callous and dismissive attitudes toward those less fortunate still prevail among the GOP and Conservative movements. The recent Ryan budget passed by the House, almost entirely along party lines, slashing funding to SNAP (food stamps), Medicaid and some 90 programs that benefit the poor and working class in America while cutting taxes for the wealthy. To me, this shows, sadly, that the ghost of Reagan’s influence is in full force today and that's disappointing. It makes me wonder how anyone of at least my age or older could so easily forget the kind of human suffering we have seen follow in the wake of these attempts to vilify the poor or if we're really living in a society of sociopaths who know the pain inflicted by slashing the social safety net and who just don't care.