Today is Election Day 2020, The Importance of Yesterday’s Elections
We were changing from our gym shorts after compulsory showers when she walked up to me. As if it mattered, I clung tightly to the towel to hide disappointingly small breasts.
“Who’d your dad vote for?” She was about my height, heavier than I, although I was among the skinniest girls at Gattis Junior High, and her black skin shined brilliantly as she pressed her face closer to mine. “Bet he voted for Nixon! Didn’t he!”
“I don’t know. He...my parents...don’t talk about it.” I took one step back. “What’s the...”
“You don’t even know? Nixon won the election. White people voted for Nixon!” She yelled, and after quickly scanning the locker room for our gym teacher’s presence, she left me standing until I sat hard on the bench.
On November 5, 1968 I attended classes and did my homework and watched television as usual. The only notice I gave to the national election was to the constant stream of Clovis men and women through our school building as they made their ways to the library voting booths. But on November 6, 1968 I was aware that something significant had happened to my world. Not because my parents talked about the election results over breakfast, they didn’t and would never do that, but because a Black girl singled me out of all the white girls that morning and forcibly made me see that votes affect others outside my own small world. The others whom I had seldom in my fifteen young years shown any concern about, other than wondering why most of the Black students in Clovis were dropping out of school that year, observing that Black men and women and children still harvested cotton in the Texas panhandle, believing that time in junior high school was as frightening as my life would ever get.
I was raised in a “cancel culture” (borrowing the term because I want to use it my way) that designated sections of towns to black and brown citizens and immigrants, assigned restroom and fountain and swimming pool access by race and skin color, suppressed the votes of minority-race citizens by intimidation and ostracism. By 1968, the nation was a chaotic scene of demonstrations and riots and calls for revolution. Even though Clovis experienced none of the chaos, I had the Clovis News Journal, three big television news networks, and our family’s subscriptions to LOOK and LIFE magazines to inform me that Clovis’ culture was not the national norm. Little Texas could try to protect its white citizens from the vulgar violence of Others but, Clovis would not yet be successful at forming and holding an information bubble. It took another decade or two for Evangelical and right-wing politically conservative churches to make that happen.
And here I am on November 3, 2020 frightened again. I’m not worried that my health will give out before I finish my daily-rewritten lists, or that Social Security will fold in 2023 because the Republican party and Donald J Trump can make that happen, leaving me and millions of aging Americans in dire straits, or that I’ll never experience the joy of being a published writer.
I am frightened that America’s voters will not think outside their small worlds as they fill in their ballots. The consequences of a Republican win today are great. Especially for Others.
When Nixon won the 1968 election, by fewer than 50K votes out of 72M popular votes cast, Clovis did not have celebrations of which I was aware. Perhaps the white country-club people had parties; my family did not belong. Perhaps there was mourning during prayer meeting in the black church across town; I would not know. Nixon was not the candidate that white Americans wanted but, he was not the candidate who black Americans wanted. Although Nixon was not popular, his election would affect US policy and politics for decades to come. Nixon accelerated the deaths of young American men in Vietnam before he ended the war. Nixon used the propaganda machine better than previous presidents, influencing Americans’ perceptions of news media and the role of the free press. Nixon made huge strides in building foreign relationships; however, he is the architect of America’s big divide. Under Nixon’s Republican era, Southern Dixiecrats switched parties and the White Evangelical-Fundamentalist believers who remained mostly quiet in their wait for Christ’s Return awakened to political activism and the heady exhilaration of Power. The Republican party brought extremism and absolutism into its machine.
Tomorrow’s results frighten me. At sixty-seven years of age, I know that today is not all about me.