A Democrat Reconsiders Her Republican Upbringing
Born in 1947, I grew up in a Republican household in Illinois. Like most adolescents, I followed my parents’ political party. In 1964 I was a junior in high school and “a Goldwater girl.”
In college I became a Democrat because I liked the Party’s commitment to civil rights, equal education and their seeming commitment to ending the Vietnam War. I have voted for some local Republican officials, but by and large, after high school, I put the Republican Party behind me.
Since the election of Trump, I have been rethinking my experiences in my parents’ Republican household. I remember how my father thought that Eisenhower understood the gravity of war and dignified my father’s service in WWII. After “Ike,” it seemed he was in the habit of being and voting Republican — Nixon, Goldwater, Nixon. He died a Republican in 1976.
By that time my mother had become more sympathetic to the Democrats. Kennedy got to her with his eloquent syntax. An eighth grade language arts teacher, she loved to teach her students how to diagram sentences and used his famous quotations: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
