Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 22, 1990 TAG: 9007230290
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PATRICIA GARNER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
What they are is uninformed by the media's short, repetitious little nothings they call reports. A poll that simply asks "Are you interested?" is asking the wrong question.
Since this poll made news in the form of a nine-second sound bite, allow me a few more seconds to ask some things that the poll did not.
When we were 4, wriggling between our mother's legs as she calmly untangled the knots in our hair while watching her favorite game-show or soap-opera, a newscast interrupted a screaming money-winner or a dry kiss to tell her that her president was murdered.
Twenty-six years later, young Americans were not asked in a poll: How many times have you seen the video of President Kennedy's assassination? Ten times? One hundred times? Or just enough times not to feel anymore the shock of the nation at its greatest grief?
When we were 7 or 8, we ate dinner at the kitchen table, watching the evening news on the kitchen television. We saw water cannons blow away Americans who were black. We saw the Rev. Martin Luther King give his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of a huge crowd in our capital city. We were outside catching fireflies when the gasp heard around the block reached our ears. He too was dead, murdered.
Twenty-two years later, no poll asked my generation: Has racial hatred affected your life? Not at all? Deeply? Or just enough to be sick and tired of the subject altogether?
Sitting in life-science class in the seventh grade, we couldn't wait to ask the class radical, what do you think about the shooting of Gov. George Wallace, the Alabama fascist? We were all embarrassed and rightly put in our place when she said, "No matter what the man believes, he didn't deserve to get shot in the back. No one deserves that." We shut up.
Now, no poll asked us: Would you take an active part in politics if it weren't potentially life-threatening?
We were studying civics when President Nixon resigned. The whole Watergate affair was like an episode of "The Brady Bunch": Some team player stole the other team's play book.
Our favorite after-school cartoons and soaps were pre-empted by Sam Ervin and Barbara Jordan and the name Martha Mitchell - although we can't remember what, if anything, she had to do with the complete loss of trust in government my generation experienced in our formative years, the years we started reading the editorial page and watching the news. We just remember her in some shameful light.
And Agnew . . . didn't he rip off someone or something in Maryland?
By the time Gerald Ford was president, the caricatures of his falling down stairs and dodging bullets shot by a woman named Squeaky were funny. At our political coming of age, politics had become so cheapened that the whole country felt it was OK to laugh and deride the president. After all, he was no John Kennedy.
I felt good when Jimmy Carter was elected. His humility was refreshing. He prayed. His message of peace was a decade before its time; or as any good Reaganite might say, a decade before amassing the military might needed to force a plea of peace from the Soviets. But during Carter's campaign for re-election, his humility was seen to be a weakness. And the cyclical wheel of fortune landed on recession.
What poll asked young Americans: Was Carter too honest, too humble, too humanitarian to get re-elected?
After 21 years of watching TV reports and a few years of reading the editorial pages, and "Doonesbury" and "Grin and Bear It," we were ready to vote. Actually, about 40 percent of us were ready to vote. The issues: image, money.
Ronald Reagan ran away with the bloc of young voters who believed him when he said he would get the government out of our hair and pocketbook. We tacitly approved his deregulation of the savings and loan and airline industries.
Now we can't afford a mortgage, and badly-bolted flying machines are lifting off every day. We gave him the opportunity to stack the Supreme Court. What was the law of the land yesterday is a criminal offense today. Women of my generation never thought our bodies would be subject to legislation.
We listened to Reagan's speechwriters defend an economic theory that had already been abandoned by its chief creator when he realized midstream that it couldn't hold water. We allowed Reagan to put guns into the hands of the Contras - in violation of the Constitution.
Even though Parade magazine, circulation in the bizillions, had an article on Reagan's attempts while governor of California to repeal or table much of that state's civil-rights legislation (it was the only article I remember reading that dealt with his elitist attitude before he was elected), it never became an election issue. But it did become a fact of life for the thousands of homeless across the country and the thousands of commuters who have to step over and around them in train stations five days a week.
Nobody thought there would be such a violent resurgence of racism, but there has been. The issues of image and money were fully exploited for good and bad.
Maybe the pollsters need to ask: Would you have voted for Reagan if you knew he would leave the country with so much homelessness and racism?
We were in college when Reagan was shot by a starstruck maniac. We were saddened, and some of us truly grieved, but we were not shocked. The video repeated: a shot. Reagan falls. A shot. He falls. He falls over and over and over again. We sat in front of the television, numbed.
Now at age 30, we find we have elected the ultimate Sen. Snort, the politician we have been chuckling along with for years and years. But suddenly it's not so funny. A campaign promise doesn't mean a thing. We should have known.
Will we be laughing when the Environmental President hands the land of Twin Peaks over to the deforesters? Won't it be hilarious when the next poll shows that 25 percent of American high school graduates can't read the Education President's newspaper, much less his lips?
President Bush can read very well, and he reads emotions particularly well. So, let's see . . . what are the issues? Abortion, flag burning and obscene art. What poll asks: Are these the American concerns, while the rest of the world is focused on freedom, economic survival and democracy?
If my generation, which has already lived through so much chaos, violence and superficiality, is to become active in politics and public affairs, these issues ought to be among the least of our concerns.
by CNB