6/11/07
Thinking about junior high school - which they don't even call "junior high" anymore, do they? - and the year 1980 brings up another memory. This is rare, because I can barely conjure up words to describe how much I hated those years. It was like the bullies had all grown up to be thugs, and still lay in wait for me after class, but now they could inflict real fucking damage. My parents, by 1980, had Officially Gone Crazy® and my siblings all hated each other. I remember telling CNN during an interview that all junior high kids should be frozen in seventh grade and thawed out in 10th.
Or maybe they could have just done it for me personally. I could have skipped 12 through 15 years old entirely, like a space traveler going to Alpha Centauri. Wake up with hair on my nards and be done with it.
But I digress.
In 1980, there was a presidential election between Carter and Reagan, and the bad guy won. People these days love to canonize Reagan, but he was a awful, awful man who set America back at least 45 years when it came to basic human rights for anyone not white, male and wealthy. If you still believe the canard that he "won the Cold War," you need to examine your specific desire for this to be true. There will come a day, perhaps a hundred years from now, when sober historians will look at the Nixon-Ford-Reagan-Bush I-Bush II nexus and wonder how such a wonderful country could have turned so vile.
Of course, even saying that makes me a "left-wing kook" and thus easy to marginalize, but we'll see. I bet any of you one hundred Euros that I'll be proven right.
But I digress.
During that 1980 election, our school had a "mock election," where we all got to vote for president, and for the major bill at the time, which happened to be the Equal Rights Amendment. On voting day, when the rest of the country did it for real, all the students cast their votes before lunchtime.
In math class, the teacher picked three of us at random, and told us to go to the office to count the ballots - since I detested math, I was more than happy to get out of there. After 600 ballots, however, my fingers were getting numb. At the end of the counting, Reagan had walloped Carter, just as he would do (for real) several hours later.
The ERA, however, was getting interesting. It's impossible to explain, these days at least, how big a deal the Equal Right Amendment was. There were yard signs, constant TV coverage, even 10-year-old Tessa was marching around Texas yelling "we demand women's libertation![sic]" If you read the text, which is unbelievably short and to-the-point, you'd be hard pressed to wonder why it was so controversial: it just said that both genders were to be treated exactly the same under the law.
Of course, right-wingers, never finding a parade of the disenfranchised too small to piss on, made bullshit arguments about the draft, abortion, gay marriage, and anything else they could think of. After all, American men in power will never tire of finding ways to make women shut the fuck up, whether it's a campaign against the ERA, or shoving antidepressants down the gullets of Utah housewives.
But I digress.
We got to the end of the balloting, and it was 329 for the ERA, and 329 against. A perfect tie - none of us could believe it. Then I realized that I had not counted my own vote, which I had laid aside for fun. The entire fate of the mock vote for the national Equal Rights Amendment of my gigantic junior high school lay in my left hand.
When I got home, the news of our "election" had made the rounds, and I told my mom and sister-in-law Melissa what had happened. Both dropped everything and gave me a huge hug.
We, too, conducted a middle school mock presidential election in 1980. But at my school, John Anderson won in a landslide. Seriously.
Oh how marvelous! That last little bit sent shivers down my spine. I also loved the image of a ten-year-old Tessa yelling "We demand women's libertation!" I would have been around the same age, in Florida, but because my parents were (and are) deeply conservative, I probably would have actually voted against the ERA--how sad that makes me now. (About twenty years later, my mother would get angry with me, really angry, for choosing not to take my husband's last name.) This makes me think about what an impact we have on kids before they're old enough to reason for themselves. I was able to shed my parents' conservatism the minute I got to college, but I wonder how many old bad shreds of it still linger in me.
Jon Anderson also won in my fourth grade class. Weird. My father-in-law keeps threatening to train my son to be a conservative, and yesterday I finally said, "Joe, I'm excited for you to try. There's nothing you could teach him that he won't be too smart for."
I think conservatism fears education for exactly this reason. In order to follow this ideological path, you have to have no option to think anything else, and you have to believe that faith and inflexibility are vastly more important than curiosity and open-mindedness.
Consider "Stay the course" vs. "Flip-flopper". An open mind is incapable of understanding why changing your mind about something is a bad thing, especially in the face of new information. Only a conservative can pretend to have "bad intelligence".
But I digress...
Jon Anderson won our election too! Weird...
What an interesting post.
I will admit I had no idea the ERA was an issue during the 1980 election...that seems so recent for such an important sociological shift.
It reminds me that we live in a nation where our leadership was raised by a legion of men who vehemently opposed equal rights for the sexes. I guess this explains why some attitudes still pervade...How long does it take for this stuff to wash out?
I wonder how the world will differ for my daughter.
.................>>I remember telling CNN during an interview that all junior high kids should be frozen in seventh grade and thawed out in 10th.<<
I am betting many parents agreed with this statement.
Am I an idiot, or who the hell is John Anderson? I know he's a country singer and "Swingin'" is still popular in my house (albeit with always different lyrics), but is that who you're talking about?
I loved CArter--still do. He sounded just like my tender-hearted preacher from Adel, GA.
I was in kindergarten -- no, wait, 1st grade -- that year and we had the same mock election. I remember being proud because I voted for Reagan and he 'won', even though my family was offended by my vote.
In retrospect, I'M offended by my vote. What do 6 year olds know, anyway?
Yay you! I remember that one of the issues brought up regarding the ERA was that there would no longer be separate bathrooms for men and women! Oh, the horror!
I was going to a horrible Catholic K-8 school in 1980. It was my first and only year at the school since we had just moved to St. Louis from Connecticut. I voted for John Anderson in the mock election. It's hard to remember now, but Anderson was a Midwestern Republican who thought Reagan and the Republican party was leaning too far to the right.I remember that when I told one of my classmates I voted for Anderson, he asked if that meant I was in favor of abortions.
Reagan won in my class.
I always like these junior high memory posts (even though, as you note, it's called "middle school" now or occasionally "intermediate school." I had verify that one as I'm trying to write some YA books.)
Oh, and coincidentally, the Xanadu record is on the desk behind me as I read this (I am lobbying someone I know for free tickets to the musical and I had to show him my earnestness). Great soundtrack. So I don't care how bad the plot is. ;)
Chip, Thanks for the clarification. I can't qyite place midwesterner politico John Anderson, but I can remember the authentic voice of the guy who did "Swingin'" and "Seminole Wind", to name two redneck(not red state)hits by the real John Anderson. Haywood Co., NC, Salute!!
If the ERA had passed the entire nation's public restrooms might have been as cool as Schiller's Liquor Bar's communal digs.
Damn.
suggestion: you should make this a theme -- junior high week. I can feel how much it simultaneously sucked for and shaped you, but your life seems pretty good now and it's really interesting reading. so perhaps consider it?
ChrisM - ...or like the bathrooms in "Battlestar Galactica".
I'm pretty sure "junior high" refers to a school with grades 7-9. "Middle school" is grades 6-8. Most schools now are grades 6-8, thus "middle school."
I LOVED Xanadu. I'm going to get the album back out again now.
I could swear Anderson won at our school election too. I think we all thought we were too cool to be any party and just wanted to be independent.
I remember all the crap about people worrying over unisex bathrooms if ERA passed. What a way to distract from the real issues. Boy, things haven't changed much have they?
I remember being very proud at age 6 that the candidate I voted for (Carter) won in 1976. I think that was the last major election in which I voted for the eventual winner.
what a great story. esp with all the digressions. and i love picturing 10-yr-old tessa "marching around texas." era hooray!
There are people reviving the ERA today:
Very exciting.
Although you are an entirely trust-worthy person, there had to have been some uproar that a counter's vote broke the tie. Or maybe that fact wasn't particularly well broadcast inside of school!