President Ronald Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt in Washington D.C. on March 30, 1981. I remember very clearly where I was that day. And I remember what America was like, too.
On March 30, 1981, I was a new kid at my school in Odessa, Texas, fourteen years old and feeling awkward and out of place. We’d moved back to Texas from the Washington D.C. area in December, not too long before the winter break, and now, moving into spring, I was still trying to fit in, which wasn’t easy. Fourteen has to be the most awkward age, and then there was the fact that, although I’d been born in Texas, we’d lived in the north and east ever since I was 3 years old. In Texas, I didn’t have many friends, and I’d only just gotten started in sports. All of the other kids had been born and raised in Odessa. They’d known each other forever. I was the odd one out, and not many people moved to Odessa, Texas from Maryland. On most days, I just wanted to squeak by without getting noticed. Walk between the raindrops. Blend into the background.
Then the President got shot.
It was in the afternoon, not long after lunch here in Texas, when an announcement came over the loudspeaker that the President had been shot. There was some worry and consternation in the classroom, but most of us didn’t even really know what that meant. I found out over time that most of my peers didn’t even know that Reagan was President other than maybe his name. They didn’t know that he’d been elected in November of the previous year and that he’d just taken office at the end of January. They couldn’t have told you who the Vice-President was, or who Reagan beat in November to become President.
I was the odd duck. I’d lived in the D.C. area and was very attuned to the news and somewhat to politics. Politics wasn’t as divisive and angry as it is now. My parents were very open about the topic, and they let me watch both of the political conventions in the summer of 1980. Gavel to gavel. I sat down in front of the television and drew a picture of Jimmy Carter that summer, and in my old school in Maryland we’d had a mock election. Everyone got to go in a real, honest-to-goodness polling booth and vote for President (Reagan won.) My father didn’t like Carter much, but he was fond of saying that Carter “was a good man, but not a very good President.” But he never told me who to like and he never talked badly about any of the candidates. He let me watch the conventions and think whatever I wanted to think. Mainly, my father believed that Carter had decimated the military, and that was one of the factors in why my dad retired from the military (and why we moved to Odessa after his retirement.) But there was no animosity in the politics. People liked or didn’t like a particular politician but there wasn’t the anger and violent rhetoric that exists everywhere today. So, in March of 1981, I was probably the most politically astute student in our class that day. I mean… I knew that Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter and that Carter had beaten Gerald Ford. I had followed Watergate, and the aftermath, even when I was only seven years old.
But I’m not sure if my teacher knew that about me.
Instead, she announced to the class that I was “very smart, and a good writer, and probably the most qualified person to be our eyes and ears” so she asked me to go down to the A.V. room and watch television for the class. She wanted me to be a reporter, to take notes, and to come back every ten minutes or so and report to the class.
I was terrified. But I did it. Every ten minutes I walked back to the class, stood in front of them, and told them the news. I was mortified, and felt scared and alone, and I got through it.
And this is really about that event, so I’ll get to it.
We knew that Reagan was shot by a lone nut, a mentally ill man named John Hinckley, Jr. Hinckley was trying to get famous so he could impress the actress Jody Foster, with whom he’d formed an infatuation. He was going to win her love by shooting the President. He was just a nut. All of these guys who do this stuff are nuts. But, there was a difference…
We didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out Hinckley’s politics. Half of the country didn’t hope he was a Republican, while the other hoped he was a Democrat. We didn’t figure that by identifying his proclivities we could condemn or applaud what had happened. No one was going to feel vindicated if it turned out the shooter was not like us. I don’t remember reporting on whether or not he’d donated money to the Sierra Club, or the John Birch Society. Nobody cared. He was a nut, and he deserved to be in a prison or an insane asylum. Everybody hoped the President would live, and that we could all feel safe again. There wasn’t a likelihood of riots, or a Civil War based on what some nutjob did.
Life was different then. And perhaps, I was very naïve. I know I was. The world IS made of cabals and conspiracies. There really is a deep state of unelected, imbedded bureaucrats and officials, across party lines, who run the country. And the world IS violent. I think one of the things that has affected me the most since I watched what happened yesterday, is the almost universal declaration that “Political violence has no place in our society.” And while I agree with the sentiment, mostly, I wonder if the people who (only 9 days earlier) celebrated the 4th of July, really understand what they are saying.
Politics is the negotiation we all undergo in order to avoid violence. All of it is. We engage in politics so that we can sit down together and let the other people know that – if we cannot work together and operate under some rules and laws that we all agree on – there will be violence. Violence is what violent men do when they cannot have their way, peacefully. But violence is also what peaceful men do when they can no longer be peaceful and still protect their families, their lives, liberty, and property. That is to say, when they are not backed in a corner with no other way out. Politics is negotiating the way out. When politics breaks down, and people no longer believe that there is a way out, then there is violence. The violence is not the politics. The politics is the part that is supposed to prevent the violence. But when one side or another makes use of violence, exclusively, strategically using riots and threats, purposefully making people feel unsafe, and when there is widespread cheating, or when people feel they are robbed of their voice, and/or feel that they are being forced into a culture and system that is hostile to their sincerely held beliefs (religious, political, or moral)… then violence is inevitable.
In the last ten years (or more,) it has become ever clearer that there are people in charge who believe that they must get their way by hook or by crook. They will have power, and they will not be denied it. They will have it by the ballot, or by bullet. There has not been an election since before the year 2000 that one side or the other has not said was “rigged.” More and more people feel like they are being disenfranchised, by Deep State trickery, machinery, or by force. We all sat back and watched an election year, four years ago, of cities burning – all the while the media and the elites told us that these were “mostly peaceful protests.” And the threats are back. And now here we are.
One side will say “Well, he was a registered Republican!”
The other side will say, “That was so he could vote against Trump in the primaries! He was a Democrat donor and an extremist!”
He’s dead.
This is not 1981. We’re not going to be able to shove John Hinckley, Jr. into an asylum and move on with arguing about tax breaks and defense spending, and beating the Russians. In my last column I wrote about the similarities between 1968 and this year, and, as of yesterday, the similarities are multiplying. I hope we can pull back from the brink. I hope that locally we can keep our heads and continue to sit at the table together and break bread. That’s what I hope.
It’s easy to spew platitudes when we know what is expected of us. “Political violence is unacceptable in our country,” you say? That’s because there is no political violence. When it becomes violence, it stops being politics. That doesn’t make it any less real, or imminent.
I was fourteen years old when I last saw a President shot, but we’re in a whole different world now.
