Apolitical Little Me, Part I

People who knew me as a child/youth would not recognize me now.  My physical body has changed, of course, but my personality has changed even more.  In my early years, I was politically naive and religiously innocent.  Raised as a military kid, I believed that "right makes might".  Since we had won all of our big wars at that time, I figured it must have been because God was on our side.  And because God was on our side, our side could do nothing wrong, nor would God allow anything bad to happen to us.

One of my earliest memories was knowing a song that I sang to my mother:
I see the moon;
The moon sees me;
The moon sees somebody I want to see.
God bless the moon;
And God bless me:
And God bless that somebody I want to see.
I told Mom that I knew who the moon saw.  It was God, of course.  Never mind that it doesn't make sense in the song.  And you know, I have no clue where I learned that.

But I believed in God and Jesus, even though I wasn't ever really taken to church by my parents.  From junior high onward, I went every Sunday, alone.  In fact, I have gone to church alone most of my life, still believing that my country would never do anything sneaky, and never knowing about the politics of religion.  In elementary school, I worried that God would be mad at me because I would fall asleep before finishing my nightly prayers.  In high school, I talked to God ceaselessly, as the Bible commands.  I was squeaky clean.  Never smoked.  Never drank.  Never got involved in sex with any date.  (In fact was mortified when one of my friends in high school told me that she and her boyfriend had decided not to "pet below the waist".  Whaaaaat?  Should that ever have been a question??

In 8th grade (1960-61) we had a mock presidential election in social studies class.  We had to study the issues and vote between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  I voted for Kennedy because he was handsome and charismatic.  (Kennedy won the real election.  Three years later, he was dead from an assassin's bullet.)

And that's when LIFE happened.
The older I got, the more of the real world I got to see.
Gary Francis Powers, in a US spy plane, was shot down over Russia.  (Our country spying?  Surely not!)
President Kennedy assassinated, followed within a few years by other leaders--Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King--all by our own citizens.
The Kent State University massacre.  Anti-Vietnam-War demonstrators being fired on by US troops (National Guard?) on a college campus.  Our own people against our own people.
Towns in riots over the war and over politics.  What's it all about, Alfie??
AND, I participated in some life activities that the younger me would have abhorred.

I wasn't raised in a political climate.  My maternal grandparents, farmers during the Great Depression, were definitely Democrats because they believed that FDR was, as my mother put it, the Great White Father.  My father, as a Navy officer, never really revealed his political leanings except to say that the President of the USA was the Commander-in-Chief, to be respected no matter the politics.  Respect was drilled into us as kids.  Dad was very much against violent demonstrations, however, saying that "those people" were destroying their own neighborhoods.  (Understand that he didn't grow up with much and was grateful for all he had, for which he had worked hard.)  And once, during the Nixon impeachment proceedings, he told me that "Tricky Dick" hadn't done anything that any other president hadn't done.  Looking back now, I know he was right, but my brain doesn't use that logic to excuse bad behavior.

I was a hippie sympathizer in those days.  I secretly wanted the renegades to stick it to the establishment.  I was tired of old people in government telling young people what to do.  (The military draft, etc., made it a big deal.  I was present in downtown Chicago one evening during the 1968 Democratic National Convention when demonstrators were being tear-gassed and beaten.  I was there as a curious bystander, soon to understand that I shouldn't be there because I didn't have the guts to shame my parents by being seen on camera when the demonstrators were yelling, "The whole world is watching!  The whole world is watching!"

I departed Chicago but was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the antithesis of what I thought was right and good in the world.  How could I be a Christian and still vote for "hawks", when I was a "dove"?  Nothing was simple anymore....