The Moment I Realized I Didn’t Have to Inherit My Politics
My family’s political affiliations have definitely shifted since I was a child. My father grew up in Jackson Hole, WY, and fit just about any description you could give of a rough-and-tough, pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps cowboy, whereas my mother grew up in a very wealthy family just outside of Chicago.
Though they had extremely different upbringings, they both came from conservative families. On my dad’s side, only one out of his five siblings chose to switch parties later in life, after deep conversations with his liberal son. On my mom’s side, three out of her five siblings chose to become Democrats by adulthood. It’s difficult to know whether my maternal grandmother changed her political beliefs after my grandfather died. I know only that she donated generously to conservation efforts during her lifetime and in her will.
In 1991, when a neighbor came to speak to my kindergarten class about his time fighting in the Gulf War, I felt a sense of pride in my country. I remember sitting in my family’s minivan and belting out the lyrics to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” every time the song played on the radio during its resurgence in popularity in the early ’90s.
I wish I could pinpoint exactly when or what started to move my affiliation to the left. Maybe it was my parent’s divorce, when my mom started to no longer feel tied to my dad’s political beliefs, or his sudden and unexpected death shortly before my mom and I were moving an hour away to Denver, severing any remaining ties to our small town and rooted lives.
I remember a poll in my tenth grade class about whether students would vote for George W. Bush or Al Gore. I raised my hand for Bush but kept it raised for Gore, since I liked the idea of saving the planet (the class was almost an even 50/50 split, just like the election). In conversations with my mom over the years, she admitted to never really paying attention to politics and just voting how her parents and then my dad did.
After hearing about what happened with Bush’s and Gore’s votes in 2000, I became much more invested in learning about each political party so that I could cast an informed vote based on the issues that mattered to me by the time I would be old enough to vote in 2004.
Megan Robertson
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My great grandparents from the outside seemed very conservative. They went to church every Sunday up until my great grandma died at 92. Christmas celebrations always involved praying before dinner, reading the story of Jesus, and singing Happy Birthday to Jesus with a cake and all (I know this is unusual lol). But my great grandpa actually said he would never move back to Tennessee bc of the racism he saw there. It also turned out they were more liberal than they let on from the outside. We had conversations at the end of my great grandma’s life that really changed how I perceived how she saw the world. These were things we just didn’t really discuss.