Voting: A Family Story
The first election I can remember was in 1976. President Ford was up against Jimmy Carter. I was only four and knew Carter was from Georgia and he raised peanuts. I lived in Georgia and I liked peanuts, so I told my mom and dad to vote for the peanut farmer from Georgia. They said they would. When President Carter was up for reelection four years later, I told my parents to vote again for Jimmy Carter. Again, they said they would. Every four years after, I’d suggest they vote a particular way. In 1984, I told my parents to vote for the fellow who looked and sounded like a grandfather. I’ve no doubt they voted for Reagan. Everybody voted for Reagan.
In 1988, I was sixteen years old. I couldn’t vote, but I was in AP American Government in high school. I was a big fan of Abraham Lincoln and he was the first Republican President, so I thought I was a Republican. Our class went on a field trip to a local campaign event where I met Maureen Reagan, the President’s daughter. She was stumping for some Catoosa County candidate whose name I’ve forgotten. She was nice and shook my hand. I picked up a Bush/Quayle button at the event and wore it for a month. That November, I suggested my parents vote for the Vice President. I’m sure they did.
Another four years passed, and I stopped recommending candidates to my mom and dad. I’d grown out of my brief Republican phase. I knew how my parents were going to vote, and even if they didn’t agree with me, we could talk about it. My dad especially has always been remarkably pragmatic, a tower of quiet common sense. But those talks don’t happen so much anymore. They haven’t happened in years.
Before I moved to New York, I’d been a Georgia Voter for 24 years, most of my adult life. There is an attitude in Georgia of us versus them, the rural versus the metro. Politicians outside of Atlanta campaign actively against the interests of Atlanta. There’s been a movement for years to “restore” Milton County, to split affluent, mostly white North Fulton County from mostly African-American South Fulton County. The ironic hypocrisy of this movement lies in how Milton County was annexed during the Great Depression by Fulton County. In other words, the area now known as South Fulton County saved the area that would become North Fulton County from financial ruin. In spite of this attitudinal split, Fulton County — still all-of-a-piece Fulton County — remains a patch of blue in a mostly red state. I’ve cast so many votes there knowing it’s the thought that counts, that showing up is what matters. We might not take the state, but here we are. That’s how I’ve felt at home. I’m a blue kid in a mostly red family. My brother is a lighter shade of blue, but he’s older, lives in Europe, isn’t home as often. He hasn’t been around for the family reunions over the last eight or nine years. He hasn’t had to remember to remove his magnetic bumper sticker a half-mile from the house where we grew up. It isn’t that my parents don’t know, I’d just rather talk about politics at home when I’ve had time to prepare.
I last talked to my dad about voting in October 2012. I made the attempt. I was driving home from work a couple weeks before the election. I called him from the car. Inspired by ads about talking to your own family, I was determined to do a little campaigning. He listened as I rattled off the merits of voting for President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, then he sighed and said he appreciated the effort, but he and my mom had already voted. They hadn’t voted for Obama. They hadn’t voted for him in 2008 either. And to be honest, they’d not voted democrat in a long time, and nothing I could say would change their mind. It wasn’t the best conversation, but it happened. I understood.
This will be the first presidential election in my lifetime when I’ve gone to the polls without knowing how my parents voted, or even having a discussion with them about how they might vote. I’ve avoided the conversation entirely for over a year. Visits home have been laced with dread. Dinners with my parents have been cloudy with anticipation. At any moment, a banal conversation could take a peculiar turn and a truth could reveal itself unbidden and undesired. There have been close calls, at least one discussion about guns in church, but I’ve emerged unaware. On the one hand, there’s some relief not knowing. On the other, this ignorance makes me incredibly sad. I don’t know my own parents.
Today, my mom might’ve voted quietly for a fellow Methodist working woman. I’ve believed for months in a silent battalion of overtly conservative women, imagining them stepping into the quiet of a voting booth and casting a ballot in secret for a woman for the first time in their lives. Maybe my mom is one of those women, never revealing her vote and feigning disappointment if Clinton wins. My dad has worked for men like the Republican candidate for his entire life. Trump is a “Wheel,” to use his blue-collar supervisor’s jargon. It’s not a compliment. My dad has never been a union man like the boilermakers who worked for him before he retired, but he’s dealt with incompetence and broken promises from higher-ups time and time again. He’s stood in the gap between the powers-that-be and the workers on the floor. He’d never want to work for a man like Trump, so why would he vote for him? There’s always a chance they both voted against a man who conducts himself in a way they’d never want me or my older brother to behave.
But there’s so much Fox News in the house where I grew up. It’s always on. There’s a cable channel deliberately programmed to scare our brave parents. And the Republican candidate embraces that fear, feeds on it like a vampire. It gives him power. This campaign has taken so much from so many of us, and I could be mad at the Republican candidate for so many reasons, but my greatest source of anger is entirely personal. That man has stepped between me and my parents. I hope he leaves us tomorrow, but even if he loses, and I pray he does, his spirit will linger. He’ll haunt family gatherings for months to come. He’ll be there over the holidays, flitting darkly behind the simplest conversations about the day to day. He’ll persist in the pauses in phone calls home.
He won’t leave until he is banished. And it’s going to take those difficult conversations I’ve been avoiding. I’m going to have to be brave, to look at the monster and drag it out from under the bed. He’s been at the center of every news cycle, but he’s just a symbol, a name we give the revenant prejudices hanging on for dear dread life as history advances out of the dark.
Tomorrow, I’ll call my parents. I’ll say hello, ask how they are, tell them I love them, then we’ll talk. In time, we’ll talk ourselves into the light.
