Julie recently reflected on some ways in which the climate of the USA today isn’t all that different from the way it was 24 years ago, and ended by posing some related questions for this week’s Hump Day Hmm:

For
those of you who don’t recall (or weren’t born yet) in 1984 Democrats
Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro challenged Republican incumbents
President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush. It was
unprecedented: a ticket with a woman. The nation was sort of flummoxed,
and everyone was talking about it, a lot…


Once Mondale secured the nomination, he selected
Ferraro as his running mate, and the Woman Question took center stage,
despite repeated efforts to make it about experience and qualifications...


Reagan retained his office in a landslide win. It wasn’t even close.


What happened?


That’s a long story, but since you asked me, I’ll tell you I think it was the Woman Question and the Economics Question.


Again,
you may not remember (or have been born yet) but I recall the 70s in
vivid technicolor. I remember both energy crises (oh yes, we had the same energy crises back then, and what did we do? DRILL HERE DRILL NOW
and release reserves—now how’s that working as a long-term plan, my
friends??). Who here remembers being assigned days you could get gas at
gas stations because supply was so low? By license plate number. Who
remembers that being a half a day to a day errand, sitting in the long
lines, waiting for your turn at the pump, praying they didn’t run out
before you got there? Oh yeah, those were the days. 1979. Loads of fun.


And then what happened? Big recession. Terrible recession.


So Reagan came in and applied Reaganomics. Then the US recovered and gained a robust economy. (Note: Just because those two sentences followed one another doesn’t mean I buy that the first resulted in the second.) So in 1984 we were fat, happy, and feeling a little cocky with our strong economy…


What we weren’t feeling was kindly disposed to
Mondale, his female running mate, and his liberal economic, diplomatic,
and equality policies.


So he lost. By a lot. So back to the woman and money questions.


I
think Mondale lost because he chose a female running mate. A lot of
people pressured Ferraro to step aside, and in my memory she
understandably got a little belligerent about it. That I respected. In
my memory, one day, she said she would, if it helped the party. That
crushed me. I had no idea what she went through but I could imagine,
but I so wanted her to pave that way.


Also, I think he lost
because he told the truth. He said taxes would have to go up. He said
we’d have to make friends with the Russians. He said we had to reduce
the deficit. He did not sing sunshine up voters’ asses. He did not say
what they wanted to hear (exclusively). He did say what he thought. He
said what needed to be said. And it cost him the election.

(A lot of quoting there, but I love Julie. I can’t help it.)

And then she asked:

I have some pretty vivid technicolor memories of the 1970’s myself, and
they’re not just about feathered hair and disco. I was in high school
from 1978 to 1982, and as my friends were starting to get driver’s
licenses and cars, finding affordable gas for those cars was a big
concern. Of course, back then “affordable” meant under $1.00 per gallon
– but considering that just a few years earlier it had meant less than
fifty cents, this was a major change. (Now? Woohoo, my husband bought
gas for $3.99 a gallon today!) People had started to care about the
fuel efficiency of the cars they drove, but they weren’t terribly
impressed with the “econo-boxes” coming on the market, and buying a
“foreign” car was still viewed with suspicion. (That was before nearly every Japanese automaker had a plant in the US.)

The Equal Rights Amendment hadn’t been ratified by enough states to
become law yet, and this befuddled me. Why should anyone object to
eliminating sex-based discrimination, as stated in the proposed law?

	Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
	Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
	Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

That was it. Nothing about unisex bathrooms or any of the other scare
tactics that the amendment’s opponents loved to bring up. But either
those scare tactics worked, or not enough people saw why the amendment mattered; after all, women apparently were making a lot of social and political advances without it, weren’t they? And it’s still not law today.

During a speech-communications class I took in college that year, one of our assignments was a panel discussion on a controversial subject, and my panel’s topic was abortion. Several students took an anti-abortion stance; my opinion was that the option of abortion needed to remain legal, so that it could be safe,  regulated, and accessible. I was asked if I was in favor of abortion. (I had just had a baby; when in the position to have chosen it, I didn’t.) I said that regardless of value judgments, it was legal now – it had been so for a little over ten years – and taking away legal rights previously granted was never advisable, so why were we still talking about it?

When Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term in 1980, he took on a
country that was still sorting out the many social changes of the
1960’s and ’70’s, and was experiencing economic and technological
changes as well. Reagan conveyed a sense of certainty and confidence in
his beliefs about what was right for the country, and had a personal
charisma that influenced many Americans to trust his direction and
leadership. By the time he ran for a second term in 1984, the country
actually had recovered a lot of ground – but on a shaky foundation.
Taxes had long been considered evil, and the government turned heavily
to borrowing the money to pay for its programs; this indirect form of
financing made the cost of government less painful to individuals and,
in my opinion, set the tone for the expansion of the debt-fueled,
instant-gratification lifestyle that seems to be the norm now. If the
government can live beyond its means, why can’t we? Why think about how
it’s going to be paid for?

1984 was the first year I was old enough to vote in a Presidential
election, and I didn’t want to “throw away” my vote. Enough said. But I
really think it’s a shame that 24 years later, our country is still
struggling with some of the same issues. In many ways it not only
hasn’t moved forward much, it’s backtracked in a number of directions.
Civil rights once granted have been threatened or taken back entirely,
class divisions have grown (even though we still officially consider
ourselves a “classless” society), and community consciousness has
become less important that individual privilege. I think that attitude
of concern for self over other is a big part of what’s keeping us stuck
– “yeah, nice idea, just don’t inconvenience me/regulate me/expect me
to pay for it.” Sometimes being an adult means seeing past your own
nose. And sometimes ignoring or neglecting what came before means you
find yourself back in the same mess, and you’re not sure how you got
there or how to make sure you get out of it and stay out.

It’s been a long day since that “morning” dawned in America in 1984.
But whether it really was “morning in America” or not, it was a time
when I was definitely thinking in “beginnings” mode myself. At the age
of twenty, in the middle of that year, I became a mom. Every day with a
baby is a day of firsts, and a new parent is filled with anticipation,
awe, and anxiety. My world contracted during the latter half of that
year as I focused on the new life I was responsible for, and my
concerns became “domestic” in the most narrow definition of the word
for some time to come. I went into the cocoon that many parents of
young children find themselves in, and was out of touch with the world
at large for awhile.

I’ve been back for awhile now, though, and sometimes I marvel at how
far we’ve come. At other times, I marvel at how far we’ve gone in
directions I wouldn’t have anticipated back then – some good, others
most definitely not – and at the ways in which it seems like we’ve
barely moved at all.

1984
has a particular resonance for a few reasons, but if it doesn’t for
you, is there a year that does, and why – personally, and/or in the
context of the world at large?

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