Revisiting a column from the election of 2020
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- April 28, 2024
- 1025
I pulled out an essay I wrote four years ago in the heat of the 2020 election. It’s now 2024, and the election landscape doesn’t look much different. How I wish it did.
I was a George Bush-voting Bill Clinton supporter. It must have been that saxophone he played on The Arsenio Hall Show that nearly made me break from conservative politics. Either that or it was the MTV Rock the Vote campaign of the same year, bringing clarity to the sometimes obscure (at least at that time) reality of presidential elections.
The 1992 campaign swept in like brush fire, drawing stark differences between the candidates: one an old-school incumbent Republican and the other a Democrat who was “really good at public speaking,” according to my dad. I was 24 years old with a 2-year-old daughter when I stood in that old voting precinct in Walnut Creek and debated. I knew who I wanted to vote for but couldn’t make myself pull the lever, because pulling the lever meant acknowledging what I’d been taught I now disagreed with.
I wouldn’t be ready to pull that lever in a different direction for another 20 years.
Presidential elections in 2020 are nothing like they were in 1992. We’re bombarded on all sides with social media targeting, and to those who didn’t grow up having a joystick — or at the very least a Walkman — in their hands at all times, using technology to decipher between what used to be National Enquirer news only and true journalism is nearly impossible. The line of fact or fiction has been blurred by repetition and declaring what’s true is false and what’s false may be true.
This morning I picked up a doughnut on free doughnut Tuesdays at my local market. It’s always packed with smiling faces because who doesn’t love a free doughnut? But as I meandered by a table, coffee raised to lips and fingers sticky with glazed icing, I heard the conversation. They were talking about our government and how “they will say anything to make the president look bad.”
I looked over and stared in my best Mennonite-raised frown. I didn’t agree with every policy and action taken by presidents I voted for, and it would be silly to think I would. I have always thought America was a place to hold differing opinions. I kept walking because I know everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, even if they differ from mine, even if it differs from those in power, even if those in power say it’s disrespectful to ever disagree with them.
But there is a deafening rumble, a multitude that believe he is never wrong. In the end aren’t we responsible for the cause and effect from our own words and actions? If I rob a store, aren’t I guilty, no matter if I continue to say I’m innocent? I guess the neat trick would be if I kept saying I didn’t rob the store that they’d eventually believe I never did.
My own kids knew where they stood politically long before I did. The very fact that my children exist, the offspring of an American woman and a Mexican man, has caused me to rethink every single vote I cast. It causes me to think critically from every angle and to read deeper inside policies that may affect them, us. The kids of today aren’t afraid like I was. They aren’t afraid to take on what they’ve been taught, to dig inside it and find a new way, a different point. When we become set in our own stubborn ideas, listening to things that are blatantly untrue, we lose sight of what we might learn. We begin to sound stagnant, uninformed and unwilling to change.
What I was afraid to do at 24 I do with relish at 55. I’m no longer tied to systems that hold guilt over me to behave in a certain way, and this includes questioning systems of power that I don’t believe in. I wish I had listened to my heart in 1992, and I wish people older than me had listened to me.
And when you stand alone in that voting booth agonizing over what you want to do and what’s expected of you, do what’s hard.
Melissa Herrera is a published author and opinion columnist. She is a curator of vintage mugs and all things spooky, and her book, “TOÑO LIVES,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives. For inquiries, to purchase her book or anything else on your mind, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com or find her in the thrift aisles.