Politics Growing Up

My daughter, Melanie, asked me the other day about politics when I was growing up. I kind of stuttered around and couldn’t really tell her that much.
I do remember voting though. That was a big deal. We lived in Cherokee County and Pilot Township. There was an old old country school that was the voting place.
I was and still am very inquisitive about how people vote. Oh, that was not a good thing. It was a secret. My mother said “you never tell anyone how you vote.”
When my mom and dad got home from voting, I always asked them how they voted and they would never tell me. I will bet you a bushel of apples they didn’t tell each other.
When I told Melanie about this she laughed, but I told her I think I know why this was the way.
World War 11 had been won in 1945, just one year after I was born. Then in the 50’s was the Korean Conflict. There was a man called Joseph McCarthy that was a senator. He had radical ideas and was very verbal about them. He and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the F.B.I., had similar ideas about communism. It was so radical that even housewives that went to literary meetings, teachers, lawyers, movie stars and a multitude of other every day people were black listed and put in jail. Jail wouldn’t have been so bad because it was generally for six months to a year, but they were black listed as enemy agents and no one would hire them.
This whole idea got so ridiculous that he said that giving vaccinations to children was communist thinking.
After Melanie asked me about politics when I was growing up, I got a glimmer of a memory of a newspaper. It had a picture of Sen. McCarthy. He was in a wheelchair. I said something like, “oh he’s in a wheelchair and he doesn’t look old. “ All my mother said is, “ sometimes things aren’t as they appear.”
I did some research on my ancestors. They had no problem being vocal about being Republicans. They were applauded for the party they helped to support. Then yesterday I looked one of my ancestors up on the internet, he was a staunch Democrat. You just never know how a person thinks and feels about politics.
Now days people are very free about telling people how they voted and why. So I think we have run the gambit on how we do things. We are back to the days of my ancestors. We are free to do and say what we think as far as voting is concerned. My ancestors would think that is the way it should be.