Shaped by Memories

Stephanie Rodriguez of McKinney: Issues, not candidates
Look beyond labels to find the real question
10:00 AM CDT on Friday, November 2, 2007

"To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves."
­Aldous Huxley

Election day, 1976. Mom had picked me up from school, and that was significant because I usually walked. She'd been invited to a baby shower, so there I was, sitting loosely in the front seat of our tan Dodge Duster, my little sister rolling around in the back.

We were off base and headed out into the country, so there was time to talk. Not like in the city, where I was always getting shushed because someone had to concentrate on traffic.

"How was your trip?" I asked my mother.

She smiled with some confusion.

"What trip?"

"Your trip to Washington. To vote."

Mom laughed and tapped her cigarette into the ashtray.

"A person can vote anywhere, honey. You don't have to go to the capital."

Oh.

"Well, then," I continued as nonchalantly as possible. "Whom did you vote for?"

It was a loaded question. I was 6 years old. I didn't care about the election. But I was a nervous child and our household had this tenseness to it and, prone to eavesdropping as I was, I had somehow ascertained that my parents disagreed on who was the better candidate. In my young mind it was all a great mystery that could be solved with one simple question.

"Young lady," she said to me. "Who I voted for is my business and my business alone. It is my right."

And that was the end of that. I don't think it was an intentional lesson, because I know my mother and she very rarely does things intentionally, but it was nonetheless a potent one. In that moment my mother taught me to not first reach the conclusion and then work backward, but to assess the information before arriving at my own conclusions.

(It wasn't until I inadvertently outed myself on the Collin County Opinions page of The Dallas Morning News that I learned that there's a name for people like me: liberal. At least that's what my e-mails keep telling me, so it must be true.)

Kids today have it so much better. They don't have to deal with the moral ambiguity of weighing all sides. Nope. These days it's all laid out, red or blue, at a very early age with the help of children's picture books such as Why Mommy Is A Democrat and Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!

I learned about those titles from an Aug. 25 column by Catherine Rampell that appeared on the Viewpoints page of The Dallas Morning News.

Ironically, on page 16A of that very same edition an article was run with the headline: "First Mickey, now Simba – Disneylike lion is hero in Hamas cartoon; rats represent Fatah."
The article went on to describe – well, really it doesn't matter what the article described. The important thing is that children believe whatever they are told, so when cartoon characters instruct them as to who is right, who is wrong and who should die as a result of it, well, ladies and gentlemen, that's the gospel truth and the chess board has, in effect, been set for the next generation.

It's no different for the innocent children of the Middle East than it is for some American Air Force brat trying to piece together the puzzle of her identity.

To this day, when I ask my mother whom she voted for, she tells me of her constitutional right to not share that information.* When we talk, it is of issues and of the human condition; it is certainly not about the humans themselves. Our conversations never revolve around politics.
It is who we are and I think it is honest and admirable. Too often we define ourselves by how others define us; character, however, comes in defining ourselves and allowing others the freedom of reaching their own conclusions.

*Note: This last election changed all of that when my mother and I decided, along with an unprecedented number of Americans, to let our voices ring loud and clear. God bless America.

Stephanie Rodriguez of McKinney writes children's novels under the name S. Kimzey Daniels and is a former Voices of Collin County volunteer columnist. Her e-mail address is stephrodriguez70@aol.com.