CHCH News - Ronnie and Me

"Oh, for sure - if he wins, it'll be the worst thing ever to happen to this country"

That was the opinion one of this ex-liberal's friends had on the spectre of the upcoming Reagan landslide. He and I were sitting in another friend's apartment one day in October - smoking weed and drinking beer and discussing, if you can call it that, the upcoming 1980 Presidential election - bad as things were, this hypocritical Bible-thumping, brain-dead, washed-up second-rate actor couldn't help but make things worse.

We dreaded an insertion of "family values" into government policy - by a man whose failed marriage made such postures hypocritical. We dreaded "tax cuts for the rich" - at a time when so many people, unable to find work, needed government social services more than ever. We hated his ostentatious wealth, and that of his friends. We dreaded the reintroduction of the draft - and that just had to happen, what with Ronnie Ray-Gun baiting and provoking the Soviets. We could see Supply-Side Economics for the simple rationalizations they were - breaks for his rich corporate buddies, at GE and elsewhere. We could sense all this - because the news writers and opinion leaders of the time told it to us, and reinforced our own conclusions.

Ronald Wilson Reagan was of course duly elected. And these things did not happen. And other things, necessary things, good things,did happen.

And along the way, an unlikely thing happened. A young liberal, educated by liberal teachers in liberal schools; raised by "moderate" liberal parents who revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt; found himself first impressed; then questioning; then persuaded and finally convinced beyond all doubt.

It didn't happen overnight. Reagan's demand for a "tight-money" policy from the Fed; and his cutting off of COLA increases for entitlements, Federal wages, and retirees and Social Security recipients, first threw the nation into a nightmarish recession. An emotive liberal, which is what I was, could not see or appreciate that this was the hard, politically-dangerous medicine the nation needed to choke off stagflation.

The times were rough. Half of Michigan, it seemed, was drifting, jobless from the collapse of the U.S. auto industry, to Texas and the Carolinas. Me with them...I remember tent cities north of Houston, of the transient nature and palpable danger - from desperate men frantically seeking work.

I remember cursing Reagan, morning, noon and night, as I would work out of the day-labor office and retire home to a rented YMCA room. I remember the ultimate humiliation - the first time I landed a stray $100, I ran like a scalded cat to the place I had avoided until then; the chilly reception of my parents' home.

And things grew steadily worse.

I remember watching, while working my minimum-wage job as a security guard, President Reagan's 1983 State of the Union Address. I remember so well the opening line:

"The State of the Union is strong...but the state of the economy remains troubled."

For the first time it seemed Reagan was grasping the pain his policies had caused. But it was not to be. Reagan spoke of recovery - was he living in a dream world?

Yet, things seemed subtly to be changing. I was laid off from my rent-a-cop job - and it turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me that decade. I traded my piped trousers for a leased taxicab and a hack license; and my daily pay went from $30 to $100.

Things weren't so bad all of a sudden, it seemed. Not for me; not for my customers, businessmen who were sensing new opportunities.

A year later I was able to land a State job - which mere months earlier I could never have touched, for the competition. Bennies and a title. And I needed a car - and found, suddenly, I could afford a new one, get the credit; and most importantly, afford the credit. Through a Ford program I could buy an Escort at the unheard-of rate of 7%.

And energy prices fell. Carter's castigating Mobil Oil as "the most irresponsible corporation in America" hadn't held down energy prices. Nor had his Wage and Price guidelines.

But allowing the oil companies to explore and drill, giving them the store, somehow didn't encourage them to ratchet up the prices. Instead, these things did what Carter's scolding didn't - it somehow LOWERED prices!

Incredible...but only until you'd read Adam Smith.

And suddenly, credit was, for the first time in fifteen years, available for the asking. After being turned down for even the most nondescript oil company credit card, time and again, I was suddenly able to meet requrements for a low-line Visa card.

And another. And another after that. Me and an entire CLASS of Americans.

Yet, somehow inflation didn't rise. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn't credit cards which caused stagflation - as Carter told us. Maybe it was Carter's policies, the policies of the New Deal, of tax and spend and take and redistribute.

And the economic juggernaut which was the American economy was launched...into the longest expansion seen in modern times

Meantime, Reagan's policy reversal toward the Soviet Bloc - instead of cowering and appeasing and accomidating and negotiating, he drew the line in the sand - didn't provoke nuclear confrontation. It forced the Soviets, with a much weaker hand, to fold; and it emblodened Eastern Europeans, and finally the Russians themselves, to rise up against their taskmasters. After 75 years and the deaths of untold millions, the world was free of the Soviet pestilance.

While all the while, he spoke of different values. Of personal responsiblities. Of opportunities - not entitlements. He brought an entire subset of Americans to the realization that freedom was, not the right to be cared for, but the opportunity to care for oneself. Not the right of expectation and entitlement, but the opportunity of acquisition and abundance.

It was a sea change in outlook - for myself and an entire generation of conservative converts.

These were the gifts of Ronald Reagan to the world; and these were the lessons to those who would learn them. That the New Deal was a raw deal. That money in the hands of those who earn it is fuel for the economy; where money taken from wagearners for government programs is a leaden weight upon it.

That the human spirit has a deep, God-given longing to be free; and that godless and evil oppressors only have strength so long as they are feared.

That diplomacy without arms is akin to music without instruments; and that negotiation without resolve is just so much talk.

That people respond to good cheer and optomism and laughter...and Reagan knew this well, having joined in with his opponents so often in ridiculing himself.

His legacy was enduring; his words bore fruit; his case persuasive. He shifted the paradigm.

He changed his homeland. He changed the world; he changed an entire generation. He changed me.

Ronald Wilson Reagan, 1911 - 2004.

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