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Nov. 5th, 2016 06:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
geminigirlNaomi and Miriam go to a "casually uniform" school; their school has uniforms but most of the time, unless a kid is violating the county dress code, they don't really do anything about it. So I told her she could wear her "A Woman's Place is in the House and the Senate and the Oval Office" shirt on Election Day next week as long as she wore proper uniform bottoms and put a school uniform shirt in her bag in case they told her to change.
Both kids are frightened but interested in the current election cycle, at least for president. We had a fascinating conversation a week or two ago about candidates-the two candidates running to represent our district are a woman who doesn't reflect my values and a man who, while he and I disagree on many fiscal and financial matters, on most social issues, we're well aligned. I asked the kids who I should vote for-the man or the woman, and they immediately said "the woman," until I explained that she didn't reflect my values but the other candidate did. I explained that you have to look at which candidate lines up with what you believe in the most, and sometimes even that's not perfected, and went on with "What if you believe in saving trees and oceans, and one candidate says 'cut down the trees' and another says 'save the trees' and leaves out the oceans. Who do you vote for?" They picked the "save the trees" candidate, but I was fascinated with their conversation that followed. They discussed different strategies for helping homeless people, and environmental things, but most interesting was listening to them talk about school populations-about what to do if we discovered we needed more spots for students in our schools-they considered the possibility of expanding the size of our current schools or building more schools and we talked about the environmental impact of those choices and economics and the traffic patterns, and all sorts of complicated things that I don't think most kids think about. It was really deep and amazing.
What it did get me thinking about though, was how I perceived elections; I was a little older than Naomi in 1984. Ronald Reagan was a "bad guy" in my head, but the Soviets and their missiles were scarier and more threatening. I don't ever remember being as frightened as they are about the future of my own country though, when considering an election.
Both kids are frightened but interested in the current election cycle, at least for president. We had a fascinating conversation a week or two ago about candidates-the two candidates running to represent our district are a woman who doesn't reflect my values and a man who, while he and I disagree on many fiscal and financial matters, on most social issues, we're well aligned. I asked the kids who I should vote for-the man or the woman, and they immediately said "the woman," until I explained that she didn't reflect my values but the other candidate did. I explained that you have to look at which candidate lines up with what you believe in the most, and sometimes even that's not perfected, and went on with "What if you believe in saving trees and oceans, and one candidate says 'cut down the trees' and another says 'save the trees' and leaves out the oceans. Who do you vote for?" They picked the "save the trees" candidate, but I was fascinated with their conversation that followed. They discussed different strategies for helping homeless people, and environmental things, but most interesting was listening to them talk about school populations-about what to do if we discovered we needed more spots for students in our schools-they considered the possibility of expanding the size of our current schools or building more schools and we talked about the environmental impact of those choices and economics and the traffic patterns, and all sorts of complicated things that I don't think most kids think about. It was really deep and amazing.
What it did get me thinking about though, was how I perceived elections; I was a little older than Naomi in 1984. Ronald Reagan was a "bad guy" in my head, but the Soviets and their missiles were scarier and more threatening. I don't ever remember being as frightened as they are about the future of my own country though, when considering an election.
