Growing up in Bush's America

I sometimes forget that there was a time before George W. Bush.

He has so dominated my political consciousness that it seems as though he is an institution, like the Supreme Court, or Congress. My political awareness began, really, with the 2000 election. I had been interested in politics before, certainly. When the central political issue during the time in which you are reaching puberty is a sex scandal, politics begins to seem quite...interesting. But as a pursuit, rather than an interest, a pastime rather than a sort of vague background noise, it was the fight between Gore and Bush that introduced me to politics.

I remember going to bed depressed on Election Day, 2000. NBC, which I had trusted, called the election for Bush, and, unable to deal with it, I went to sleep.

I do that sometimes: sleep in order to deal with things that are inconceivable. When I was a freshman in high school, the senior class president committed suicide on a dark day in February. He hung himself from the stairwell of his dorm (it was a boarding school) with a belt, leaving his dormmates to find him. It is one of those moments that I remember vividly. I was sitting in front of my computer in my bedroom, doing an assignment for Mr. Jones' history class, which I hated because I hated Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones thought that any use of the verb "to be" made the sentence passive, and therefore utterly unacceptable.

But Mr. Jones had assigned us something on the Black Plague. I remember the phone ringing as I opened up google - this was back when google was cutting edge, the hot new thing. I of course didn't answer. Then, I remember typing in "the black p". I got as far as 'p', and my mom came up the stairs, the portable phone in hand. She looked serious. I took the phone from her, and I remember that she sat down on my bed, which I thought was unusual at the time. Why was she lingering like this?

The person on the phone was my adviser. She told me what had happened. Not the belt and all that, that I learned later. But she told me about the suicide and after a short conversation, we hung up.

I realized why my mother was there; she wanted to talk to me, to make sure I was ok. I was, I thought. I did not know him well, only a few months. I had not actually ever talked to him. The most I ever heard him say was when he spoke at an all-school meeting at the beginning of the year, to welcome everyone. But still, I knew that I could not really handle the news I had just heard. It would not sink in. So I went to sleep. That moment, right then, without brushing my teeth or anything, I got in my bed and slept, somehow able to sleep.

It is perhaps a deficiency of humanity for me to admit that my reaction when George W. Bush was elected was similar to that of hearing of a peer's suicide. But for me, I genuinely felt, and feel, like Bush has hurt millions of people through his policies and his rhetoric. I think he has put the lives of many millions more at risk. The thing was, Bush didn't hide what he was thinking; if you were listening, you knew exactly what he was going to do. And what he was going to do scared me to death.

What he has actually done has scared me even more.