Hugged by reality

"On election night in 1980, I was terrified. From my bedroom, I could hear the radio in my parents' room down the hall. Jimmy Carter was losing," writes La Shawn Barber:

Months before the election I'd heard tales about how Ronald Reagan would send blacks to "the back of the bus" if he won. He won.

But the sky didn't fall, ice caps didn't melt and old Jim Crow didn't return. In fact, from what I hear, blacks prospered economically under Reagan's watch.

I went through the 1980s scarcely aware of politics. While Reagan demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, I was celebrating the return of the mini-skirt. As the Cold War ended, I was extending adolescence and enjoying my reign as kegger queen.

La Shawn needn't have worried.  Even as noisome critics without ideas of their own were trying to demonize their political adversary, Ronnie "reached for and touched the better angels of our nature," as Margaret Thatcher said in a birthday tribute to her old friend February 3, 1994:

You reached beyond partisanship to principles, beyond our own selves to our very souls . . . Leadership is more than budgets and balance sheets. More than the policy of public measures, it is a matter of moral purpose. And that moral realm is reached by that insight and rhetoric of which only the truly great are capable.

[via Blogs for Bush]

Update: Oh, and speaking of mini-skirts -- the light of our own young womanhood -- Cool Blue Blog reports that some old fogies in Russia are getting their panties all atwist about them:

A Russian regional government has told its women employees to stop wearing short skirts and tone down their make-up because they were arousing their male colleagues' "animal instincts."

Good God.  Who do they think they are, mullahs or something?  As we always say, why don't these men get a life?

Comments

[Rob A.]

"Mr. Putin, tear off that hemline!"

Or something like that.

Great post, as always.