I grew up in Indiana. In my house, we didn’t discuss politics when I was growing up. However, when I was a senior in high school it was no secret that I was part of a republican family. During the fall semester of my senior year I enrolled in what would be one of my favorite classes. My current events class had Time magazine as the book for class. Each week we read the new issue and took quizzes on the current events. The best part about this class wasn’t the class but what was going on in my life and the country. I started my senior year as a 17 year old in 1992. I was set to turn 18 on October 28th making me eligible to vote that November.
Any presidential election would have been a big deal but 1992 felt especially exciting. I spent the first half of the semester pouring over the Time magazine. My teacher encouraged us to study the major issues and research how each opponent felt about the issues.
I started to form an opinion and talked to my mom about voting and asked what she was going to do. This seemed like a smart thing to do since as a 17 year old girl she was the most trusted advice I had. She told me something in that conversation that she had already told me about other decisions I had faced and something she would repeat for years to come. “I can’t tell you what to do in this case. You are going to have to figure this one out for yourself.” She is a wise woman. With the election I wasn’t going to blame her for guiding me in the wrong direction but there were some other life choices that if I had let her make the decision and it went wrong I would have spent my energy blaming her instead of correcting the choice. Back to voting. She told me her opinions and we discussed some of them quietly during the days leading up to the election. On election morning she drove both of us to our polling place, my old elementary school. We walked into the school and went to our separate voting booths. She voted. I voted. We walked back outside looked at each other laughed and said “that was fun we just cancelled out each others vote.”
Today, I am grateful she taught me it is important to make up my own mind and to vote. Do you remember your first election?
