Remembering Reagan with shallow, convenient history*

The past week of media retrospective and tribute to Ronald Reagan has been shallow at best and Orwellian at worst. It is a distortion of our history to gloss over the reality of the Reagan era.

Reaganomics had lasting detrimental effects on our nation and our world by promoting and encouraging avarice and through widening income disparities. Creating wealth is half the job, and a bull market doesn’t help poor people. Distributing riches and raising up the less fortunate should be a priority in government’s mission, rather than an afterthought. I know a woman who remembers the Reagan years thusly:

“I had just become a single parent by divorce in a strange state with very few friends, no attorney, no family and lost my job because I was on a federal grant from Health and Human Services that was cut by Reagan's signature. He cut funds to human services agencies nationally and to the arts to give tax cuts to the wealthy. Unemployment was over 13% in New York and I stood on the unemployment line to support two young sons and myself. Sound like anything that's happening now? He never addressed the spread of AIDS and HIV or the rise of homelessness. When I remember Reagan, I remember the Iran-Contra scandal, guns for the wrong reasons, military build-up, reckless spending, rich people leading and poor people suffering. That’s what the Regan years meant to me.”

That woman is my mother.

The Economist magazine’s cover this week dubbed Reagan “The Man Who Beat Communism,” a view parroted by news outlets and citizens nationwide. Does this not discount the true heroes who knocked down the Berlin Wall and broke up the Warsaw Pact? Does anyone remember the internal reforms of perestroyka and glasnost, which started under Brezhnev, were championed by Gorbachev, and embraced by repressed people craving sovereignty, freedom, and openness? Yet what did we hear time and again on the news – Regan making speeches, buying bombs, and aiming more missiles at the USSR.

My respect for the presidency stretches beyond partisan boundaries, and I mourn as the nation mourns. My sorrow and reverence, however, do not allow me to forget the facts.

*This entry originally appeared on grassrootsdemocrat.org.

© 2005 by justin michael cresswell