How Ronald Reagan changed my life
By Greg Butterfield
When I learned of Ronald Reagan's death June
5, I was on a bus riding home to New York with other activists
who had participated in a march in Washington to protest the
U.S. occupation of Iraq, Haiti and other countries. Ironically,
the far right's "preemptive war" doctrine used against Iraq is
one of Reaganism's poisonous fruits.
My first reaction on hearing the news was: It's about damn
time. Good riddance.
My second reaction was: What a shame he'll never face real
justice at the hands of the people he abused, tormented and
murdered.
Justice for Reagan isn't dying peacefully in a comfortable
bed. Justice would be a trial before a jury of welfare
families, Black Panthers, people with AIDS, anti-war activists,
air traffic controllers, Salvadoran peasants, Libyan victims of
U.S. bombs and Nicaraguan revolutionaries, to name a few.
President Ronald Reagan figures mightily in my own political
development. I was a junior-high and high school student during
his regime. My first memory of genuine political consciousness
is sitting in front of the television in the early 1980s,
listening to Reagan attack welfare mothers. My own family was
on welfare, like millions of others, not because of any
personal failings, but because of the cruel workings of the
capitalist economy Rea gan championed. There were no jobs.
As a child in a rural, virtually all-white area of Northern
Wisconsin, I couldn't yet understand the racist implications of
Reagan's welfare bashing for millions of oppressed families in
the ghettos from Los Angeles to New York. But I knew an attack
on poor people when I heard it. That night he, and capitalism,
made an enemy for life.
I remember the humiliation my parents felt at the time,
forced to grovel every few months to keep the meager government
assistance coming so my brothers and I could eat. I remember
what happened a few years later, when Wisconsin Gov. Tom my
Thompson (now a Bush cabinet member) followed Reagan's lead and
eliminated assistance for thousands of poor families. I
remember how that winter we had to eat raccoon carcasses meant
for dog food because there was nothing else.
Spurred by the painful crisis of my family and others I
knew, I went on to learn about the Black liberation struggle of
the 1960s, about the civil war in Nicaragua, and the enormous
Cold War arms buildup designed to run the Soviet Union into the
ground. The ever-increasing military budget was the flip side
of Reagan's vicious attack on programs to aid the poor and
unemployed. Money was being stolen from the poor to build the
rich man's war machine.
Now 32, I have spent half my life in the progressive
movement. I consider myself pretty hardened to the hypocrisy of
the big-business media. What could be worse than post-Sept. 11,
after all? Still, their fawning over Reagan and his "legacy of
freedom" sickens me.
Just like after Sept. 11, there are millions upon millions
of people in the United States who know better--who know that
Reagan was no hero, but one of history's worst criminals. But
they are made to feel isolated by the full-court press of
slavish media coverage.
The truth about Reagan and his legacy must be told.
Ronald Reagan was a scab. His political career began
when, as a leader of the Screen Actors Guild in Hollywood, he
ratted on fellow union members and others before the
McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Ronald Reagan was a racist. As governor of California
in the 1960s and 1970s, he joined the FBI in waging war against
the rebelling African American community and those heroic
advocates of Black liberation, the Black Panther Party. He was
responsible for the deaths of many young Black freedom
fighters. Only a worldwide movement saved his personal nemesis,
Angela Davis, from unjust imprisonment. In the 1980s, his
administration was responsible for CIA-sponsored drug running
in Black communities to fund the contra war against
Nicaragua.
Ronald Reagan hated the poor. He knew that capitalism
creates armies of poor and unemployed workers, and that they
constitute the greatest threat to the profit system. Over
decades, first as governor of California and then as president
for eight years, he missed no opportunity to wage war on the
poor--their image in society as well as their material
well-being. He was a prime mover in the post-civil-rights-era
rollback of public perceptions of the poor as less than human.
He was an early champion of the "Cadillac welfare mother" myth,
and continued to use it throughout his career. Reagan blazed
the trail for none other than Democratic President Bill
Clinton, who smashed the federal welfare system in 1996.
Ronald Reagan also hated gays, lesbians, bi and trans
people--and he promoted a vicious homophobia to
characterize AIDS as a "gay disease" and stigmatize people with
AIDS, a disproportionate number of them people of color. Reagan
blocked funding for AIDS education, prevention, treatment or
care, here and in other countries. The AIDS crisis exploded
during the Reagan presidency. He let it. The president now
being lauded as a swell fellow, a kind, good-hearted, decent
guy you just couldn't help but love, was in fact a callous
killer. He is directly responsible for the HIV/AIDS deaths of
tens of thousands of people then--and millions around the world
since.
Ronald Reagan was a union buster. He broke the PATCO
air controllers' strike in 1981. This act, at the beginning of
a reactionary period in world history, dealt a body blow to the
labor movement from which it is still struggling to recover.
Workers in the United States pay the price every single day
when they face off with the boss on the job, when they collect
their paychecks, when they are told they must pay for their
health benefits or lose them.
Ronald Reagan was a warmonger. The idea of people
being free of U.S. imperialist domination was anathema to him,
especially if they were people of color. His war crimes--from
the funding, arming and training of some of the very forces
today called "terrorists" to wage war on the pro-socialist
revolutionary government of Afghanistan, to the invasion of
tiny Grenada--are too many to list. But mention should be made
of the death squads his regime promoted in El Salvador, and the
reactionary contra army and invasion threats that undermined
the Nicaraguan Revolution.
Ronald Reagan was a bitter enemy of all poor and working
people. What is it that the media and political
establishment are celebrating as Reagan's "legacy"?
It is his role in helping to destroy the Soviet Union, the
great achievement of the workers' and peasants' revolution of
1917, and setting back the world movement for socialism. The
unrelenting nuclear arms buildup and aggressive threats that
were the hallmark of his presidency laid the groundwork for the
USSR's demise.
The USSR's existence for over 70 years had the effect of
challenging imperialist aggression in many areas of the world.
The existence of a major alternative economic and political
system helped countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and
Latin America to achieve a measure of independence from the
former colonial powers. In the Western imperialist countries,
it helped the labor and civil-rights movements win and hold
onto hard-fought gains, because workers knew there was another
system that guaranteed jobs, food, housing and health care for
all people.
There are many other crimes that bear Reagan's stamp: the
continuing rollback of women's right to choose, the war on
immigrants, the speech at a Bitburg, Ger many, cemetery
honoring Nazi SS troops, and so many more.
The history of the last decade-plus is Reagan's real legacy:
more war, more occupations, a return to openly colonialist
methods and ideology, more racism, more vicious attacks on
women and the lesbian/gay/bi/trans communities, fewer rights
and falling living standards for workers, more people hungry
and homeless with no safety net.
Of course, Ronald Reagan was only an individual. If he had
not existed, the reactionary social forces he represented would
have thrown up someone else in his place. But it is hard to
imagine that they could have found someone more treacherous,
hateful and vicious to represent them. Just because he died of
a lingering illness that cruelly affects millions of people
doesn't give him a "Get Out of Jail Free" card in the hearts
and minds of those who lost so much through his cruel
actions--actions he clearly relished.
History will judge Ronald Reagan as one of the bitterest
enemies of the people. His name will rightly be reviled, and
his terrible legacy of racism, war and brutality will be undone
by people united in solidarity to build a world that puts
people's needs ahead of profit.
And me? I'm sorry that I'll never see the man face justice
for his crimes. I have this one consolation: Ronald Reagan
helped make me a communist. I know he'd really hate that.
Reprinted from the June 17, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to
support pro-labor, anti-war news.
Email
this article
Printable
page