Jackie Danicki

Good meme from Politico’s bookshop owner Iain Dale. Depending on how you define ‘political,’ mine is either:

Trying to explain to my father, when I was four, that it was complete nonsense not to let people live where they damned well want to live just because we have some man-made notions about borders and states. (This, after he told me I would never be allowed to just move to England, which was my dream back then, because I wasn’t English and they wouldn’t want me ‘taking’ a job from an English person.)

or

Going to the polls with my parents for the 1980 presidential election (I was born in July 1977) and being asked by a little friend’s mother who my parents were voting for. “Not Reagan,” I replied. “We strongly dislike* him.” Later, my mother told me off for not just telling the woman to mind her own business. “It’s nobody’s business who we voted for, and it was sneaky for her to ask a little kid such a thing,” my mom said. What’s funny is that I was offended, even at that age, at being asked that, sensing that it was sneaky for her to be trying to get that information out of me. But I was more scared of getting told off by another adult than I was offended.

*We were banned by my mother from using the word hate in our household. I guess this was supposed to stop us ever from feeling any hatred or recognising it as a real force for anything in the world. It didn’t work.

Filed under: Life