This Just In — Fifty years out, I finally made it to a high school class reunion. I had to think about it.
Last weekend, my class of 1976 marked the occasion of 455 of us making it to the finish line and securing a diploma. They gave us our transcripts, allowing the high school to close the books on this bunch of long-haired hooligans.
Perhaps an innocent mistake, I opened my envelope during the gala dinner. I had the honor of sitting beside the only teacher to attend, my favorite English teacher, Jan Glitzenstein. Reviewing my final grades, I had questions.
I showed her the document. She laughed and insisted that I had created a phony replica to pull a prank on her. No, indeed. It looks like she gave me a D in her Introduction to Poetry class.
“Give me a pen,” she said. You bet I did. Carolina might audit my qualifications for admission at any moment. I need to be ready to defend my degree.
There were more than 100 of us at this celebration and the vast majority looked very fit and likely to make the next events up to 75 years out. We’ve lost more than 40 classmates, but this was a good looking group overall.
My high school years were a great blessing to me. I was kind of miserable in junior high, but when I arrived at high school, somehow it became a place where I found my tribe. I made good friends and I’ve kept a few of them very close. It’s a treasure to have friends who knew you as a teenager.
My parents went through a difficult divorce in the middle of my junior year. My grandmother, who lived with us, died. Without my friends, I don’t know what would have happened to me. It felt like a warm blanket of trust, distraction and joy to see them every morning at school.
Our school was among the best in the state and in our senior year our entire class took one course all together — Current Issues. We sat alphabetically in the auditorium. Newsweek magazine was our textbook. We had a week of a simulation game where the class was divided up into dozens of countries, simulating the UN General Assembly. I was assigned to be in the media. I was hooked.
In the 75-76 school year, the country was recovering from the shock of the corrupt Nixon Administration. Reading the news coverage of the subsequent criminal trials and convictions was a primer in the accountability provided by a rule of law. Nixon’s resignation when informed that there were votes to impeach and convict him was a strong signal to the world that no one was above the law.
It seems quaint now that President Ford thought it best to pre-emptively pardon Nixon, not for his sake, but to spare the nation the further trauma of a criminal prosecution.
Nixon’s crimes look like teenage shoplifting compared to the current occupant of the White House. His assertions of executive privilege to conceal his recordings feel like a kid hiding her diary with accounts of her crush on the school’s star quarterback. Nixon hated reporters. He hated the accountability that they delivered unto him.
I don’t think even Nixon would have thought to get his richest friends to acquire and destroy CBS, but that may have merely been a lack of imagination on their part.
Behind closed doors, Richard Nixon said some of the most racist, anti-Semitic things ever uttered by a president. You’d hope that in 50 years’ time, those bad old days would be rendered to the scariest exhibits in the Smithsonian.
They’re not. Those no good very bad ugliest impulses are in the wide open spaces in and around the petty, demented brain of the 47th president and his corrupt, weak supporting players on Capitol Hill.
Soon we will have the opportunity to enjoy the oncoming train wreck of an Attorney General nominee (Acting AG Todd Blanche) trying to BS his way through the Senate Judiciary committee in a confirmation hearing. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said of this last night that it’s going to be so bad for Blanche, it’s almost a gift for the Democrats … coming to a TV near you this summer. Ahhh, memories of that other country lawyer from North Carolina – Sam Ervin. Keep your eye on Thom Tillis, now free to let it rip from his perch on the Judiciary committee.
Every summer needs a disaster movie, right? This year, the call will definitely be coming from inside the House … and the Senate. I have to stock up on popcorn.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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