Why I’m voting for Obama: part 1
I am two months younger than Barack Obama. I grew up in a Chicago suburb called Crystal Lake.
Whenever I asked my parents why they chose to live and raise their children in Crystal Lake, out of all the other possible bedroom communities, towns like Lake Forest and Dundee and Barrington and Woodstock, the answer was always the same: because of the schools.
It was the mid-1960s. When you’re a child, you don’t know anything about current events. I couldn’t have picked Lyndon Johnson out of a lineup. I didn’t know there was a war in Vietnam until it was almost over, and I never heard a whisper about the assassinations of Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy.
I voted for my first president in 1968. I was seven and in second grade. We had a class election, with a little voting booth and everything. I didn’t know anything about either candidate, so I voted for the guy I had heard of: Richard Nixon, who I had heard my father talking about at some point. To this day, I clearly remember sitting on the front lawn of the school, waiting for the bus to come, when they announced on the loudspeaker that Nixon had won the school-wide election. I remember cheering, not because I had any idea who Nixon was, but because I had somehow “guessed right.” When it was announced later that night that Nixon had also won the national election, it felt anti-climactic.