Dear Mr. President [The Life and Times of Evil E]

If you have read my previous blogs, you know I don’t have the best luck with written correspondence, my pen pal dumped me and my nephew really let me know what he thought about the present I got him for his birthday. However, I prefer criticism over being ignored and that’s why I’m bitter that Richard Nixon never wrote me back. Why did I write Nixon? Well it’s sorta a long story.

I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by the 37th President of our country, although I can’t really say why. I was born while he was in office and some of my earliest memories were sitting with my dad watching Nixon on the news. He scared me, like Dracula or Frankenstein, but my dad was very conservative and a supporter so I watched intently. I wanted to understand why people liked him enough to vote him into office.

This is probably the point where I should add I was a weird kid. My mom was born in Holland, raised in Indonesia, during WWII she survived the Japanese occupation in a concentration camp but her parents did not, she struggled greatly to be able to take care of herself, immigrated to the U.S., met my dad and moved to Las Cruces, NM where she had me. My mom had a lot of fear and understandably so, she also had me later in life which meant a big age difference, plus she had no idea what it was like to live a normal childhood, and she taught me English with a Dutch accent. I loved my mom, but through no fault of her own, she made it so I had a lot of fear and that I had a hard time fitting in with other kids. First of all everyone made fun of the way I spoke. Throughout elementary school, periodically a speech therapist would appear to drag me out of class or make me stay late after school to help me eliminate my articulation problems. It wasn’t frequent enough to be all that helpful and everyone made fun of me for being taken out of class like that. I was so incredibly shy and awkward that any attempts to fit in usually failed miserably. If I had a friend it was usually someone new to the school who didn’t know better than to friend me. Seriously I can tell you some really mean stories.

It wasn’t until I entered Junior High that things started to change for me. I was getting better at making friends, but I was still a target for ridicule. And then everything really changed – it was book report time in history class. (No really this changed my life.) We were given a list and told to pick a book for our report, I went home and there it was on my parent’s bookcase – the most difficult book on the list “Will – The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy” I thought back to being a little girl and watching the news on Watergate on TV and knew that was my book. I expected to learn more about what happened during the 1972 election, what I didn’t expect was I kinda related to Liddy in a strange way, he was largely driven by fear in his youth. Don’t get me wrong I think the man is horrible, but as I read about how he faced his fears it got me thinking. Liddy was extreme, he feared rats so he ate one, he was afraid of thunder so he climbed a tree and tied himself as close to the top as he could get during a storm. I knew the man was crazy and in no way wanted to be like Liddy, but I also found myself realizing I needed to take some chances. First off I got an A on my book report. Ya! Then I started getting more involved with the drama program and putting myself out there. I also started standing up to the girls who would threaten me and they completely backed off. And I had friends! We read comic books and we started doing lip sync contests at the mall. I still made mistakes, people would still make fun of me and it still hurt, but it didn’t stop me.

In High School I pushed my abilities as far as I could by doing Cross-Examination Policy Debate, it required fast thinking and speaking with very little prep time. I wasn’t the best and there was the incident when we were debating water quality and I said micro-orgasms instead of micro-organisms (Opps!) but I didn’t give up. I even started playing guitar in a rock band. In college I was a DJ on the campus station, played drums in bands, did more air band concerts, and even got my degree in Communication Studies. One of my favorite classes in college was Political Communication. The ramp-up to election 1992 was in full swing and we analyzed the hell out of it. Ross Perot was a prominent figure in the election even though he was running as an independent and there was a lot of debate if he could actually win. For my final class paper I decided to write about the role of third or minor parties in election, whether they had a chance of winning or if they were just there to drive attention to a special interest. We were required to write letters to two people asking for their input on our topics. It didn’t matter if or what they wrote back, but you had to reach out. One letter went to Ron Paul, he had ran as a Libertarian in election 1988 which was the first election I was old enough to vote in. I was so excited to be old enough to vote, but I knew I would never vote Republican like my dad and wasn’t exactly sold on Dukakis yet so I did research on the minor parties. Ron Paul came in third in that election with less than .5% of the vote. He knew he would never win, so I wrote him to find out his thoughts if a minor party candidate could win and if so how. My other letter went to Richard Nixon, I figured if anyone knew how to win an election it was him. Alas I never heard from Nixon and he died a couple years later. As for Ron Paul, I did receive a letter from him:

Ron Paul is running for President again, this time as a Republican. I doubt he believes he could win, but he continues to get a platform for his interests.

Me, I am still scared constantly to speak in public, but I continue to always challenge myself to not give in to that fear.

And as for that paper, I got another A. Oh, and of course the winner of Election 1992 was Bill Clinton. I never wrote President Clinton, but I did write his cat and believe it or not I got a response:

If you liked this post, please do us the further boon of Liking the Fierce and Nerdy page on FaceBook. Also, we’re giving great stream on Twitter, so do give us follow.

featured image credit: The University of Iowa Libraries