Family

My first interest in the presidential landscape came by way of Liberty, the golden retriever who lived in the Ford White House. When she had a litter of puppies, I wrote President Ford and congratulated him and the new mama. In return, I got a signed picture of Ford, seated in his office, holding Liberty's two front paws. She's looking over her shoulder at the camera as if wondering who's invading her quality time.

I've still got the picture, and it reminds me of how I came to form an idea of what a president was.

About five years later, in 1980, I asked Mrs. Muir, my fifth grade teacher, who she'd be voting for in the presidential election. At that time, Kentucky was still deeply, deeply Democratic, and my mom was the oddball out, supporting Reagan and his vision of Morning in America.

"I'll be voting for Mr. Carter," Mrs. Muir said over the din of the lunchroom. She knew full well that I was the only Reagan-Bush hand that went up when the kids in our class were asked who our parents went for. "I think he's a good man."

Her answer was so simple and included a few more points a 9-year-old could wrap her brain around. I kept that in mind four years later when, as a high school freshman, I was the lone "Reagan representative" explaining the Republican position to a new group of fifth-graders.

Four Octobers after that, I was a freshman at Western Kentucky University up late stuffing balloons into a net — balloon drops were HUGE then — for a rally. Ronald Reagan was coming to campus to campaign for his vice president, George H.W. Bush. It would be my first presidential election, and Poppy Bush is still the only politician I've ever voted for twice.

As I watch my boy, 9 and with eyes and ears wide open to the election buzz around him, I wonder what he'll absorb from this, his first exposure to the White House pursuit. Like I was in 1980, he's the loner in his classroom. A blue dot surrounded by red, he comes home each day wondering how it's possible for people to disagree about who should run the country. Each day he seems a little more unsure of anyone's right to stand alone, to the extent that a 9-year-old can in an election adults will decide.

"Someone at school said he'll get killed."

"Someone at school said his name means he's not from here."

"So is he really a liar?"

"Someone said he's not a Christian, and that we can't vote for him 'cause he'll blow us up."

I didn't have to deal with that in 1980.

I don't know what to tell him.

It's not morning in America anymore.

News clips, sound bites and the bitterest excerpts from ads flash across the TV screen as pundits discuss the campaign, which sinks further each day into a spiral twisted by hate, hysteria, paranoia and the fear of something that, for whatever reason, is all the more frightening because it cannot be articulated.

As parents, our job is to shield our children as long as we can from the uglier elements of this earth, both natural and manmade. They listen to what we say — and how we say it. They parrot back words and phrases that seem jarringly unreal when overheard from lips that are only 8, 9 or 10 years old.

The catchphrase for modern elections in the United States is that the rest of the world is watching. Forget the rest of the world; our children are watching how this thing is decided, how we talk around the kitchen table or rage at the television. How we discuss making our decisions is just as critical to the one that we ultimately arrive at.

How do we foster a generation of curious, informed and thoughtful voters when the purest ideal of being an American becomes not a lesson in civic responsibility and freedom, but instead an urge to bury your head under the covers and not emerge until Nov. 5?

And then hope that it's all over.