It's All About Perspective

Last Tuesday was election day, so it made sense that I got into a conversation with my hair dresser about voting. I revealed that I first voted in the 1972 presidential election (the voting age was 21 back then), and that I voted for George McGovern who was running against Richard Nixon. When I happened to mention that although Nixon won by a large margin it was ironic that he ended up resigning from office a few years later, I unwittingly set off a barrage of questions from Tricia. “Oh yeah,” she said, “why did he have to resign again?” That was followed by more questions like, “Why did he do that? How did they find out? Where did this happen?” I am not a history buff, but I did have the experience of knowing about these events as they were happening, so I found myself digging back into my memory for some answers.
 
I believe I was on the right track with the information I gave, although it took some time for me to come up with the names of the two reporters from the Washington Post who broke the story (initially I could only remember that Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played them in the movie).
 
 I wondered, how could Tricia not remember events that were so prominent at the time? And then I realized that while I was a young adult in the 70’s, Tricia was in elementary school. She was probably no more concerned about Nixon in the 70’s than I was about Khrushchev or McCarthy in the 50’s – we heard about the events surrounding these names, but we weren’t quite at the age to fully understand. Yet these were people and events that shaped the country.
 
            Conclusion: It’s all about perspective.

---