Didn’t hear about the gipper shuffling off this mortal coil until this evening, when I stepped out. I was born in 1980; Ronald Reagan was President for practically my entire early childhood. It’s sort of weird when they start dropping off like that. Honestly, I haven’t really given it as much thought as I should perhaps, worth writing about sometime in the future, perhaps.
Of the commentary I’ve read, WolfDaddy’s reminiscence struck me the most:
Reagan and the 80s and AIDS are inseparable to me. The optimism he brought to a country disillusioned made me feel very hopeful as a young teenager when he first took office.
By the time he left said office I had changed, as had the gay world around me that I so had recently entered. After being forsaken by family and childhood friends, I had already lost about 25 close, new, friends to diseases far worse and far stranger than Alzheimer’s, and would lose close to 100 more by 1994. No one cared. The optimism was still there in the general public; it wasn’t meant for people like me. All we could see was horrible deaths and irrational fear, and worse, utter apathy from many of the people we looked up to in our youth.
That’s Reagan’s legacy, to me. His inaction and silence, his failure as a leader, led to great suffering, great death. I yet cannot imagine anyone gleefully celebrating the man’s own suffering in the last ten years of his life. To do so is to forget–or possibly to have never learned–the consequences of the decisions made during Reagan’s time.