It’s interesting how memories blend events in our minds and how intertwined those events are in our lives.
Fifty years. October 1972. Specifically, Oct. 20, 1972. That’s the day I was promoted from staff sergeant to mister, the day I was separated from active duty in the Air Force. It was also the first time I heard of a guy named Joe Biden.
It was a Friday and my father had taken the day off to drive down to Langley Air Force Base to bring me home after three years, 11 months, and 28 days of active duty. We got home late afternoon, maybe about 4 p.m. My mother had the TV on, tuned to one of the Philly stations airing news.
On the screen was a young Joe Biden campaigning to become the next U.S. senator from Delaware. I watched and listened and thought he reminded me of the late John Kennedy. He was young, energetic, and, yes, even a little charismatic. At least he spoke with that type of energy. Two months later, his wife and daughter were killed, and his two sons were injured in a car crash in Hockessin.
How could anyone not sympathize? Even hardcore Republicans felt for him and, even today, respect his attention to his then-young sons by taking the train home every night so he could be with his boys after a full day in Washington serving as a senator.
But it’s been downhill since then. He didn’t treat Clarence Thomas very well during Thomas’ confirmation hearing for Supreme Court. He railed against busing, saying he opposed a “racial jungle” where someone would hit his mother over the head. And he helped enact laws — such as the 1994 Crime Bill — that put people in jail and kept them there longer for activities as nonviolent as marijuana possession and use, yet he decries Russia’s incarceration of Brittney Griner for having THC, the psychoactive cannabinoid in cannabis, with her when she went to that country. And inflation is running rampant with him sounding like Gerald Ford touting WIN buttons.
Oh, politically, it’s been good for Biden. He went from the Senate to become the vice president and now president. But it’s been downhill for liberty and the economy. This is not to say he’s worse than Donald Trump. They’re both bad, just in different ways. One thing they share, though, is a disregard for the Constitution and the oath they took to uphold it. And their understanding of what a free market is about is virtually nonexistent.
Neither Kennedy nor his Republican predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, were perfect, but they were both better than anyone we’ve had in the Oval Office since. And both would likely be rejected by their respective parties if they were alive today and advocating what they advocated when they were in office.
Four days after my 50th anniversary of returning to civilian life will be the 54thanniversary of my enlisting. My dad was around for that day, too. He dropped me off at the induction center on Cherry Street early in the morning. It was still dark when I got out of the car. That afternoon, he, my mother, and my sister saw me off at the airport on my way to basic training.
My father knew Philadelphia almost as well as a veteran cab driver. But he got lost on the way home from the airport that day. We never spoke of it, but I know why he got lost. He was in the Marine Corps during WWII, and in his gut, he felt that he hadn’t island-hopped from Saipan to Iwo Jima to Okinawa just so his only son would have his own war to go to. At least the war he fought was constitutional.
About Rich Schwartzman
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
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