Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [93]
“Oh, well, then, you can’t run. You have to be eighteen.”
“But I’ll be eighteen by the day of the election,” I blurted out.
“One minute,” she said, picking up the phone again.
“Can a seventeen-year-old run if he will be eighteen on election day? Uh-huh. I see. Yes. Thank you.”
“Apparently you may run,” she said, as she reached into the file cabinet and pulled out the petition. “Make sure that every signature is that of a registered voter who lives within the boundaries of the school district. If you don’t have twenty valid names, you will not be placed on the ballot.”
I had the names within the hour. When the twenty signers asked me why I was running, I just said, “To fire the principal and assistant principal.” That was my entire platform on Day One, and it seemed to play well, at least to twenty citizens.
“What about college?” my mother asked, perplexed when I told her I had decided to run for school board. “How can you serve on the school board and go to the University of Detroit?”
“I guess if I win, I’ll go to U of M in Flint.” She liked the sound of that. If I won, I would not be leaving home. My parents were not the type to kick you out at eighteen (though that is when my sisters would leave). They did not like to see us go.
I returned the next day to the school board office and turned in my petition. Word soon spread through town that “a hippie” had qualified to be on the June ballot. I set a goal of knocking on every door in the school district. I handed voters a flyer that I had written up outlining my feelings about education and about the Davison schools specifically. I told people the administrators in the high school had to go. I’m guessing this frightened most parents.
But there were some in town who were delighted with the idea of a young person on the school board. OK, they were all under twenty-five.
And then there was the majority, the ones who noticed I had long hair. The week I began to campaign, the racist governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, won the Michigan Democratic Presidential primary. Not a good sign for me and my chances. (This was also my very first time voting. I cast my first vote ever as a citizen for Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for president.)
The Chamber of Commerce types in town were appalled at the thought of me, a kid, winning, as were many of the Protestant pastors, the local rednecks, and the pro-war crowd (which was made up of all of the above).
The problem was, the town pooh-bahs had a really bad strategy to stop me. Six of them went down to the school board office and took out their own petitions to run against me. Six of them against me. Clearly they missed a few days of civics class when they were young. You don’t win by running the most candidates – you’ll split the vote and your opponent will win with a plurality. It was to my good fortune that they did not know the word plurality and I did. I taunted them and challenged more Republicans to go get their own petitions to see if they could beat me!
And that was when I got a taste of my own medicine. In addition to the six older, conservative adults who would oppose me, an eighteen-year-old decided to also run against me—and thus split the already very small youth/liberal vote I was going to get. The other eighteen-year-old candidate was none other than the vice president of the student council, Sharon Johnson—the girl who was one of my only two dates in high school.
“Why are you running?” I asked her, a bit peeved that she was stealing my thunder.
“I don’t know, I thought it would be neat. We could both be on the school board!” (Two seats were open on the board, and her idea was that we could both win and serve together.)
Why was she still tormenting me? First student council, then the bra, then the steamed-up windows, and now she’s going to split the youth vote and sink any slight chance I might have had to get elected.
A week before the election, I received my first anonymous hate mail. It was addressed to the two eighteen-year-olds running. It read:
Sharon Johnson
Michael F. Moore