A Confession

My name is Patricia Camburn Zick, and I’m a political and history nerd.

There I’ve finally admitted it. I don’t know for sure where it started but I do remember our dining room at home also served as the office for the township clerk, who was my father for many years. Often during election cycles, dinner would be interrupted by a knock on the door and when answered a resident would enter our private home to register to vote.

Some of my earliest memories come from the actual day of an election. Both my parents ran the polling sites for our township in the town hall of our small Michigan town. I played dolls and colored under the tables as voters arrived for their ballots. I can remember my winter coat often serving as my padding on the concrete floor. And if I was very good, my dad would take me to the back of the town hall where the fire trucks rested in a large garage. I can still smell the combination of oil and gasoline emanating from those large red monsters.

For a few short years, I covered politics for the local press in northern Florida. I loved all the drama and intrigue. And I learned a ton about zoning and planning and the ways the real estate developers maneuvered around the rules. And there were times when the other side acted just as poorly, so nothing but disdain ruled.

Recently, I’ve been lost in the past researching for a project I hope to develop into a full-blown novel. As a result, the Gilded Age has become my world as I read the stories of the robber barons of the last half of the nineteenth century in both fiction and nonfiction. This history will form the groundwork for the story between two eras as I examine the women’s suffrage movement and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 drawing parallels to the time of COVID in the present day. Whether the book is ever completed matters little to me. I’ve simply loved burying my head in the past. But it is disturbing that the lessons learned in 1918 were forgotten by 2020.

And to prove my point about my nerdiness, my current pastime involves the rewatching of The West Wing and reading chapters in a new book about the series, What’s Next – A Backstage Pass to The West Wing. I’m confessing this obsession here for the first time.

Here’s what I’ve learned. Nothing in politics changes much. However, when we take the time to listen and attempt to understand the other side’s cogent and rational arguments, only then can we hope for compromise and solutions. Neither side may get exactly what they wanted in the first place, but at least something gets done democratically rather than autocratically. History can guide us and show us what to do or not do for the most good and least harm.

What’s Next – A Backstage Pass to The West Wing