Smile, it might change your life

By Chuck Thompson | The Sunday Column

OPINION / HUMOR – There’s a reason you always see people smiling, it’s friendly / warming, healthy and contagious. People are more likely to buy a product or vote for a person that smiles than not.

Miss America contestants don’t smile because they want to; they smile because it makes a difference to the judges and the audience.

Smiling can also be comical, depending on the situation. In the movie Elf, staring Will Ferrell, his character Buddy the Elf constantly states that smiling is his favorite activity and he does so at such awkward times. It’s hard not to enjoy unless you’re just a sour unhappy person. Even people without a personality enjoy that movie.

The greatest election because one was smiling and the other wasn’t, was the 1984 Presidential election between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.

In my kindergartner class, we held and election. I don’t know why — either my teachers were teaching us about voting and the president or just nosy to see if we knew who our parents were going to vote for and see if we picked the same based off what we all overheard at home.

I didn’t have a clue, and didn’t care less.

President? Boring.

If it wasn’t Thundercats, GI JOE or Transformers I couldn’t care less.

Now, if you had said Optimus Prime or Sgt. Duke or Roadblock was running for President then sign me up. I'll be the first to vote, but I didn’t know much about politics.

My kindergarten teacher explained to the class that we would wait in line and one-by-one, go into the voting booth (which was a cardboard box or something) and vote for our choice for President of The United States of America.

Yeah. I knew who that was. I think. I’d heard that on the news my dad was watching while I was playing with my toys every evening after supper. I don’t know what the President looked like, and couldn’t have cared less, but I’d heard of him before.

I was just concerned because I had never voted before. Do we have to write in a name? If so, I’m just writing 'Mom.' She seems to be in charge at home, and I don’t know any names or anything.

“Who are you voting for?” My friend Tanner asked, standing in line behind me.

I just shrugged. I didn’t have a clue because I didn’t know any names. The more I thought about it, the more I knew voting was serious; I remember my dad talking about it and getting mad, so I knew it was important. “They better not mess this up. People go vote and they don’t even know who or what they’re voting for because they don’t pay attention,” he would say.  

He was right, because I hadn’t paid any attention and had no clue what I was doing.

When it was my turn, I stepped inside the voting booth and did as instructed by my teacher, “Use this pen to circle the photo and the name below and then place it inside the slot in the tissue box.”

I looked at the two choices. I looked carefully. One man looked a bit younger than the other one. He didn’t seem as happy because he wasn’t really smiling. I thought it was awfully brave of him to refuse to smile for his photo because I bet his mom or grandma wasn’t happy with him when he showed them that school photo or whatever it was and wasn’t smiling. I know I wouldn’t have wanted to show my Momma or Mawmaw a photo where I refused to smile! He had some nerve…

Then I looked at the other man’s photo. He was old like my Pawpaw. He had dark hair like him too. I bet he was somebody’s Pawpaw too. He was smiling and looked friendly. I felt like he would be nice and say hello and wave and if he was a Pawpaw too he probably knew a lot of things that I didn’t and that’s why he was one of the two people that got picked for President of the …. The … Blunited smates of Sumurcia or whatever they call it. I know the pledge of allegiance but they never make that part clear — anyways — he looks like a happy person.

I circled his photo.

That night I went home and saw him on TV and he won. I knew he won because he was smiling and that made all the difference (in the mind of a five year old)

In the actual race, Regan beat Mondale in a landslide, winning every state except Minnesota.

Reagan carried 525 electoral votes, 49 states, and roughly 60% of the popular vote. Mondale won 13 electoral votes; 10 of those were from his home state of Minnesota, which he barely won by a narrow margin of 3,761 votes, and 3 electoral votes from the District of Columbia.

And it all happened because Reagan smiled, (according to the opinion of my five-year-old self). I truly felt like my vote made a difference (even though I was five and it didn’t count, but nobody told me that until later).

Try smiling today. It might not make a world of difference but it might cheer up one person; and over time, well… you never know…. It worked for Ronald Reagan in Mrs. Packard’s Kindergarten class at Boiling Springs Elementary School in ‘84.

Ronald Reagan (R) and Walter Mondale (D), 1984 Presidential race.

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