Changed

I feel like I’ve died and gone to America.

–composer Barry Franklin

I can’t stop crying.  I have been crying for five days now.  Every time someone says something to me that includes the words “President Obama,” I well up.  Jessie Jackson, Will Smith, and Oprah Winfrey cry, and I’m snot-nosed and red-eyed right along with them.  Colin Powell cries and–defends his right to cry–and I weep.  

Intellectually, I understand why I have been so invested in the Obama campaign, but until he won, I didn’t know myself how emotionally invested I was–not in his campaign, but in a dream of America that I pretended to stop dreaming some time during the Reagan years.  Or maybe it was after the The Cosby Show was cancelled and Cops debuted.  I can’t put my finger on it.  But it died when I was young enough that dreams were dying off by the dozens, and I don’t remember taking particular notice of it then.  

Now, in its triumphant return, I begin to wonder what other dreams I put aside that, instead, I should have worked toward.  It’s a scary, brilliant moment.  I am glad to have been here for it, and I hope I am up to the things it will ask of me in the coming months and years.  

 

Is West Virginia the New Alabama?

I was once married to a man who had grown up in Birmingham right next door to Bull Connor. Though by no means supporters of Connor’s reactionary politics or his famously brutal methods, my husband and his family had still done all the neighborly things people do: brought in the mail when the Connors traveled, baked them fruitcakes at Christmas, invited them to neighborhood cook-outs. While the nation watched Bull Connor turn fire hoses and attack dogs on unarmed demonstrators, my future in-laws smiled and waved a neighborly “Hello” to him when passing on the street. Anything else would have been rude, my former mother-in-law once told me.

My ex-husband and I fought about this through out our marriage; he staunchly insisted that there is never anything wrong with being polite, and I never stopped believing he had shirked his moral obligation to throw bricks through the Connors’ windows every morning on his way to school.

So I do not know how I am supposed to act now that I find West Virginia has somehow become the last bastion of racism that speaks out loud and doesn’t even know it’s supposed to be ashamed. There isn’t a single villain here, a person at whom to throw bricks… literal or rhetorical. There is only a sadly gullible citizenry. An unchanging understanding of a world that is made of nothing but change.

I am at a loss. I hope you are not. I hope you have ideas and hope and a list of things for me to get working on right this very second to make this better. I am willing to spend my time, my money–or maybe some other thing, some thing it hasn’t occurred to me to offer up but that you know will do some good– to make this better. Because I didn’t know it was this bad. I would have told you “West Virginia isn’t a traditional strong-hold of racism, the Union made sure of that, because as long as there were men who would cross a picket line, no strike would hold.” I would have told you “Where everyone is this poor, skin color doesn’t mean so much.” And I would still tell you, “I was one of the few Jews growing up here, and I can’t remember ever experiencing anti-Semitism.” So I don’t understand what has happened here.

But I am grateful to Robert Byrd, who leads us even when we do not want to be lead.

Bedfellows

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scotti spent his afternoon calling people to ask them to vote for Hillary Clinton on the 13th.  The pundits say it was unnecessary; last time I looked at the polls, she was favored to take the state by twenty points.

I, on the other hand, have been a die-hard Obama fan since he first emerged on the national scene.  He talks to me like I’m an adult, and I rise to the occassion.  He says difficult things to me, and I am grateful. 

You’d think there would be arguments in the yellow farmhouse, but we are oddly able to each believe the other is completely misguided without feeling the need to bring it up. 

Of course, if one or the other of us were out rallying voters for McCain, it would be a different story.  Here is my favorite story about politics:

My parents had just eloped.  My mother was at Queen’s College in North Carolina, and engaged to someone else, when my father appeared out of the blue.  “You said to come back when I was ready to get married,” my father said from the payphone in the lobby of her dorm, “and so here I am.  Get packed and let’s go get married.”  Or something to that effect.  One hopes there was a little more romance to it, and that just gets left out of the telling for the sake of us kids.

In any event, my mother called my grandfather from the road to tell him the news, a little afraid of how he would react.

“Daddy, guess what?  I just married John Einstein!” she said.

“Well, that’s great, honey,” my grandfather replied.  “I always did like John.  He’s a good boy.”

“Now, Daddy, you know this is a mixed marriage, right?” my mother said, a little sheepishly.

My grandfather’s exact words are never reported when the story gets told, no doubt because he said some very ungrandfatherly things.  But there was some yelling, and some over-my-dead-bodying.  Finally, my mother was able to interupt with, “But, Daddy, you knew John wasn’t Jewish the whole time we were dating!”

“Jewish?” my grandfather said–and I believe this, because my mother won’t brook any lies about her father–”Who said antying about Jewish?  I thought you meant he was a goddamned Republican!”

So the little yellow house on Ridgeway Avenue can sleep peacefully behind warring Democrats, safe in the knowledge that once we finally have a nominee, we’ll both be standing behind the same person.  Everything will be fine, as long as neither one of us becomes a goddamned Republican.

Why West Virginians Should Support Obama…

 

Does anybody else remember that West Virginia used to be a “yellow dog Democrat” state, meaning that we would rather vote for a Democratic candidate who was a yellow dog than a Republican, no matter what his/her qualifications?  There was a good reason for this:  more than most of the country, the people of West Virginia deal with poverty, disability, and the issues of rural communities.  We voted for candidates who stood behind labor, were willing to fight the war on poverty, and supported initiatives to ensure that people living in rural communities had good schools, good roads, and the chance to raise their children to have good lives. 

Then, somewhere along the way, we let ourselves be told that those things didn’t matter.  That, in fact, the folk who wanted to build roads, improve schools, and care for the elderly and disabled were, in fact, the bad guys.  Why?  Because somehow we let ourselves be tricked into believing that “Christian” and “Republican” were the same thing.  We let ourselves forget that Jesus gave us not The Ten Commandments, but the far more difficult and demanding Sermon on the Mount. 

I believe that if you look at the issues, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that Obama is the best candidate for West Virginia.  He supports strengthening the supports for persons with disabilities–a key issue in the state with the highest percentage of citizens with disabilities in the entire country!  He supports initiatives to ensure rural small business can compete by bringing high speed internet to currently unserved areas, and he supports keeping the market open to these small businesses through net neutrality.  He has the best plan for providing health care to everyone–a key need in a state that only a few years ago saw the head of DHHR refuse to answer the legislature’s questions about how their healthcare reforms were impacting West Virginia citizens!  On these, and so many more, issues, Obama is clearly the candidate with the best plan  West Virginia’s future.

It is time for us to have hope again.  That’s not something that comes easy here in West Virginia, where wave after wave of reformers have come and gone without providing much relief from the hard times that seem always to hit us the hardest.  But Obama isn’t offering us a hand-out.  He’s offering us the tools to carve out our own prosperity, and better lives for our kids.  And isn’t that what we all want?