The Revolution Wants Candy…

 

Hope comes knocking and asking for candy...

Last night, we had three Barack Obamas at our house.  The first was the teenage girl next door.  The second was the ten year old boy from down the block.  The third was someone’s father.

There were no John McCains, no Sarah Palins, and no George Bushes.  And we’re supposed to be a red state.

I will wait with the rest of you for the results of the election.  But I have seen the results of the primary:  two children, years away from voting,  dressed up on Halloween as the black man who, according to the poles, is most likely our next President.  

These children will grow up to be people who do not say, as people my age said for a very long time, “He’s a great candidate, but I don’t think even the Democrats will elect a black man as their Presidential nominee.”  They won’t say, as people I love have said as recently as last week, “It’s a shame, but this country isn’t ready for a black president.  He can’t win.”

They will have always known a black man can be president.  

The revolution has come.    Last night, it knocked on my door, along with a gaggle of Hannah Montanas and Darth Vaders, and held out its pillowcase for candy.

Four Thoughts, Mid-Convention

• Graciousness is perhaps the greatest defense we have against approbation.  It erases past bad acts more cleanly than confession.
• We Democrats can not stand on pragmatism alone.  It’s not the necessity of our platform that will compel the undecided, but the moral appeal of it.  We can ignore the plight of the returning veteran, the uninsured child, the planet.  We know this because we are ignoring them now.  The argument can not be that we must do something about these wrongs, but that we should do something about them.  It’s time for those better angels of our nature to come out of their long, deep slumber and join in civic discourse once again.
• Very few people over forty can look cool when they dance.  If they are holding signs, wearing funny hats, or dressed in sloganeering t-shirts, the likelihood of coolness seems to drop even further. 
• John McCain is frighteningly willing to steal other people’s voices and turn them into puppets:  Paris Hilton, Jackson Brown, Hillary Clinton.  All people who have appeared in his campaign ads, all people who have repudiated his cooptation.  Watch this.  A man who will steal another’s right to speak for themselves is a dangerous man indeed, and perhaps the least fit man we can imagine to hold the office of the President.

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.