Praying with your Feet

I spent Sunday, September 28, 2008 in Pennsylvania with my friend Hope, canvassing and calling for Obama. A day that started out drizzly, built up to torrential rains on the drive down. Those abated a bit, just enough for us to start our canvassing in Edison, in what I call one of those townhouse McMansion communities. After going through our first round of doorbell ringing, the rains returned with a vengeance. We and our materials were getting absolutely drenched. So we decided to go back to the volunteer office in Doylestown, hoping the rain might let up enough for us to go out again.

So what did we accomplish/learn from this canvassing. Number one: lots of people won't be home. Number two: some people will close the door on you (politely, I'd say). Number three: some won't open the door, even though they're home, but you can't tell what they're saying to you from behind their closed door because the rain is too loud. Number four: some people might open their door, but tell you that they don't want to discuss their political views or presidential preferences. Number five: some people might tell you they embrace Obama wholeheartedly, but it's going to be an uphill climb with their neighbors. Number six: someone might be the wrong person, having just moved in and still being unregistered at that address, but engage you in a lengthy conversation nonetheless, getting stuck on the "lipstick on a pig" comment. You'll learn that this person has a son who did two tours of duty in Iraq, that he really would like to see a woman in the White House, that he's not at all concerned about McCain's age and Palin's inexperience, that he thought McCain cleaned Obama's clock during the debate, but that he's still undecided and that we gave him food for thought.

We then wound up making calls back at the volunteer office. Again, lots of people not home. One committed McCain supporter. One man angry that I was calling after someone came by his house the day before. "You people are ruining my life!" he shouted. Seemed like a bit of an overreaction to me, but you get what you get (and you shouldn't get upset) when you canvass or call. Got a wife on one call when I was looking for her husband. She said it was ok to ask her husband's views. Her characterization: "If he doesn't vote for Obama, he's going to be divorced." And then she agreed to volunteer for the campaign, since her husband's work schedule won't permit him to.

On to an undecided voter. I'm sure I broke the time-on-task rules, but I must have had this woman on the phone for a good half hour. Too much ground covered then to recap here. But suffice it to say that I touched on every imaginable issue, and brought up every little personal tidbit I thought might matter: my nephew at West Point; my sister-in-law who survived the '93 and '01 attacks on the World Trade Center; the fact that I have a special needs child, left my job (and its attendant health and dental benefits) to spend more time caring for him and his siblings, and therefore shifted the burden of providing health care for our family to my husband and his small business. In the end, she said that I gave her a lot to think about. Maybe that's a failure, since I didn't move her squarely over to Obama, but I'm not sure anyone could have done more than I did. I even followed up with a note and some policy info. from the campaign. The head of the volunteer office thought my note was so good that he made a copy to post on the office bulletin board for others to use as a model. Maybe that's a victory of sorts. Who knows? At least it's a contribution...

That Sinking Feeling

I'm trying to be optimistic. I'm trying to imagine a wave of sanity and decency sweeping across this country and carrying with it Barack Obama, all the way to the White House. But I've been disappointed too often by the decisions of my supposed countrymen, by their answering the calls of their lesser angels. I'm afraid to be too hopeful and this time, it won't be garden-variety disappointment I'll be wrestling with if he loses. It'll be a crushing blow to all that I care about and value about this country that I was born in, and to which my father came as an immigrant/refugee.

But also not wanting to sit on the sidelines and bitch, I filled out some forms to volunteer with Obama's campaign. I'm willing to go to other states for him and make his case. I'm not sure they'll take me (they seem to require a five-week commitment), but we'll see. As a mother of three children (one of whom is autistic), I guess I'm just not the heroic everymom that Sarah Palin is. Were I she, I could not only kill defenseless animals with high powered weapons, prod my local librarian to remove books from the shelves and then threaten to fire her when she refuses (only to be called off by a local uproar against the move), hire my high school classmates for government jobs for which they're patently unqualified, threaten my ex-brother-in-law's boss with the loss of his job because my bro-in-law's being a meanie to my sister and the boss won't ax him, and tout my fiscal conservative bona fides by highlighting the fact that I put the state's plane up for sale on ebay. (Oops! Forget to mention that nobody bid and I sold it at a $600,000 loss to an Alaskan businessman.) If I were even half the moral/fiscal/family hero Palin is, I could leave my family for five weeks to campaign for the man I desperately want to see win. Since I'm not, I'll just have to live with my many shortcomings.

Of Babies and Bombs

Perhaps the only thing to say about the news that Sarah Palin's 17-year old daughter is five months pregnant is: imagine the reaction if the pregnant minor were Barack and Michele Obama's 17-year old daughter...

Whoo-Hoo!!

Enough of all the serious political stuff. How's this for a mid-life crisis, or an act of cockeyed silliness: I got a little red convertible this week. A sporty little Mini with a manual transmission. What fun! No real justification for it, though I do plan to make it my go-to, tool-around-town car. Finally, took my feet out of cement and put them on the clutch instead. Whoo-Hoo!!!

Slip Sliding Away

It's starting to feel like it's very possible for Barack Obama and the Democrats to lose this presidential election. That seemed nearly impossible just a few short months ago. Perhaps I should play opposite girl and vote for McCain on the theory that my vote often doesn't matter in that the election goes to the other side. Perhaps I can weave some spell into my vote, causing McCain to lose by a landslide.

I often come back to what my father, z'l, said about the United States in the last years of his life, viz., that the United States would destroy itself and destroy the world. As I look at the possibilities before us, I can't help but wonder if his prophecy is not long from now to come true. To me at least, a McCain victory would mean one more giant step in that terrifying direction.

I only have one vote. I only have one voice. I keep praying that Obama will start to fight back harder on economic issues. I keep praying that Americans won't fall for the usual B.S. that the Democrats represent weakness and aren't serious enough to tackle important issues. I don't honestly have a whole lot of faith in the Democrats, and I most assuredly don't worship at the altar of Obamamania, but the consequences of a McCain presidency are truly frightening and not something I think this country will survive in good form.

Unbridled Hatred

So what magnitude of problem is it that I sometimes dream of seeing Bush/Cheney beheaded on YouTube? Actually, I've never had such a dream, but I've certainly wished for them to be subjected to the same indignities they have so cavalierly visited upon others, whether through war, illegal wiretapping, cruel indifference ("let them eat cake in New Orleans"), and blindness to the struggles and suffering of anyone and everyone who isn't a wealthy, white businessman. OK, I admit it; I've also wished every imaginable disease on them, and with every possible attendant suffering. I've wished for their daughters to be drop-shipped blindfolded into Baghdad, and for Cheney's hunting buddies to fire back.

I don't think any of this makes me crazy, or a threat to national security. I am, quite simply, horrified, furious and frustrated over what those two venal jackasses have done to my country. I have never in my life been embarrassed to be an American. It took the worst president/vice president combination in any imaginable lifetime to get me to that point. All the good things we've stood for as a nation have been ....ed away by the coke-sniffing, drunk driving mama's boy president and the vice president who's made it quite clear to all of us that it's ice that flows through his veins, not blood. These two chicken-shit service-dodgers are all too happy to send other people's sons and daughters into harm's way. These armchair warriors wouldn't know courage or bravery if it walked up and bit them in the ass. History will surely bury them. But forgive me if I hope another kind of burial visits them even sooner...

A Toe in Cyberspace

I have to laugh at myself as I try to be current to some degree with 21st century technology. Linked, Facebook, even blogging. But truly I do it all with half-hearted enthusiasm. Yes, I can get that momentary charge from reconnecting with someone, or finding shared "friends" but I don't really feel part of any kind of cyber community. I don't take it very seriously. I find all the options exhausting. I find seeing other people's links, articles, quotes, recommendations, game choices, political leanings, etc. to be somehow oppressive. It all seems like a cheap kind of voyeurism.

I put little bits of myself out there, but with a certain amount of trepidation, and with a larger amount of cynicism. Maybe it's the generational divide, but I think not. There are people my age and older eagerly embracing and using these tools. I'm sure it's in part my feeling only marginally competent in how I use all this stuff. But truly I think it's that I am old-fashioned. I need the tactile connection. I need to hold a friend's hand, kiss a friend's cheek, look into someone's eyes and bat ideas back and forth. Maybe the idea sharing can be done faster via the web, but I'm sorry, being tagged or poked or whatever the hell the terminology is will never measure up (favorably) to being embraced for real. At least for me.

My Country?

There's so much sturm and drang associated with this presidential election. I try to avoid most of it. I try to pay attention to the things that matter, at least to me. I don't believe Obama's the messiah, the second coming of anything. I believe that he is precisely what he is: a politician. He's ambitious, shrewd and calculating. He's also well-spoken, smart and capable of balancing complex ideas in his single brain. OK, that last one sounds a little "superhero-ish," but considering what we've had the past (nearly) eight years, a cadaver would look like a genius.

As for McCain, I tried to be objective, and to believe that he was indeed some sort of maverick, someone who bucked either party to get the right and necessary things done. Other than his opposition to farm subsidies, and his crossing the aisle to cosponsor campaign finance legislation (neither of which has had a discernible impact on how business gets done in D.C.), I can't figure out how and whether McCain is different. He's backtracked on his previous opposition to Bush's tax cuts, and has publicly announced his ignorance of economic issues. Not encouraging at a time of seeming economic meltdown here in the good 'ole US of A.

So balancing my usual skepticism against my desperate, mad, screaming desire to see this country do a radical 180, I find myself falling down squarely on one side of the choice fence. Although I know he'd inherit a monumental pile of excrement, I have to hope, pray, and do what else I can to try to get Obama elected.

No, I don't think he'll be able to dig us out of the bottomless well of problems we're stuck in, but at least he's not impoverished re: the vision thing. He actually has some ideas about where we might go as a country and why it matters that we arrive at one destination vs. another. He can articulate--and might actually start us down the road toward--a future I'd want to embrace, both for myself and for my children.

If my prayers go unanswered, I've got Plan B. I've told my husband that we'll start shopping for real estate outside these borders. Another round of the same old Republican crap and I'm done. This country won't be mine any more, and I'm not sure it'd be worth sticking around to see it collapse under the weight of so much dead thinking, mean-spiritedness, and ugly disregard for the rights, privileges, obligations, openness, and optimism that have made the United States great. Or at least once did.

Read It and Weep

Today I read two articles that overlapped in interesting ways. One was a Sunday Times front page article about habits of reading, with emphasis on how the younger set reads on the web, and often only on the web, eschewing the actual page turning required when reading bound books, and certainly eschewing the long books and classic novels of the sort I grew up reading. Then I read the cover article in the Atlantic, "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?" I'm a believer in the old-fashioned idea of reading a book, a thing one can hold in a hand or two and turn the pages of. That's not because I'm anti-internet; it's because I believe that the internet provides reams of information, but frighteningly little context. Sure, you can click around like a madman, and write and post your own content (as I'm doing here), but there is some kind of stunning egomania at work in thinking that there's even rough parity between scanning titles and skipping from hyperlink to hyperlink, and reading War and Peace. No, you can't actually capture the nuances of Russian history, and the intrigue and ups and downs in a given set of relationships, by googling War and Peace and scanning a synopsis. It's a bit like thinking that a lick of Tootsie pop is the same thing and as satisfying as sucking on it til you get to its candy center. No comparison.

I don't blame Google for making us stoopid; we were well on our way without it. Google just gave us all a giant shove, as well as ample excuse to pretend that we're now smarter than ever. If that's the case, then why are we no better at solving genocides now (Darfur) than we were in the '70s (Cambodia) or '40s (Holocaust)? Why do we come up with exotic carbon trading schemes, but fail to talk about actual life change, like buying less stuff, having less stuff, and using less stuff, which requires no expertise, just commitment? We've reached a point in historical time when we can see atrocities unfolding on YouTube, but we can't muster the moral courage to stand up and stop them. We see more, and hear more, but are we any more insightful, any more capable of standing up for what is right and challenging what is wrong?

At the same time that Google has exploded, my country has seen its Constitution eroded, individual and collective rights undermined, secrecy in government raised to an art form, and some of the most disastrous international and domestic policies unleashed. What good is a faster computer, packed with ever-more information, and jazzy new ways of viewing it, if we're not smart enough to know which issues should capture our ever-shrinking attention?

Fears and Cheers

So today was my debut as a "public" consultant. I led a workshop for reps. from eight different community development groups on grant writing. It's not rocket science, I know, but I was still pleased that the only "negative" comment was that the workshop was too short. I'll take that kind of criticism any day of the week. Perhaps this will mushroom into something more; perhaps not. Either way, today was a good confidence-booster. Let's see what tomorrow brings...

Five Months and Counting

Hard to believe that I've been "retired" from my job for five months and have yet to look back with regret--or to look back much at all. I'm tempted to ask myself who robbed me of my essence when I wasn't looking and replaced me with a facsimile who doesn't second guess her every move. But perhaps I was just so ready to be gone, to give myself a break, a time-out of sorts. I think that's probably why I have yet to look over my shoulder wondering what I might be missing, or if I made a mistake.

It feels like much and little has happened since I left. In short order I was offered a several month consulting gig (through the end of June), asked to join two nonprofit boards, had one essay accepted for publication, and was encouraged to turn another into a longer, "reported" piece. I've also been struggling mightily with how to handle A and the concerns we have about her. She's been quite vocal lately about feeling left out, unliked, and friendless. It's just torture for me to hear that, and I try not to project my own childhood memories and lifelong insecurities onto her, but I can't help seeing something reflected in her moods and her struggles that just screams out to me from my own past, and even from my sometime present.

I'm still trying to figure out if therapy--and what kind of therapy--might help her. We're having her evaluated through the school district and are quite seriously considering bringing her back to public school in GN. We'll make that decision by month's end.

My sorrow about my father continues to rear its head, though I think I did something he would be proud of in getting Sam to play at our synagogue's Yom Ha Shoah commemoration. Sam wrapped himself inside of Max Bruch's Kol Nidre in a remarkable way. And he told me that his leg didn't shake when he played (as it always seems to when he performs solo). I told him that I thought Papa Jack must have been resting his hand there to steady him.

Wish I could say that I've made progress with my mother. I haven't. I know I should, but there's just a mountain of anger, disappointment and regret that I can't seem to get over or around.

I'm out this evening to dinner with two girlfriends and tomorrow, instead of thinking about Altman business, I can think about who might show for the second parent support group I'm hosting (decided to start one now that I'm home), and how A will do during her evaluation at school. Life still has its obligations and challenges, but they feel more like ones of my choosing. And I'm very grateful about that.

After forty...

I've told myself for some time that turning forty was liberating. Or maybe I've just been telling other folks and in the process trying to convince myself. After all, I've often said, forty is when I really stopped caring what other people think, and can just be myself--take me or leave me. But I realize that that's a pretty stunning lie. Yes, I am who I am. But who am I kidding to think that the opinion of others doesn't matter to me, that I don't feel pricked by (perceived) rejection and don't feel excruciating pain at not fitting in, pain that somehow worsens with age, since by this time, not fitting in should feel so commonplace as to go nearly unnoticed.