This weekend I drove south from Washington to volunteer for the Obama campaign. They had plenty of staff in Portland, so my son and I were assigned to rural northwestern Oregon -- home to working Americans, hard-working Americans, white Americans.
Americans who are voting for Barack Obama.
Many more pictures (click for more detail) and the full story after the jump.
For Mothers Day, my brilliant 7 year old son and I went to see Cake.
It was a gamble. Luckily they didn't play "Nugget."
When my boy was just 3, I used to listen to a lot of Cake in the car. We had just moved back to Washington state from Santa Cruz. The teacher in his room at preschool was also originally from Santa Cruz. This is probably why she could barely stop cracking up long enough to describe to me how, on his second day there, he had put a terracotta flower pot on his head, turned to her, and said, "Miss Molly, look! I'm a pot-head!"
Anyway, the next story Miss Molly told me was that he was singing "Sheep go to heaven, goats go to hell," to himself on the playground. She commended me for my taste in music but suggested I should impress upon him the importance of not singing that particular song at school. I switched to a heavier rotation of They Might Be Giants in the car after that.
Lately, though, Cake has been back in the mix.
Victory Dinner - $33,100 per person.Photo Reception - $10,000 per person/ Contribute or Raise.VIP Reception - $2,300 per person.General Reception - $1,000 per person.
A post on DailyKos today raised the question of how to begin healing the divide between Clinton supporters and Obama supporters. The post itself had much harsher things to say about Hillary than about Barack, and it understandably turned off the Hillary supporters who none the less tried to participate in the discussion. In answer to the poll, this is what I posted:
We have to start being nicer to each other, period.
Not everyone who supports either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is a Democrat, so let's get that out of the way first. We can't just say "party unity is where it's at," and then expect everything else to fall into line.
It is legitimate to question issues of policy, action, and character on the part of all candidates. It is legitimate to question the influence of people who are a part of the lives of all candidates.
And it is essential that we develop a method of dealing with the answers to these legitimate questions that is consistent. In other words, if supporters of one candidate can separate their candidate's words and opinions from the words and opinions of people around the candidate, they must be able to do the same with respect to the other candidates.
We must not inflate our presentation of the candidate we support beyond a level that is supportable by the facts.
We must spend more time talking about the reasons why we support a candidate and less time talking about the reasons we'd vote against another candidate.
Until we develop these abilities, we are not having a discussion, we're having an argument. And we won't get anywhere until we can start discussing -- which is how we begin to recognize ourselves in each other.
Here
I grew up in Spokane, Washington, just west of the northern Idaho stronghold of the Aryan Nations, in the 1970s and 1980s. By the time I was old enough to understand the discussion, I knew that racism was wrong. My mother and her six siblings lived out their disapproval of my grandmother's deep-rooted and incessant racism daily through their kind and fair words and actions. But in truth, I had little exposure to other races growing up: one family that took in black foster children who attended my otherwise entirely-white public school, employees and caretakers of my quadraplegic uncle paid by the state, or the occasional kid who played at my soccer camp during the summer. It was a part of the country occupied by the Aryan Nations precisely because they did not have to confront the objects of their hatred on a daily basis, given our demographics.
In the 1980s in that part of the country, the history of race relations in America was taught through a sort of narrow-aperture lens: we spent weeks watching the miniseries "The Blue and the Gray," we were taught that Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery singlehandedly (but we were not taught that he owned slaves), and we were taught that the U.S. Government was so benevolent as to give huge tracts of land to the Native Americans who had lived here before our ancestors. Even growing up within a two hour drive of three such (largely destitute) reservations, we were shielded from the basic realities of systemic racial oppression.
I must preface this post by stating a simple fact: I am agnostic. I do not belong to a church. I do not presume to know whether or not there is a supreme being or a creator, whether karma is real or imagined, or what is going to happen when I die.
This does not mean I am amoral. In fact, it means that I have only my own actions in life to prove my worth as a human being. I do not expect redemption at the time of my death. I do occasionally ask for forgivenness for mistakes I have made, but I ask for that forgivenness from the people my actions have affected, because they are the only ones who can give me forgivenness and redemption.
My upbringing instilled in me a deep distrust of organized religion. My father's family belonged to the Jehovah's Witness church, although my father left the church when he left home. I attended services at my dad's family's church on more than one occasion, and I once spent a terror-filled week at the home of my dad's brother, watching the family constantly at war over their children's association with people who did not belong to their church. I was injured while playing in their barn and should have received stitches, but because they did not believe in excessive medical intervention, they put a band-aid on my knee and told me not to bend it. I did not see that uncle for years after my parents came to pick me up and learned what had happened.
But there were also experiences in my childhood and adult life that tempered my resentment of organized religion and dogma, because they taught me that people can be more than simply their religious identities.
I attended a Jesuit university where, for the first time in my life, I met deeply religious men and women with whom I could have honest, scholarly conversations about the very mechanics and importance of faith without first having to defend my right to believe differently than them.
My paternal grandmother, though she attended Jehovah's Witness services all her life, was the kindest, gentlest, most fair woman I have ever known. When the family was divided over religion, she demanded that they come together and behave in her presence, and they did.
My father's best friend converted to the Mormon church when he married a Mormon woman in his middle age. He was, until the day he died, one of the people I loved most as a child, funny and kind and fair and nonjudgmental. Although the Mormon church treated my father horribly at his best friend's funeral, it never occurred to me to be angry at his best friend, posthumously, for being a part of the religion.
So even I, an agnostic, one who is deeply skeptical and suspicious of organized religion, understand that people are defined by their actions as human beings and not by the actions of their pastors or priests.
Those who acted in exactly the way their religious leaders told them to earned my deepest distrust -- such as the aunt who screamed at her 13 year old daughter that she was going to go to hell for having a Catholic pen-pal, forced me to go with them to proselytize on a Sunday but eventually allowed me to wait in the car when I told her I'd pretend to be possessed by Satan if I had to go inside a house, and told me I was a harlot and a sinner for using lotion on my 8 year old face.
Those who demonstrated through words and actions that they were good, decent people who none the less belong to a community whose beliefs on the whole I did not share were -- and are -- valued friends and family of mine.
Even I, the agnostic, know that the teaching of Christ is to accept all, to work toward a better world for all, and to show respect and kindness to our fellow human beings. Even I, the agnostic, know that Barack Obama has comported himself as a Christian, and not as the puppet of a radical pastor. Even I, who have nothing to offer but simple human forgivenness, can forgive him.
I challenge every Christian to do the same.
My son is a Pokemon fanatic.
I laughed so hard at this I thought I might throw up.
It's an animated image, so you might need to wait until it starts over again at "You encountered McCain!"
A politician like Barack Obama comes along once in an era, and my support of him is the result of careful consideration of personal and political issues. I've outlined them here, both from my perspective as a parent and based on how he compares to other Democrats running for president.
Neither was "Grassroots Mom" at DailyKOS. So she did her homework, and found out that hype isn't necessary to believe in Change.
Read her extraordinarily well-researched article here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/20/201332/807/36/458633
Interesting editorial from Dick Morris at Rasmussen Reports regarding Hillary's claim to be the more experienced candidate.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/political_commentary/commentary_by_dick_morris/hillary_clinton_goofs_again
Excerpt:
Her only actual legislation included one bill to increase nurse recruitment, another to aid respite time for Alzheimer’s care givers and another to expand veterans’ health benefits, a paltry output for six years’ service. In her second term, she has spent full-time campaigning for president and has the worst attendance record of the three senators now still in the presidential race.
Her only actual legislation included one bill to increase nurse recruitment, another to aid respite time for Alzheimer’s care givers and another to expand veterans’ health benefits, a paltry output for six years’ service.
In her second term, she has spent full-time campaigning for president and has the worst attendance record of the three senators now still in the presidential race.
I responded to a discussion on a message board today and thought I'd share the calculations I did here where others might find it of interest.
The question was why, in the Blueprint for Change, Obama supports the idea of seniors who earn less than $50,000 annually being exempt from income tax. The argument was that those of us still working and paying taxes would be subsidizing the cost of living for them.
My response, and the numbers, after the break.
I wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton's campaign a few days ago that I doubt any of them will ever read or care about. I have higher hopes for the letter I contributed at http://my.barackobama.com/superdelegates, that I'm sending to the superdelegates in my state, and that I'm posting here for your perusal after the break.
