Obama’s Firsts, and Ours November 12, 2008

Seldom noted in the election excitement about fists is that President-Elect Obama will be our first president with a community organizer background.  We have finally elected a Democrat who is also a democrat!

 

I have been a progressive idealist my whole adult life.  I have voted on hope for the empowerment of workers, civil rights for all, expanded voices for all citizens, diplomacy instead of war, internationalism, feminism, environmentalism, and go ahead and raise my taxes for our schools, for health care for all, to end poverty, to re-build our communities.  In my work and in my limited activism, and as a parent, I have tried to be a voice for such hopes.

 

Up until now, in my 24 years of voting, only one candidate whose victory was due in part to my one vote truly inspired me, time and again:  Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota senator whose life was tragically cut short, along with his compassionate and active wife Sheila.  There went much of my hope for our elected leadership, even as I stayed in the trenches of teaching, working on behalf of critical thinking, exposing the power that seemed always to concede nothing, as Frederick Douglass famously said.

 

In 2004, I talked often, and with restrained hope, with my then 12 year old eldest child, Allie, about how things could change if John Kerry were elected.  All the way to school each day, we looked nervously at yard signs, and talked and talked.  And Sylvia, then just 8, bravely wore a t-shirt to school (her idea, not mine) asking adults to please choose more carefully in this year’s election:  “I care about clean air and water, good jobs, good schools…but I can’t vote to protect them.”

 

Then George W. Bush was elected, again, or more accurately, for the first time, and the girls and I seemed to run out of things to talk about on our way to school.  The first day of the election news, I couldn’t even eat, I was so depressed.  I continued for years afterwards to try to avoid the news.  I saw power, lies, and fear all hopelessly intertwined.

 

And then, along came someone who built a political campaign from the bottom up, who talked in every speech about the shoulders he stood on, about the workers who risked their lives for the right to a voice in the workplace, the activists who risked their lives for racial justice, the women who risked their lives to vote, and the women who taught him what he needed to know in life through their own sacrifices.  Here was someone who believed that citizenship was ours to claim, who talked truthfully about race, and who brought out our best selves.

 

Despite what now seems a brief struggle over whether to support Obama or Clinton, the democrat with a small “d” in me won out over my compelling interest in supporting a woman.  My gut told me that it was Barack Obama who would change our politics, if anyone could.

 

And so, in the last few months, my family and the nation have come into a time of firsts.   Here are a few of ours:

 

·        First time I canvassed and made phone calls for a candidate.

 

·        First time I held a bake sale for a candidate

 

·        First time I felt happy, inspired, and hopeful, every time I saw that candidate’s face on TV.

 

·        First time I became an obsessive poll checker

 

·        First time my older daughter became a political activist, making phone calls for two months, and canvassing too.

 

·        First time my 12 year old tried her hand at political activism,

 

·        First time I wore a political button everywhere:  “Yes we can”

 

·        First time my parents and I got involved in the same political cause (and the first ever political activism for them)

 

·        First time I helped people vote:  my mother-in-law and I took senior citizens to the polls this past election day.   

 

·        First time I ran through the house screaming for joy:  when I saw McCain come out to deliver a concession speech I knew was the real thing, and we had done it!

 

·        First time since the 1990s (and back then it was just an assumption) that our electoral system could work fairly

 

·        First time we had a party with 55 people, to celebrate the Obama victory

 

·        First time I didn’t feel deeply ambivalent about red-white-and-blue decorations at my home:   my mother-in-law’s red white and blue balloon, to mark our driveway for party guests.

 

·        First time in my adult life I felt the magnitude of hope triumphing over fear through the results of an election.

 

I’m a historian.  I know that fear will triumph over hope again in some future election.  But for now, my children will grow up knowing a new face of leadership and authority.  They know already, especially the girls, what it feels like to be part of a larger, transformative movement, to be politically active and see great results. 

 

If we are lucky enough to have Obama for two terms, children born today or within the past few years won’t know for quite a while that most Presidents were white, and had mundane names like Harrison, Taylor, Hoover, or Bush.

 

As for us adults, the many I know who have trained ourselves in cynicism, who have lamented again and again the way the particular power dynamics of race seem to change so little, who believe the last two elections were stolen, and that American democracy has been a sham, for us there needs to be a paradigm shift, a new openness to possibility.   I welcome that, and I love to think about what the generations can teach one another.

 

My mother-in-law is remembering Kennedy.  My white father from Chicago’s south side is ecstatic over the election of this African-American president.  My children are dreaming of brighter futures.  My curmudgeonly political self is coming alive with pride in the people who made this victory possible, and in a political system that still has some life in it, still has some gifts to give, hopefully for generations to come.

 

 

Thoughts on Writing from my Eight-Year-Old Poet November 3, 2008

All five of us in this family love words, and we all are capable of producing expressive writing, sometimes even beautiful writing.  Not only are we capable, but we’ve all done it, if only under pressure of school assignments!  At Brad’s parent-teacher conference, our youngest writer showed us his poetry, which made me laugh and cry in the space of a few minutes.   

 

John, Allie, and–I learned this week– Brad, have to pull writing out of the depths, have to go down into themselves for awhile before a single word hits the page.  Allie’s essays for English class are truly labors of love—and misery.  After she’s been sitting at the computer for an hour, I’ll come in and see a couple of sentences.  The end result, though, is fabulous:  careful, insightful, expressive, and genuinely, passionately engaged with the universal subjects at hand.  She’s almost always pleased, if a little shell shocked, when she finally completes one of these essays.

 

In nursing school, John had to write about his ideal death. I learned some remarkable things about him from that assignment, and his instructor was blown away by both the thoughts and the writing.   I’ll treasure what he wrote forever.  As is always true, people say things when they write that wouldn’t be expressed quite the same way in speech or in action. 

Sylvia and I on the other hand, the family chatterboxes, make it up as we go along.  We just start writing, delete what we don’t like, add some more, and figure out where the thing is going as it moves forward.  Editing comes later.  My “just get started” writer girl has actually written a pretty significant chunk of a novel, in chapters that dart around, sparkle, and revel in the delights of a fantasy quest world she has created.  She keeps changing the story because she’s growing up so fast that she can’t decide if what she wrote before is too childish.  (It isn’t.)

 

The shared propensity for expression through writing—and the very different ways we all approach it– became more clear to me this week when I fell into this mind-expanding conversation on the topic with the family’s most junior writer.  I was sitting at the dining room table with my laptop on, doing something, and then he and I started talking.  Before I knew it, I was amazed at his insights, and asked him if I could write down what he was saying.  So he said,

 

“You’re going to interview me?”

 

I said, sure! That’s a great idea!  So here is a virtually verbatim account of our conversation.  His reflection on how much he enjoyed writing about crabs having wrestling matches on the sand just slays me.

 

Brad: “When I write, I just pretend like I’m talking to someone and then I write because that’s easier than thinking that you’re writing–except with poetry because people don’t casually talk when they’re reciting a poem.”

 

Mom: “Tell me again how the process works.”

 

“Usually I just sit there and think for like a half an hour, which is the whole period of poetry.  I just sit there, but once I figure out the theme I can just make a quick sketch in my head and write it all down as a rough draft”.

 

“Why is it that you enjoy writing more now than you used to? Say writing about the frog (earlier in the school year) compared to writing poetry?”

 

“I would have put a lot of detail into my writing, but they just rushed us, basically. So I didn’t have much time and then I can’t type, and we had to do our publishing on the computer so that took me like a million years.” 

 

“But why do you like poetry better? Or do you?”

 

“Well, I like them both the same, it’s just I only like poetry when I have how ever…a long amount of time to do it.”

 

“And do you sometimes have enough time in school?”

 

“Well, usually no, because…I don’t know.  Usually they’re expecting students who basically just get the work done so they can have fun.”

 

“But is the work of writing poetry kind of fun in itself?”

 

“Well, yeah I guess, if you have enough time to do it.”

 

“What’s your favorite poem you’ve written or your favorite piece of writing?”

.

“Salt Bay poem.” [about a special place in Ireland during our month there in 2007]

 

“Why?”

 

“Well, I just, first of all, I LOVE sea creatures, they’re my favorite living things on earth, and Salt Bay had the most interesting sea creature that I have ever seen. And we actually got to feed some of ‘em.”

 

“I wish we that poem here with us, but is there any particular line from that poem that you can remember that you really liked writing?”

 

“Well, I sometimes like to write sentences with words that you don’t really expect to hear, like one line: “crabs having wrestling matches over pieces of salmon that we threw in the water.:”  You don’t expect to hear “wrestling matches” in a sentence.”

 

“Is there any other favorite piece of writing that you’re really proud of?”

 

“Mmmmm….not really, but I like the April one.” [ about sledding with our dog—a memory he had, since April died this past spring]

 

“So, can you remember any particular line from that poem?”

 

“Well, actually not really.”

 

“Do you remember the process of thinking about that poem and getting it started?”

 

“Well, yeah, kind of.”

 

“So tell me about that.”

 

“I was…well, actually, I can’t really, no I don’t remember, but I assume it was probably something like I was thinking about winter and then I was thinking about April and then I combined those two, which turned into sledding with April.  And then I thought that would be a good theme for my next poem.”

 

“How did your teacher get you to start thinking about writing poetry? Did she read you poems?”

 

“Well, as usual the first few days of poetry class, like normal classes, they’re just like showing you examples, which is reading me poems.  And then they let us write poems, rough draft. And we had to write five of them.”

 

“Do you remember anything about what it was like to listen to good poetry that got you inspired to write your own?”

 

“Not really.  It wasn’t really that inspiring, actually.”

 

“You were more inspired by your real-life experiences?”

“Yeah.”

 

“I think you like words. They’re just fun to play around with.”

 

“Yeah, I, and I especially like thinking up big words that I know.”

 

We stopped there.  I was beaming.  It was like getting this direct insight into something that would be so easy to overlook—how this kid’s brain actually works, what moves him intellectually and emotionally and how those things are intertwined.  It was a beautiful gift.

 

Apparently, he received his own treasure from this conversation too.  When I read him back the transcript, he was delighted.  He did, however, ask if I could take out the “like” words that were just fillers.  He said it sounded okay when he said that, but not so good when I read it back.  So the above is an edited version in that respect.

 

And then, when the big sisters came home, he was eager to tell them, “Mom interviewed me!”  He was proud of his words and his thoughts in yet another way. 

 

So much lies beneath the surface in the way our kids grow every day.  I wish I could catch these falling stars more often.  I think I need to do more interviewing!