Voting to-do list.

Alright, kids.  We have a critical election on Tuesday.  Here are two things we can do:

1. Vote.
2. Have The Talk with your parents.

The second item applies however you think your parents will be voting.  If you are on the same page, great.  Encourage them and thank them.  But if you disagree, talk to them.  I know it sucks and is way easier not to.  Your siblings may get angry with you and wish you’d keep your mouth shut (may I recommend a time other than dinner?).  But it’s important.  You may not change their minds or sway their vote, but they need to hear your voice.  Tell them you are worried.  Give them reasons why.  Show them evidence.  Don’t resort to name-calling.  Tell them you love them instead.  Donald Trump has split up enough families.  

Maybe they are also troubled by the current climate, but they think we are too far down the path of corruption to make any difference.  They’ve thrown in the towel.  Tell them how strange it is to hear them say such things, when you’ve been so accustomed to them telling you to never give up.  Ask them where we would be if that had been the attitude of their parents in the 1940s.  Tell them you will not give up without a fight, because that is how they raised you and how their parents raised them.  

Tell them what you see of your generation.  I see optimism, inventiveness, and determination.  We have big ideas and big hearts.  We crave the freedom and opportunity that is our inheritance from this great nation—the nation you will hand over to us, even if we have to claw it from your cold, dead fingers.  We will make it new again.  Because you taught us to participate.  We weren’t out there buying those participation trophies for ourselves.  You gave them to us.  You enrolled us in softball and dance and scouts and summer camp.  You taught us to participate because you knew its value.  We learned participation is not just valuable—it is essential.  Healthy society cannot function without it.  Democracy cannot function without it.  

Happy voting, friends.  

Only 2 years ago?  What a wild ride.

#neverforget: A Treatise on Fear and Freedom

After listening to President Obama’s speech (which I highly recommend), I was inspired to dig up FDR’s Four Freedoms speech.  I’d been meaning to do so for a while—it often pops into my head against the constant, reckless fear-mongering by our president and his enablers.  The Four Freedoms speech was FDR’s State of the Union address in January 1941—his message that the Union was preparing for the fight of her life, an existential battle for how humans deserve to live in this world: with freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.  The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would happen less than a year later.  

It’s scary how relevant his words are now.  An excerpt:

I suppose that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world–assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.

... 

In times like these it is immature–and incidentally, untrue–for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.

No realistic American can expect from a dictator’s peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion–or even good business.

Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. “Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.

We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the “ism” of appeasement.

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests. 

How reassuring to read and imagine hearing those words from an American president.  Don’t know what you got till it’s gone, right?

I bring this up today out of anxiety that we are confusing what we should #neverforget about September 11, 2001.  The attacks of September 11th were an evil and cowardly attack on our freedom.  They were meant to inspire fear.  Death by itself can’t destroy democracy—fear can.  Like democracy, fear is simply an idea.  But they are two ideas that cannot live in the same place.

I remember a particular history lesson at Villa.  Our teacher remarked it wasn’t a given that ordinary Americans would stick to the values of democracy in the wake of the stock market crash and Great Depression.  The conditions for fascism seemed riper in a place like Germany, for instance, but we were not immune.  Look at this photo essay from The Atlantic.  These are images of 1930s New Jersey and New York, not Germany.  (Check out that crowd at Madison Square Garden—yuge!)  High-profile Americans like Charles Lindbergh espoused the “America First” Committee, whose stated goal was to keep America out of the war, an intention that sometimes mixed with fascism of its own.  On this day in 1941, Lindbergh gave a speech detailing the three groups he believed were to blame for pushing us towards war in Europe—the British, American Jews, and the Roosevelt administration.  Regarding the second group, he said:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. 

But be assured: 

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire.

But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

Back in that history class, I remember thinking how obvious it seemed that remaining true to the values of our democracy would be the only way to defeat fascism.  And I still don’t think that’s my hindsight bias talking.  Democracy and fascism are fundamentally opposed.  Democracy includes all people—all men are created equal.  Fascism excludes certain people.  Charles Lindbergh doesn’t get to exclude Jewish people from an American democracy, as much as he professes to “admire their race”.  When we compromise on which groups of people get to be included in “freedom”, we defeat democracy.  When we compromise on a fundamental belief, it’s not a fundamental belief anymore.  Democracy depends on the word “all.”

Fear and freedom cannot live in the same place.  I believe this essential truth to my core.  You know it too.  We feel most human when we are most free:

• when we can freely and honestly express what’s happening in our brains and hearts, and when we respect others for doing the same
• when we can praise the spirit of life in whatever way makes sense to us, in whatever way gives us true joy
• when our bodies enjoy health and sustenance and mobility, when we can walk and eat and dance
• when we can do all these things with confidence, when we can do them without shame, without being afraid.

Isn’t that when we feel most alive?

That is the promise of America I grew up believing in and loving.  The promise itself is American exceptionalism—the rest is just noise.  When we abandon the promise, we lose what sets us apart, what makes us great—our freedom.

I’ll presume to close with the end of FDR’s 1941 State of the Union:

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

Raise a glass to freedommmmm

Give me your tired, your poor, and I'll take those babies away: A Treatise on the Border Situation.

If we cannot recognize both the cruelty of separating children from their parents at our border and who bears responsibility for this cruelty, I'm not sure we can claw our way back up this slippery slope.  Again I ask my friends and family who voted for Donald Trump: what are the limits of your tolerance for his actions?  Where do you draw the line?  If the tearing of children from their parents does not stir rage in you, what will?  That is not a rhetorical question.  How bad does it need to get?  Because that is what our president is testing.  The American president and his disciples ask—no, they condescendingly expect your partisan fervor to override your natural empathy for that instinctual panic of a child who cannot find her mother.  But the team conveniently provides an out for those of you (presumably good Christians) who hate what is happening to the poor children: they assure you they too, as parents and Christians, hate this abomination, but there is simply nothing they can do to stop it.  The blame falls squarely on their political enemies.  Republicans only control the presidency and both houses of Congress.  The buck stops somewhere else. 

If our president is such an expert negotiator (who, let's not forget, has all the power on his side), why does he need to use real-life, vulnerable children as pawns? This is the genius of Donald Trump, you say.  He’s effectively forcing a conversation.  Many methods are effective, even sanctioned by law.  But that does not make them all moral.  The ends do not justify the means.  This is not some brilliant move of brinksmanship to force Democrats to the table on illegal immigration.  This is only cruel.  Any fool can orchestrate inhumanity in an attempt to get his way.  The strategy is not only despicable, but shortsighted.  Who else has used this strategy?  How did that turn out?

We can even look at this “policy” specifically.  Who else in history has forcibly separated children from their parents?  Nazis come to mind.  Antebellum slave traders come to mind.  I’m no policy maker, but I’d think we could find better role models.  Though I guess we shouldn't be surprised.  Our president has expressed sympathy for Nazi demonstrators before our very eyes. Our attorney general, like his father and grandfather before him, is named after the president of the Confederacy and the man who oversaw the first attack on the Union. Still, emulating those who increase their power by degrading fellow humans seems at odds that old American fundamental “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.  But maybe the founders really did just mean men, what with "original intent" and all.  Tough luck, women and children.*

Perhaps in the search for biblical justification, Sarah Huckabee Sanders alerted the president to the story of the judgment of Solomon, but he quickly got bored, heard the words "split the baby in half" and thought, "great idea."  Spoiler alert, Don: Solomon neither cuts the baby in two nor blames his murder of the child on the dispute of the mothers.  But in that movie, Republicans of Congress win best supporting actor in the role of the mother who is happy the baby dies.

*THANKS IVANKA

My fellow Austrians.

Good evening.  You may have noticed the Blob’s small hiatus from its regularly scheduled cutting commentary.  My apologies.  We’re living in a reality show conducted by King Man-Child and Mr. Bannon-Goebbels and it is exhausting.  I’m so exhausted that upon waking up to a rare San Francisco peal of thunder recently, I assumed we were getting nuked by North Korea and was surprisingly okay with it. 

But this is the tactic of our Orange Overlord, right?  Inundate us with bullshit from all angles so we are stuck spinning in excrement, all while he dances around tearing down democratic norms?  Our free press, our independent judiciary—nothing is safe from his vindictive incompetence.

I can hear some of you thinking, “Oh Claire, you’re being dramatic.  Can’t we go back to the fun, non-political times of the Blob?”  NO WE CANNOT.  I attempted to write a light-hearted post last week but it turned into a real tearjerker about how I feel like CAPTAIN VON TRAPP SINGING EDELWEISS TO HIS DEAD AUSTRIA.  I need you, Julie Andrews.  And right now, I’m sparing you the very poignant lessons we could learn from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague (but don’t worry, I’m saving it for later).  It seems that all my blob brain is wired for right now is finding parallels between our current state of affairs and the rise of the Third Reich.  THANKS, OBAMA.

And now, we breathe.  During the hiatus from substantive blobbing, I had the great fortune of attending two meet-ups of strong lady friends (Feminist Fight Club last Tuesday and Babes Brunch yesterday).  We discussed current events, brainstormed ways to get involved, and ate delicious food.  I recognize my tendency to sit at home and fret, so it was good to meet up with smart, kind women and plan for action.  I highly recommend it.  It’s healthy to get out of social media world.

Womankind, arise!

That’s all I got for today, y'all.  Good night.  God bless.  Call your senators.  Tip your waitresses.

Though we adore men individually,
we agree that as a group they're rather stupid.

Thanks, Obama: A Treatise on Race in America

More book review than treatise.  Not actually much about Obama.  Just felt like a good title.

Few books have altered my understanding of history and of the present moment as profoundly as The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  I want every person in the country to read this book.

The Warmth of Other Suns is the story of the Great Migration, the exodus of six million African Americans from the South from around WWI through the 1970s.  I remember learning about this in high school history, but mainly as a simple chain of cause and effect.  Jim Crow was bad, black people moved away, demographics in northern cities changed.  I completely missed the big picture.  This was the largest and fastest migration of people in American history.  I’m not sure my italics can convey how huge that statement is.  How about This was the largest and fastest migration of people in American history.  The sheer number of migrants dispersing at such a rapid rate from one region to the rest of the country fundamentally changed most, if not all, aspects of our nation—our economies, our politics, our culture.

Isabel Wilkerson weaves the stories of three distinct migrants together with the overall picture of the Great Migration.  The personal accounts of Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and George Swanson Starling give the story of the Great Migration something I missed in history class—the power and emotion of our common humanity.  We learn not only of the indignities they escaped and the challenges of their new homes, but also what they felt at those moments.  We can feel Ida Mae’s nerves as she and her husband quietly prepare to leave Mississippi, without alerting their sharecropper for fear of retaliation.  We can feel Robert’s humiliation and delirium as he pleads for a place to sleep for the night on his drive from Texas to California.  We can see ourselves in these people.  They make us ask, “What would I have done in their shoes?  What if I had to flee the place I’d always known and start from scratch in a foreign city?”

This is not a political book, but it has clarified my views of civic responsibility.  As President Obama said in his farewell address,

[if our democracy is to work] For white Americans, it means acknowledging that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow didn’t suddenly vanish in the ‘60s…

Ms. Wilkerson expertly draws the lineage from slavery to the Jim Crow South to the Great Migration to the present, illustrating the compounding, deleterious effects of slavery on today’s African Americans.  We can’t pretend the wealth gap between white and black people is the result of one group’s hard work and the other’s laziness. Black people began in this country as slaves, were kept subject through sharecropping, denied rights and respect, forced to leave their communities to start again elsewhere, where they faced the same prejudices and earned less than their white counterparts.  While at the same time, white people were free to build their wealth over generations, free to attend the better half of “separate but equal” schools, free to buy homes where realtors forgot to tour their black clients, where those homes would appreciate in value and prove a good return on investment.  We cannot pretend institutionalized racism is a made-up phenomenon, when almost 9% of black men in their late 20s are in prison.  When, at the same time, a young white man convicted of raping an unconscious woman walks free after only three months in jail. It’s dishonest to pretend we all start on the same playing field.  We just don’t.

I’m not shaming white people for our ancestors’ wrongs.  I’m asking us to recognize how our whiteness has eased our paths through life.  If we truly believe all men and women are created equal, we have to acknowledge the injustice of the fact that one’s mere skin color either enhances or threatens one’s ability to pursue happiness.  The Warmth of Other Suns opened my eyes to so many ways that is true.

I would like to end this treatise and step off my soapbox, after a quote Ms. Wilkerson included in her Notes on Methodology, from the 1922 Chicago Commission on Race Relations report The Negro in Chicago.

It is important for our white citizens always to remember that the Negroes alone of all our immigrants came to America against their will by the special compelling invitation of the whites; that the institution of slavery was introduced, expanded, and maintained in the United States by the white people and for their own benefit; and that they likewise created the conditions that followed emancipation. Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making.  No group in our population is less responsible for its existence.  But every group is responsible for its continuance; and every citizen, regardless of color or racial origin, is in honor and conscience bound to seek and forward its solution.

Raise a glass to freedommmm