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January 29, 2008

speaking of eloquence

This in this morning, courtesy of rickydoc over at rootwork the rootsblog.

Posted by cageyer at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2008

the watchman on the wall

Yesterday, Caroline Kennedy, only surviving member of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's marital family, endorsed Democratic candidate Barack Obama for the office her father died while holding. Today, Senator Edward Kennedy, only surviving brother in that Kennedy generation, was expected to do the same.

In an eloquent and somewhat poignant opinion column, Ms. Kennedy said that people were telling her that this candidate inspired in them the hope, the optimism, the potential, that her father had once inspired. That of all the available field, this man stood out, carried that same sort of sense that the world could be different, that we could make it different, that individual people with a concern could do something that had meaning in the larger scheme of things. So she endorsed him--anointing him in a way with the spirit of Camelot.

Barack Obama, a United States Senator from Illinois of mixed race heritage, won the Democratic primary in South Carolina.

Say that slowly. A black man won the Democratic party primary in the very Southern state of South Carolina, the home of Strom Thurmond, the home of a state defense of Confederate flag displays, the home of the Clarendon County School District, where an auto mechanic named Harry Briggs forfeited his livelihood and that of most of his family members to become the lead plaintiff in one of the cases that would make up the Brown decision. The Clarendon County that is probably today still segregated, though not officially, in a state that is still a harbinger of the deepest racial divides of America history.

Say it again, slowly.

A few months back, a reporter for the New York Times was interviewing black women in a hair salon in South Carolina. The question had to do with whether they would support Mr. Obama, the black man, or Hillary Clinton, the woman candidate. For those responding it was a dilemma. Both factions, and the party is dividing along these factions, unfortunately, were important to them. But you know what comment stood out for me the most?

The concern that if Barack Obama were elected president of this country, he would be assassinated.

Like Jack. Like Bobby. Like Martin.

These women are smart, even if they are not college educated, and even if they don't tote around many theories about leadership and identity and presence. They understand the gritty fact that if you stand up and say those of us who are Americans are not just white, we are many colors and many faiths and the true meaning of being American is to embrace all of that in the context of the liberty proclaimed in our founding documents, that your life may be the price.

I'm told that next week, New York is part of that media circus that is variously know as Super Tuesday or Tsunami Tuesday, or whatever, when most of the delegates to the very outdated electoral college will be decided. And my problem with that day is that I can't support the candidate I want to. Why? Because when I moved to the great State of New York, I registered, as I have always done, as a Republican.

My choices? Let's not even go there.

My party has let me down for so many years on so many levels that it is impossible to justify my allegiance. So I won't. I will only attempt to by saying that I consider myself a Lincoln Republican. More on that another time.

I ran across a quote by President Kennedy in my research today, about how the words we proclaim about democracy don't override the discrimination diplomats experience when they come to this country. 1963. Yes, it was a long time ago. But it was also nearly 10 years after Brown. He felt the need to say it. and in the same speech, the speech he never got to give in Dallas that November day, he would have concluded:

We in this country, in this generation, are--by destiny rather than choice--the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

He also promised in that speech that our nation's power would never be used aggressively, but always for peace. My party has failed in that promise. The "Audacity of Hope" that Barak Obama brings makes me wish, like never before, that party politics were not what they are, and that I could go out a week from now and vote for the best shining light I've seen since I was a toddler.

Thank you, Caroline.

Update: There's a great discussion on Obama's victory over on Hungry Hungry Hippos. Check it out.

Posted by cageyer at 08:55 PM | Comments (2)

January 10, 2008

A Kennedy Reflection

Madeleine Albright has a new book out, called Memo to the President-elect. In the short excerpt from Chapter 1, she quotes from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address:

we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty

I wonder about this now. In the same excerpt, Albright recalls the words of Colin Powell as he spoke to Congress as the new secretary of state:

It is a challenge of leadership. For it is not a dark and dangerous idological foe we confront, but the overwhelming power of millions of people who have tasted freedom. It is our own incredible success that we face.

The strength of commitment promised to the world by the young president of 1961 had achieved the survival and success he envisioned. Communism as practiced by the former Soviet Union and its iron curtain devotees was gone, capitalism had taken on global proportions and the world was at peace when Powell warned of the challenge that success brought us. We failed. We - all of us in this democratic nation - failed because we retained political leaders who had already proven they were not up to the challenge. So far distant is Powell's challenge from this moment, from that cold January day when Kennedy's words rang out, the Albright warns the new president "you will enter office with respect for American leadership lower than it has been in the memory of any living person."

Jack Kennedy became president a little over two months before I was born. My young childhood was shaped by his vision of what America could be. I liked Kennedy. The older I got, and the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. And I'm not blind to his shortcomings. They were legion. But as a president of this country, as a national leader, he was the right man at the right time. I have wondered many times how our country might have been different if he had lived.

But this week it's really been Jack's dedicated younger brother, Robert, who has been on my mind. Reading about the violence in the South during the Civil Rights Movements, the records of Bobby's efforts as head of the Justice Department to walk the fine line between states' rights and citizen's rights, to do what was right with an eye always focused on what would be best for his brother's presidency, and eventually catching the belief that he could be president himself. In an article I read over this past weekend, the writer was comparing 1968 to 2008, and for the similarities there are these are not nearly those days. He recalled that period of Kennedy's campaign as a wild 85-day adventure.

The article showed a picture of Robert Kennedy, that young idealist and presidential candidate standing in a moment of quiet sobriety, head bowed, in the moments before he told a crowd in Indianapolis that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis. His speech that night is nothing short of amazing. Impromptu, his own thought, his own encouragement to those who would be filled with hatred to choose unity and understanding instead, quoting Aeschylus from memory. Martin Kettle called it the "bravest speech of that campaign". In my lifetime, I have never seen another like it. Listen for yourself. It's currently the "Top 100 Speech of the Moment" at American Rhetoric.

Maybe it was because I had been so absorbed in this history, the awful times that followed the Brown decision, maybe it was the photograph, maybe it was the knowledge that 2008 isn't and can't be 1968, but as I sat with that article, I did something I almost never do with any seriousness. I looked at the man in the photograph and asked him, with tears threatening and the knowledge that this project I have engaged is changing me in ways I am only just glimpsing, "how might my life have been different if you had lived?"

Posted by cageyer at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2008

New Year's non-resolutions, or something like that

I am not one to make New Year's Resolutions. If I'm going to "resolve" to change things in my life on any sort of wide-scale, reflective response basis, it is usually at my birthday, when spring is inspirational, or in September, which will always seem like the more logical beginning of the year. So what follows here are decidedly not New Year's Resolutions, but rather a public declaration of things I'd like to improve as the year goes by:

In my former life, these would be called "wishes" more than "goals" because they are not specific, not measurable, and not broken down into daily to-do components. Right. That's the idea. Because if I've learned nothing else in graduate school, I've learned that I can only control certain things, and the rest of what happens has a lot to do with other people, and how I respond to those other people. But if everyday I can remind myself that I'd like to have more good days than not when this year is over, the rest will be manageable.

Posted by cageyer at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2008

A New Year's Blessing

I received this as a forward and it seemed so appropriate for the year to come that I offer it here as my New Year's blessing for all of you.


My Wish for You in 2008

May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts.
May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet of $100 bills.
May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips!
May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy.
May the problems you had forget your home address!
In simple words ............

May you find reasons to be happy every day in the year ahead.

Posted by cageyer at 08:45 PM | Comments (1)