Don't Get Fooled Again

Twelve years ago, the last time the Democrats lost a presidential election, a not-very-bright college senior had this to say about his disappointment:

But don’t let the narrow difference in the Electoral College fool you. This wasn’t a close election. When the new Congress convenes in January, the Republicans will have double-digit advantages in the Senate and House of Representatives. Governors’ mansions and state legislatures remain, on the whole, firmly in their grasp. . . .

So what gives?

A lot of things, but I would argue the biggest problem is that most of us Lefties don’t understand people who base their votes on “moral values.” Here in Ivory Tower academia, we like to make fun of these people. With smug self-satisfaction, we mock them as backwards simpletons who can’t read and base their opinions on (gasp!) The Bible.

Well the joke’s on us now, and we need to regroup.

Two friends wrote me in the days that followed to take issue with my analysis.  One, Dave Weigel (now of The Washington Post), challenged me for overreacting to a single election.  Realignment is hard, he said, but there would be better days ahead for Democrats as they started to challenge in areas traditionally held by Republicans.  The other, Greg Lowe, challenged me for abandoning my principles.  Yes, moral-values voters had turned against the Democrats, he conceded, but on the big “moral” issue of that election—gay rights—we were right, and they were wrong.  We shouldn’t cede ground just because we had lost an election, he argued.

Two years later, Democrats took back Congress, and two years after that, they had a near-filibuster-proof majority in the Senate to go with the presidency and the House.  Meanwhile, it would take barely a decade for gay marriage to go from a Republican wedge issue to a nationwide right.

It turns out two days after an election may not be the best time to make predictions about American’s political future.

In the wake of this year’s election, a lot of people are repeating my mistake of 2004.  They’re saying that Democrats are out of touch with the working class.  They’re saying that “identity politics” is (or should be) dead.  They’re saying that the left needs to reorient itself primarily or even exclusively around economic messages.  They’re wrong.

Like me 12 years ago, they’re overreacting to a single electoral loss without looking at the broader picture.  Yes, this hurts.  But when 2 million more people vote for your candidate than the other guy, and you gain seats in the House and Senate, it seems awfully strange to conclude that it’s time for a massive overhaul of your entire platform and message.  Democrats will remain competitive in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in the near term.  And as demographics shift in the southwest, Democrats should continue to make gains in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.  Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.  Let’s keep things in perspective.

But perhaps more importantly, those calling for a significant messaging overhaul aren’t just overreacting.  They’re ignoring the moral imperative for liberals to continue to stand for the values—particularly equality and diversity—that have defined our movement.

Yes, we should stand with the working class.  But a lot of the working class is black or Latino.  A lot of the working class is Muslim.  An infrastructure bill is nice, but it won’t mean much to people who end up deported or part of an immigrant registry or on the wrong end of Trump’s plan to institute “law and order”—whatever that means in a time of historically low crime rates. 

Let me be blunter: You can’t cozy up to Trump in the hopes that he’ll pass your favored school reforms and ignore that he wants to deport millions of the kids you’re supposed to serve.

You can’t separate the good white supremacists from the bad white supremacists.

I’m all for listening to other people and understanding their pain.  Lord knows this election has revealed that a lot of people across this country are suffering.  But don’t tell me I have to give up on my vision of America as diverse, welcoming and forward-looking because Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College.

This was a loss.  For a lot of people, it will prove a devastating loss.  But for now, the only real option is to take the hit, spit out the blood, and get up and fight.  The war for our country is on. 

Bread and Grief

By Meredith Buse

It’s five o’clock in the morning.

1 c. warm water.

The time is not unusual. But the tears are.

½ oil.

They come unbidden, but I welcome them.  These tears feel clean. Cleansing. Quiet.

1 tsp. honey.

Not rageful. Not keening. Not wailing so loudly your five-year-old comes running downstairs to see if you are okay.

2 ½ c. flour.

Those tears, too, have been shed in this kitchen. Mostly on the floor.

Early on, it was easier to connect to my grief while lying prostrate on the cold tile. For a time after I lost him, it was the only thing that helped.

The rabbi said, “Maybe a ritual.” Daily. Weekly. A walk. A prayer. A habit of study.

I thought yoga and baking bread. But how did that serve at all as a remembrance of a man who could do neither. I nodded, mute.

I favored legs up the wall. A posture in which you lay on your back and, not shockingly, stretch your legs out vertically and place them against a wall to be supported and held up, letting the blood rush down from your feet and feeling kind of magical. An ironic tribute to a man whose legs, shriveled, tiny and so depleted by the end, had long, brittle, yellow toenails that made me believe those geriatrists who say clipping nails and trimming hair are more important to elder care than big-ticket surgeries. I tried this pose at first, without telling anyone, but it didn’t feel right to me.

I thought about talking to him. Even tentatively tried once or twice—quietly, or in my head. But this didn’t feel right either. To me, he’s not here. He no longer exists. What I have left is just those things I remember, what meaning I can make for myself.

And the smell of baking bread, which for me, equals grief. Or maybe it’s comfort.

He always said he didn’t like baking (my mom did more of that), because his lack of hand control made it hard to take heavy, hot trays out of the oven.

“Man, if I had hands, I’d be dangerous,” he would say with a smile. Sometimes a sigh. It was his refrain for any time the world reminded him he was not like everyone else and couldn’t do the things we take for granted—walk, button a shirt, grip his morning coffee cup—after which he would promptly forget.

I searched “grief for a parent” online. One article talked about losing one’s mother. And how, especially for women, there is sometimes a coming into oneself—after the initial grief ends, of being more able to find one’s true self when no longer in the shadow of a parent who so defined you. My experience is different than this, but it still resonates.

Losing my father has given me the impetus to cut through all the bullshit. Reminded me that we only have so much time here. Months ago, I made a list of things I wanted more of in my life and things I wanted less of—more of yoga, sex, sleeping in, spending time with family, ritual and connection; less of spending time with people who annoy me, facebook and screen time, feeling buried by my family’s possessions, and worrying about money, or work, or anything. I put this list away and forgot about it while I did the heavy work of grieving and focused on putting one foot in front of the other.

But now, I realize, I’ve slowly been moving toward making my life—remaking it—according to that list. And, no, the yoga and the baking are not things my dad did. Not things he could have done. Not even things he would have wanted to do if he had hands or legs.

1 ½ c. whole wheat flour.

They’re things I do.

1 tbs. salt.

They’re uniquely and wonderfully, me.

¼ cup sugar.

They’re things that help me be who I want, how I want, in the world. Which is something I know he would have been proud of.

1 tbs. yeast.

And tonight, as I braid the dough and say a prayer mourning the dead only by exalting the wonder of living, I know. It’s all him. 

Parenting at Five

It was some time on the night of December 28, 2010, I think—two days after a two-foot blizzard, a few hours after the Eagles found a way to lose to a team quarterbacked by a guy who now returns punts for the Carolina Panthers—that I finally lost it.

Convinced that my 5-day-old daughter, Rebecca, was suffocating, I tore at the sheets in our bed to free her.  I think I started to yell.  The alarm clock may have been going off.  It was 2:30 or 3.  Maybe it was really December 30.  I can’t remember.

All I know is that, when my wife, Meredith, came in to our room holding Rebecca and asked me what the hell I was doing, I realized that I had entered a new phase of my life.

I was fucked.

*******************************

People sometimes ask me why Meredith and I decided to start our family when we were so “young.” (I was 27 when we had our first child; she was 25).  In some ways, the question says more about our times than it does about us.  In 1980, the year after my older sister was born, the mean age for an American women giving birth to her first child was 22.7.  By 2010, when Rebecca was born, that number had increased to 25.4.

The question also says plenty about class and economics. Take a look at the numbers in the last paragraph again. A woman born in 1985 would generally be considered a millennial, part of the generation that supposedly never wants to settle down or enter family life. Yet many of these women were settling down (or at least having children) as the 2010s started. The expectation that we would delay having children had as much to do with our other defining characteristics—advanced degrees, reasonably good prospects for high incomes—as it did our generation.

Whatever the reason for the question, I’d like to be able to say we have some sort of interesting answer. But the truth is that we just sort of felt like having kids. Or, at least from my perspective, we didn’t go out that much, and having children seemed compatible with working and watching baseball. So it looked like the kiddos would just slide right into the life we had already built.

***********************************

There are two ways to survive the first year of parenting without going crazy, and only one if you are prone to alcohol-induced psychoses.

You have to give up. You have to surrender the idea that the image you had for yourself as a mother or father will ever match the reality. You have to accept that your time, your energy, your thoughts, even—they are not your own anymore.

The rub is that having kids doesn’t really change your desire for any of those things (time, energy, thoughts). Maybe at the margins a little. Maybe you realize that 10 hours of football on Sundays was a little much. Maybe you come to grips with the fact that no one else watches 1-vs.-16 games in the NCAA Tournament all the way to the bitter, 47-point-blowout end.

But you are who you are, and when you miss the whole Eagles game because when else are you going to get three hours of uninterrupted sleep, you aren’t going to just be cool with it because something something, the miracle of life, something something.

So when you give up, it’s not to make yourself happy. It’s with the understanding that, sometimes, there is no happiness to be found. Sometimes, the best you can say for yourself is that when things got hard, you didn’t run.

*******************************

Before junior year in college, my parents drove me to the Midwest so that I could move all my stuff into my new apartment.  At one point during the drive, my parents asked how I was feeling.

“I’m OK,” I said.  Then I thought for a minute: “You know, I’m pretty happy.  But I don’t think I’ll ever be truly happy until I have my own kids.”

My thinking was this: Most of our lives, we act selfishly.  We focus on our own wants and needs and, though we genuinely care about others, we rarely if ever put them first.  This leads us to be unhappy because chasing our selfish desires doesn’t really fulfill us.  It just appeases parts of us—our ego, our need for validation—that can be satisfied for only brief moments before they crave reinforcement.

When you have kids, I reasoned, this changes.  Because you are forced to put others first, you transcend the selfish, baser parts of yourself and gain an actual sense of self-worth.

Now, before you laugh at this, keep in mind that I was 20 at the time, had no kids, didn’t know anyone remotely close to my age who was raising kids and owned a fake ID that misspelled Massachusetts.  And did I mention I was 20?

Years later, I would recall this conversation during an hours-long walk on a January night in Chicago with my father.  As I admitted to him that I wasn’t having a lot of fun being a father—that I found myself disconnected at times from my 13-month-old daughter and bored by much of my life—he started laughing.

“Yeah, a lot of parenting young kids sucks,” he said. He explained, by the time I was 3 and my sister was 6, he was dead set against having a third kid. He didn’t want to deal with three more years of sleepless nights and dirty diapers. He could, as he put it, “see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

He told me he remembered 20-year-old me saying that he would need to have kids to find meaning in life.  He kept quiet.  He knew I’d learn eventually.

****************************************

People who don’t have kids like to talk about what they’ll do when they’re parents, which is both perfectly understandable and laughably stupid.  To paraphrase a great philosopher, “Everyone has a plan until the baby has colic.”

The truth is that parenting in the 21st Century is a lot like being a fan of the 2015 Eagles: “Damn, that’s the third episode in a row of Paw Patrol she’s watched this morning, and she didn’t eat her breakfast really, not unless you count half of a chocolate-chip granola bar as breakfast, and I really need to start actually washing her hair at night instead of just pouring water in it, but, whoa, she still seems pretty normal.  I can’t believe we’re only down 10.  We can do this!  Wait, what the hell is Byron Maxwell doing?”

You have to learn to take small victories. (If you can go 7-9, you should feel really proud.  Unless you’re a jerk like Chip Kelly.  And even then, you can’t be fired).  You have to envision a bigger picture that probably doesn’t exist and keep it in your head every time your baby falls off the bed, chair, changing table or other allegedly baby-proof device onto the floor. You have to treasure the good moments, not because life is a Hallmark card but because it isn’t, and if you don’t enjoy the positives, you might not make it.

A couple of months ago, as I attempted (word chosen intentionally) to drag (word again chosen intentionally) Rebecca and Sarah to school, Sarah stopped walking in the concourse for the Broad Street Line and sat down. I tried the old, “I’m still walking, see you later, Sarah,” routine, which apparently even a 2-year-old would find unconvincing. But Becca, who had just turned 5, was worried.

“We can’t leave her!” she yelled at me, and then ran back and reached out her hand to her younger sister. Together, they walked towards me, giggling.

Somehow, after five years of long nights, temper tantrums, potty training and instructions not to ride her sister like a pony, at the moment when I needed it the most, Becca had displayed a level of empathy often lacking in people 10 times her age.

It didn’t make it all feel worth it. But damn, it felt good. 

For Esther Rose, a Vote for Hillary

If Esther Rose Abrams (nee Cramer) had been born in 1978, she might have been a politician, instead of a career volunteer and activist.  If she had been born in 1948, she might have been a dentist, instead of marrying one.

But she was born in 1918, and so, even though she did graduate from college (and later got a master’s degree), she never had much of a chance to pursue her professional interests, at least not as the men of her generation did.

Now, I don’t think she was unhappy with her life at all.  She raised four strong-willed, educated (and did I mention strong-willed?) daughters.  She was happily married to the love of her life for more than 55 years.  And she was a royal pain in the ass to New Jersey lawmakers who challenged a woman’s right to choose (more on that later) and the rights of the elderly.

But if you want to talk about a system that was rigged, as many Bernie Sanders supporters do, you could do a lot worse than pointing to sexism in the workplace and broader American society in the first 75 years or so of the 20th Century.  (And today, too, but again, more on that later).

The last extended conversation I had with my grandmother in January 1998, before the cancer took what was left of her, concerned my ninth-grade non-Western Civilizations class. We discussed the tendency of even well-meaning westerners to treat the third world with a sense of paternalism, without having any background knowledge of the cultures they were discussing.  She was among the most well-read people I knew.

And when Grandma died that February 15, 18 years ago today, the Rev. Albert Davis, a minister and leader in Ardmore’s black community, came to pay his respects. Despite living in the Philadelphia suburbs for less than five years, the Jewish grandmother from Princeton was the most connected member of her family.

*****

Trying to predict how a dead person would vote is challenging, at least for those who never lived in Cook County.  My guess is that Grandma would have liked a lot of Bernie’s ideas and admired his doggedness.  Her favorite politician was Bill Bradley, who played the Left-Wing Darling to Al Gore’s Guy Who Is Actually Going to Win back in 2000. 

That said, she also spent enough time around cranky, loud, old, liberal Jewish men in her life to be a bit skeptical of his current demigod status among college students.  There is about an 85 percent chance that any conversation between them would have ended with her saying, “That’s nice, dear.  Please finish your soup before it gets cold.”

Bernie’s chief appeals are that he Says What He Believes and Doesn’t Compromise. I think Grandma would have liked that, too.  I also think she would have recognized that those are traits we’re much more likely to tolerate in men than women. And on the compromise front especially, I think she might have pointed out that life and politics are both full of trade-offs.  Some people just have to get used to it earlier than others.

If Hillary seems craven because her entire political career was built on the back of her husband’s, consider what her options were when she came out of law school in the mid-1970s.  If she seems duplicitous, consider what it takes to stay politically relevant for 40 years in a country capable of voting for George W. Bush and Barack Obama in consecutive elections.  If she seems like she’s been angling for this moment her entire career, ask yourself when was the last time we had a president who didn’t—and whether anyone really cared.

*****

In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, my grandmother went on NPR to tell her story of traveling to Puerto Rico to have an abortion after the birth of her fourth daughter.  (Corrected from earlier version).  Why had she, after all these years, decided to share her story with a nationwide audience, which presumably included friends and colleagues who might disapprove?

“I have three granddaughters,” she said, referencing my sister and two of my cousins.  “And I want them to know that it’s their choice.”

Thankfully, it is their choice today. And thankfully, women of my sister and cousins’ age can pursue choices largely unavailable to their mothers and grandmothers.

But if the doors are more open to women, it’s only partially.  Only 20 of the S&P 500 Companies have women CEOs.  That’s 4 percent. Which is the same percentage of women who are managing partners at the 200 largest law firms in the country.

And it’s not just in corporate boardrooms or white-shoe law firms where sexism reigns. The dirty little secret of the movement left (trust me, I’ve been a part of it since I was 5), is that it’s plagued by the same strains of sexism and racism that infect so much of our culture.  That’s why the BernieBro phenomenon, and in particular its more misogynistic and racist elements, haven’t surprised me.  (Some day, I will go back in time to let John Lewis know that white college students will be explaining racism to him on something called Twitter in 50 years).

This isn’t Bernie’s fault.  He has an impeccable record on civil rights and seems legitimately frustrated by the Reddit Tough Guys giving him a bad name.  But it may go part of the way to explaining why Bernie’s coalition has gotten deeper but not much broader as the election has progressed. 

“Whitesplaining” and “Mansplaining” are annoying Internet jargon, but they address a real problem.  Bernie’s supporters are good at talking.  Listening?  Not so much.

*****

A Hillary Clinton presidency won’t end sexism any more than the last seven-plus years have ended racism.  The people who never accepted that America voted for the black guy probably won’t like the idea of “Madame President” much better.  And bigotry is not solved by symbolism anyway.

At the same time, when I look at my 5-year-old daughter, Rebecca Esther, who spends so much time trying to figure out what is a “girl color” or a “boy color”, a “girl game” or a “boy game,” I want her to know that being at the heights of power—and all the good and bad that entails—is a “girl thing,” too.  Yes, I want her to question authority.  But if she decides she wants to be the authority, I want her to believe that can happen.

It’s not enough, of course.  It never is.  But it’s one step closer to the world the great-grandmother she never met would have wanted for her.