Dear America,

It has been a very long time since we've spoken. I should probably start by explaining where I have been hiding for so long. I have been around, here and there, but I have been avoiding you. I know that is hard to hear, and I feel like I owe you an explanation.

When I was 17, Bill Clinton was elected your president for the first time. I was a surly proto-intellectual who refused to pledge allegiance in school and was, frankly, far too cool for patriotism. Nonetheless, and despite the fact that I was still too young vote, I was excited about Bill Clinton and what his presidency would mean for our country. On Inauguration Day my friends and I skipped school and drove three hours south to DC. We gained tickets and squeezed in to the crowd of hundreds of thousands assembled on the Mall to listen and watch. We could barely see anything, but we could feel the power and excitement of the crowd. And we, four teenage girls born during Gerald Ford's completion of Nixon's term, felt somehow acknowledged by the younger, more progressive president.

Maya Angelou was the poet laureate for Clinton, and on Inauguration Day, she read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" to an eager crowd. The poem described come out of the shadows and into the light of a new day. We felt triumphant. On this day I felt hopeful for our relationship, America.

Fast-forward six years. I am sitting around the dinning room table in my shared house in Seattle, surrounded by the five women with whom I live. We are listening to NPR relay the testimony of the Monica Lewinsky hearings. In the intervening years I have gained perspective and Clinton has disappointed. He is not only painfully human but had proven himself to be much like any other president we have ever had: a conciliatory traditionalist who is deeply non-revolutionary.

Like many of my peers, I am ambivalent by the time the 2000 election comes around. Most of my friends vote for Nader as a signal that we need a third party in this country. After the election is over and the unbelievable had happened, I feel depressed. In the election of George Bush, I felt betrayed by you, America. As a country, you had become bitter and repressed, and electing Bush sent a pretty clear message that you hate young, progressive, and queer people like me.

Things just get worse and worse over the next eight years. I go from disengaged to angry and cynical. I, like many others, threaten to leave you and head to Canada. But then the worst part happens: I stop paying attention. I check out. I don't read the news because I don't want to know how many soldiers died in Iraq today. I turn off the tv every time George W. Bush's face appears. I think selfishly that my own day-to-day survival is all that matters at this point. I mimic the Bush White House policy and become my own isolationist state. At this point in my story you and I have disowned each other.

And then this guy Obama shows up. I was not really paying too much attention at first, but he kept coming back. And he kept impressing and inspiring. He kept smiling that genuine smile that conveys hopefulness. And he kept working. And suddenly, by the winter of last year, I found myself believing in something again. I was going to support this man in trying to become your president.

Every challenge he surpassed helped me shed some of the scales of hopelessness. Every time he got one step closer to your doors, I felt more awake. I had lingering doubts about whether this country would ever elect a black man to the highest office. Racism is foundational in this nation and works in all ways to promote and sustain the status quo. And yet I hoped and talked and called and wrote. I invested heavily.

And then we arrive at last Tuesday night. It was 10pm in Wisconsin when the race was called and the television stations flashed an image of Barack Obama with the word “President” on the screen. We screamed and cheered and then we cried. I couldn’t speak. I sat in disbelief as every single idea about you, my country, started to fall away from my skin. My eyes filled and my heart jumped and my body began to murmur in aliveness. In an instant I was transformed. In an instant you were transformed.

As I sit at my computer five days later, still strumming with excitement and joy, still tearful at random moments of the day when I think about what this means for you, my country, I realize that that moment fifteen years ago, when Maya Angelou read her poem to a sea of hopefuls, that moment was a prelude to today. This poem, more than anything else I have found, describes the way that it feels to come out into the daylight again and feel love and hope for the nation in which I live.

Here on the pulse of this new day

You may have the grace to look up and out

And into your sister's eyes

And into your brother's face,

Your country,

And say simply

Very simply

With hope ----

Good morning.



America, I hope you can forgive me for turning my back on you. I have forgiven you.


Love,

Amy

Procrastinatin'

I have a full day of grading ahead of me, and I deeply engaged in the work of distraction. I have been reading the New York Times, chasing turkeys in our yard, reading wikipedia entries about the McCain family, and contemplating trimming the bushes. I am really talented when it comes to procrastination.

So here are some of the tidbits I want to share:

*Last night we had our seventh anniversary dinner. The tradition is that we take turns making fabulous meals; the menu is always a surprise and the non-cook must stay out of the kitchen until it is time to eat. This year Rhonda was the cook, and last night I was presented with an amazing feast:

Apps:
-orange ginger ale
-bacon wrapped scallops
- amazing homemade baguette (a 2-day process)


Dinner:
- broiled salmon on a wilted spinach-citrus salad

Dessert:
- Peach "cobbler" (on homemade scones w/ fresh whipped cream)

It was delicious and fun. After we were done with dinner (and in order to make room for dessert) we danced around the living room for an hour.


* The turkeys are back! I tip toed around the shed and caught this guy trying to get into the garden.


* There are some great Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times right now. This article is really insightful about the "othering" of Obama. It is also just plain disturbing . I cannot believe that 1/3 of all Americans still think Obama is Muslim. (Not to mention the ridiculous assumption that being muslim is suspect. )

P.S. Rhonda is going to see Obama in Green Bay tomorrow. I am jealous that I will be otherwise occupied with the teaching of writing. harumph.

so scared of everything staying the same

I have caught myself doing several strange things to comfort myself about McCain's recent surge in the polls. I have guerrilla-tactics that involve facebook and posting things my students *just might* watch or read (heavy on the video clips). I have been wearing my Obama shirt non-stop over the weekend. And, in an attempt to feel better, I have found myself thinking, "well, at least McCain isn't as bad as Bush."

The last line of thinking shook me to my core. It was that moment of acquiescence, it was a moment of letting the system -- and all of its complex ways of maneuvering to favor McCain -- have its way with me. It was giving in to a sense of inevitability and powerless that I am not yet ready to concede. So, to counteract this I am doing a couple of things:

1 - talking to everyone I know about why I am supporting Obama (labor, Iraq, environment)
2 - donating money to support grass-roots campaigning in battleground states
3- taking the plunge and volunteering for the Obama office (yes, making calls and canvassing, ugh!)

In case you missed it.

Knocked Up: A Week in Politics

Yesterday, while on the phone, my friend Vince asked me if I had heard the rumor that Sarah Palin was pretending to be the mother of her teenage daughter's baby. I laughed really hard and thought it was funny, 'cause that was a story line from Desperate Housewives last year. Ha ha. Funny joke. Well, about an hour ago, Sarah Palin, in an attempt to dispel the rumor, announced that her 17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant. Like, right now.

I don't have too much to say about all of this. I mean, I think McCain is a nut, and I think his choice of a running mate is questionable for a lot of reasons. Not because her daughter is pregnant, though. I mean, if nothing else, Sarah Palin definitely has a real family with real problems. And just think, she and her daughter will both be breastfeeding at the same time. Yay!

Soon after Palin's candidacy was announced I read a comment on facebook (a friend of a friend's posting) ranting about the "ridiculous" nature of the now-"circus" of an election. I was livid. Furious. I wanted to write a scathing reply to the guy who posted this opinion. I didn't for a lot of reasons, but if I had, I would have explained "how curious it is to me that a political election becomes "circus-like" when, for the first time in a nations history, two of the four candidates do not look like you, white boy." The audacity to suggest that politics ceases to be serious and real when it is no longer run by the status quo is a dangerous and haunting suggestion. And yet, I am afraid that there is this way that McCain's choice of a running mate has lent itself to this type of criticism -- there is something so superficial about the whole thing. It tastes like candy and shimmers in the light.

And this sense of the election become more and more superficial is not exclusively in the hands of the Republicans. As was noted by lots of people I have talked to, the convention was so canned, insincere, and scripted. I wanted to be much more moved by Obama. I wanted to see something genuine, and was disappointed. The closest we got to a genuine moment was when the Obama girls were handed microphones for a minutes, and the ten minutes of real-american speeches. Although the latter were super-scripted, it was the delivery and the deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces that made it seem so much more bearable.

I wanted to feel more than I did because it was such an important event. I never, ever, thought I would see a black presidential candidate in my lifetime. I thought it was beyond the limits of the possible of US political representation. I have been deeply moved by the significance of Obama's candidacy and the suggestion that maybe, just maybe, things have changed a little bit. I am not so naive as to suggest that Obama is going to offer some great liberal deliverance, and all that is wrong will be righted. However, I want to believe that there is something real, sincere, and meaningful happening in what I perceive to be a movement.

And yet, there was not a single mention of race during the whole convention. Not a word about blackness. This is disheartening to me. Even more so was the comment I heard an Obama supporter make recently that "I don't think of him as a BLACK candidate." But don't you see? The moment you take race out of the specific terms of this election you take away the historic, political, racial context that constitutes our cultural history. The reality is that to be black in america is a different lived-experience than to be a white man. To be a woman, queer, a person of color, etc. means that you have experiences and perspectives that are different from those of almost all of the other senators, governors, presidents around. I want to beleive that this difference in experience, perception and lived-reality translated into change in the White House. The minute you say race is no longer an issue is the minute you completely disenfranchise the meaning of this event. The moment gender is just an arbitrary box you check and the female running-mate becomes nothing more than a tokenized joke is the moment that we all bow down in complicity to the pretty, shiny, plastic version of ourselves and our nation.

Hillary & Barack, Or, Why a Feminist Supports a Male Candidate (and learned to love the bomb?)

I don't often wax political here. But this has been brewing for me for a couple of days. I was further encouraged by this excellent article by Judith Warner in today's New York Times.

I have supported Barack Obama since he first announced his candidacy. Rhonda and I both have. I remember, not too long ago, thinking that there was not much chance he would ever make it to the convention let alone to November. I still hoped. The last week has been highly emotional for me; it is a remarkable thing to see something you never, ever, thought possible. For me, it was never a choice between a black man and a woman as the token "firsts." My choice of presidential candidate was informed by a sincere belief in the policies, beliefs, and experience that this man embodies. It still is.

And yet, I have felt a lot of guilt, as a feminist, for not supporting Clinton's campaign. I have asked myself if it is my own, internalized sexism that has guided my decisions. I have wondered if I am equally influenced by some kind of liberal guilt that encourages a vote for the more- oppressed minority group (a dangerous paradigm that leads to comparing and weighing minority experiences).

What I have had the chance to realize is that I can still support and believe in Obama while recognizing the deeply embedded sexism that has been a part of the coverage of and response to Clinton's campaign. (For a really depressing glimpse of this coverage, take a look at this video montage .) There is a part of me that is genuinely sad at the fact that a woman is not going to win this race. And yet, I did not vote for her.

It is really dangerous to begin to believe that Hillary has been the subject of more bias and discrimination than Obama. I think that it is simply more acceptable, in our culture, to mock, critique, and objectify women out loud. Obama, too, has been subject to a complex set of racial critiques, (not the least important being a critique of him as a light-skinned, over-educated elitist). But to mock him publicly for being black (or for traits assumed to be part of being black) is not how these racist responses are happening. They are more subtle. But, my point here is not to claim the victimhood of both candidates. This is not a productive or worthwhile way of thinking about these things...

Instead, I have to continually remind myself of the ways in which sexism and racism are deeply interconnected. They work together, folks. So, for me, this means that I am unapologetically hopeful for Obama's chances in November. I am certain of my commitment and political choices. And, I am deeply aware of the many vectors of sexism and racism that are informing this campaign.

go-obama-go!

I called my parents (in Pennsylvania) a few hours ago and left a message that went like this:

"Hi Mom and Dad. Uhm... I meant to tell you this a few days ago, but if you don't vote for Obama today you can't come and visit us in May. And, oh yeah, can we buy your sump pump, Dad? Ours is broken. Love you, bye."

I imagine it is technically illegal (to extort votes, not buying sump pumps) but that just shows how much I care about this election.