Last thoughts on the sea change that we have all just experienced and then I will join some of my other friends who are signing off for a few hours (or millennia) before we have a collective nervous breakdown. Having worked in political elections of all sizes and shapes, from managing small county campaigns, to a mayor’s race, to working at the national Gore campaign, I’d like to think I know a little bit about the people with whom a successful candidate surrounds him or herself and how that plays into the overall tenor of a campaign. When a candidate is so frightened of saying the wrong thing, whose staff micro-manages every. damn. detail. of the candidate’s life, refusing, threatening, and downright bullying others to stage-mother events and appearances, it leaves a vacuum for the simple, likeable, affable, down-home guy (especially one who has nothing to lose) to step right in. I saw it with Bush v. Gore. And I damn well saw (and felt) it with the Brown campaign. I remember Anthony Brown when he was allowed to be himself, when he had nothing to lose, when he was brave and smart and funny and fearless. That is not the man who ran in this campaign. His handlers got to him and the fear they instilled in an otherwise ideal candidate left behind a fragile and stumbling Lt. Governor. The electorate, complacent as ever, never got fired up enough to get up and vote for him and that sits squarely on the candidate’s shoulders.
Category: Politics
So, for the last 72 hours, I was pretty sure I had cancer.
I am not an uneducated patient, not by a long shot. I’ve spent months at the prestigious Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore caring for an ill father, and before him at the same institution, an adored father-in-law with pancreatic cancer, and years, if not decades before those crises, in and out of hospitals with health issues of other family members and friends. I worked for a national cancer advocacy group where my job was to walk patients through their own journeys to find experts, to get needed tests and to help explain results to them. I worked with many clinicians at Hopkins, the National Institutes of Health, and other tertiary hospitals in the country in a professional capacity. In other words, I have connections and I know whom to call to get some answers if I need them. I know when to challenge my healthcare professionals and when to stand back and let them do their work.
And, yet.
Continue reading “So, for the last 72 hours, I was pretty sure I had cancer.”
9/11 – Thirteen Years Later
I always thought September 11th marked a transition for our national identity. As sad as the loss of life was that day, as horrific as the carnage was to our own sense of security, to me, the one bright spot about that moment in time was that it seemed to mark the point where we, as a nation, finally came to an understanding that while the United States is an amazing country, and most of us are forever grateful to have had the privilege (and flat out luck) of being born here, we are but one citizen in a patchwork quilt of religions, colors, and cultures who also call our planet (not just our country) home.
Having recently reconnected with family from across the globe, I am reminded that while we grew up with disparate and unique (to us) experiences – different languages, different priorities, different lives altogether – we have a shared history. Our great grandparents sought to provide a good life for their descendants (and there were a lot of them, those crazy Irish kids) wherever they (we) find ourselves camped out. We are not so different in that respect and I am grateful for the reminder that we are all connected by a Kevin Bacon-esque string of DNA. We would do well to remember that when we choose to discredit, disavow, or just plain dis our fellow planet dwellers.
Waking up this morning after watching President Obama’s speech last night about ISIL, I am again grateful for a leader who is slow to authorize military power, smart enough to build a multi-national coalition when he must use force, and strong (and brave) enough to endure the downright idiotic frothing the warmongers on the right never cease to spew. (John McCain, you shriveled up feckless slug of man, I’m looking at you.)
Today will always be a sad and poignant reminder to those of us who lived through the horror, but I feel deep down in the bones that we are stronger, kinder, and more thoughtful as we move forward as a tenant of our planet.
Let’s Get Real About Voter Suppression.
If your (honest) argument for voter suppression (or as True the Vote, a conservative “vote-monitoring” organization based in Texas calls it, voter protection) is that voter fraud is rampant, you are either misguided, brainwashed, or an idiot (and by idiot, I mean someone who has a functioning brain, but chooses not to use it).
With under 300 cases NATIONWIDE in the last election brought to prosecution, I believe we can all agree (again, if we are being honest, something not necessarily easy for a conservative hell-bent on denying a fundamental right to millions), this is NOT a problem for our country. If this is your argument, if this is your logic, then you must also believe that because there are 300 hungry children in, oh let’s say Des Moines, Iowa, ONE MILLION volunteers should be mobilized to fan out to the food banks in 15 other states with the hungriest of children. What?? Is hunger not quite on par with voter fraud as a matter of importance? See, your logic and your actions are colored, not by your publicly stated goal, but by your insidious one. Your end, in Machiavellian terms, is, you think, justified by your means.
Except that it is a farce…it is laughable. And it is sad.
Sometimes Silence Tells All You Need to Know
The recent racist comments of John Sununu aren’t so much shocking as is the fact that he is a co-chair of the Romney campaign.
Every campaign, every campaign season, candidates says this is “the most important election in which you’ll vote in your life time.” Sometimes we believe them and sometimes we are onto their hyperbole. But, for four years, I’ve tried to reason with my own sense of patriotism…that although racism (and sexism and all kinds of isms) exist in pockets scattered throughout our country, surely, certainly, the country as a whole speaks out against these sorts of things.
But, what began with Sarah Palin’s “palling around with terrorists” jabs, eventually erupted into the President’s first night in office when republicans gathered to hatch a plan to do anything they could to make him a one term president, even if it meant harming the least among us.
Continue reading “Sometimes Silence Tells All You Need to Know”
Christine Anne Scott 