It’s Sunday morning and I’m wrestling hard with this week, during which the themes that seemed to emerge—insistent, like crocus spears through cold ground—were about being caught up in harsh environments. It’s Sunday morning and the clouds press down, blue-grey, ashy white, streaked with peach through the skeletal branches beyond my window.
The week started off cold, with a light snowstorm. The week started off with a Federal holiday to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. a man whose belief in improbable dreams guided so many to insist we as a nation, and as people, do better.
The week also began jittery. If you were a Democrat on the books in Massachusetts with a land line you couldn’t help but knowing that there was a special election coming up—and that everyone important, including Bill Clinton, Vicki Kennedy and Barack Obama—was counting upon you to vote for Martha Coakley to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.
The calls started to come in bunches about a week before the election—our house seemed to be averaging, I kid you not, around six a day—and the jitters morphed with each annoying call into something much more like dread. I got one fundraising call from a young DSCC staffer the Friday before the election who came out and said, “We’re desperate.” It was all I could do not to reply that when you seem to start a campaign a week before the election with the words we’re desperate it doesn’t inspire any confidence; it sounds wholly disastrous. Barack Obama’s campaign visit to Massachusetts did whip up votes; it felt more like he was telegraphing the ominous defeat ahead.
Also, to those strategists (a term that felt generous last week) choosing to call me a hundred times, given that I would count as an extremely loyal Democrat, then what about the voters aren’t you calling? Because, let’s face it, I require maybe one call, at most. And all the while, you keep wondering how a Democratic candidate could be losing Teddy Kennedy’s seat. I’ve barely ever enjoyed voting less (and I really, really tend to love to vote).
Frank Rich summed up the whole fiasco thusly, writing, of Obama: “Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.” Rich calls upon Obama to become much more decisive from here—and much more articulate. Let’s hope he gets the message.
Living in the bluest section of a suddenly purple state, the mood was that, bruised a deep, tender-to-the-touch purple all week. For me, the sense of powerlessness was huge: even a seat so nobly held for so many decades by Teddy Kennedy was not safe. That defeat was quickly eclipsed, though, by the far worse news that the Supreme Court was handing over undue, unfair rights to corporations. This New York Times’ editorial cut to the chase: “With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century.”
The cynical and despairing part of me doesn’t feel like calling my representative to say something along the lines of clearly we don’t want elections to be bought because I think this is already that case. There is no way to look at this past year overall, from banking to health care, and feel particularly hopeful about elected officials’ ability to use a moral compass for navigational purposes; purse strings seem much more powerful, the scent of money trails.
Bob Herbert told it like it was, too, that the Democrats are not grasping the severity of this economic downturn for so very many people. He writes, “Democrats in search of clues as to why voters are unhappy may want to take a look at the report. In 2008, a startling 91.6 million people — more than 30 percent of the entire U.S. population — fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, which is a meager $21,834 for a family of four.” When what we know, from Roosevelt and the WPA, is that investment in infrastructure (and we know the country’s infrastructure needs help) provides a way out of this desperate situation for working people, by getting them back to work while improving everyone’s lives. Herbert: “The Democrats still hold the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress. The idea that they are not spending every waking hour trying to fix the broken economic system and put suffering Americans back to work is beyond pathetic. Deficit reduction is now the mantra in Washington, which means that new large-scale investments in infrastructure and other measures to ease the employment crisis and jump-start the most promising industries of the 21st century are highly unlikely.”
Okay, that was Thursday. Friday, the 37th anniversary of Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal, confessed murderer Scott Roeder’s case went to trial; he killed Dr. George Tiller, then one of two doctors performing late-term abortions in the entire country, at Dr. Tiller’s church.
An in-depth article in the Guardian’s Observer profiles Dr. Walter Hern, 70, the very last doctor doing late-term abortions. Dr. Hern treated Canadian woman, unable to be treated by Dr. Tiller because of his murder. She is quoted, “He's a doctor who is trying to help people. It's shocking that people want to hurt him." Protecting Dr. Hern is no small endeavor: it’s not just having an unlisted phone number, it’s being escorted by US Marshals, never eating out, ironclad anonymity for all involved (save for Dr. Hern) and according to his 92 year-old mother, in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s murder, “terror” in her son’s voice. Given the vitriol surrounding this issue, which Dr Hern criticizes for going on unchecked, her comment is naïve and poignant; faced with severe complications, termination of her pregnancy was difficult and much safer than her continuing it. Mother to a nearly five year-old, she feared dying while pregnant and leaving her child behind. Very often, the pregnancies terminated behind these bulletproof doors are chosen pregnancies, wanted pregnancies.
Contending that it’s irresponsible to write Scott Roeder off as a “wingnut,” Dr. Hern weighs in: “This was a cold-blooded, brutal, political assassination that is the logical consequence of 35 years of hate speech and incitement to violence by people from the highest levels of American society, including but in no way limited to George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helms, Bill O'Reilly, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.”
On the 37th anniversary of Roe, I feel so demoralized about how the lives of women are barely in the “conversation” about abortion (I pondered the word “debate,” but it’s not that, either), let alone the idea that this is an issue, first and foremost, about equality, women’s equality. I want a mother of a nearly five year-old to be free to do what she needs to do to stay healthy in order to raise her child. I want that same protection for my freedom.
**
Clearly, it was a dense week, a heavy week, simply put, a really hard week. I kept trying to find the small stories that offered me a sense of hope’s tangibility: a young teen organizing a fundraiser for the arson victims next weekend, fourth graders at my kids’ school raising money for Haiti, and a visit to the Meekins Library in Williamsburg, a place that clearly serves as a vibrant hub for the town.
For every story about an out-of-work architect recreating him or herself—to sell ice cream sandwiches named after famous architects or do pottery or set up a Lucy-style architect-is-in-5 cents please-stand—are stories of people who cannot reinvent their circumstances. Dairy farmer Dean Pierson took the lives of his 51 milking cows and then his own last Thursday, leaving no note.
The week was like that, earnest and somewhat desperate attempts to find silver linings.
I found some early green shoots pushing through the ground last night. Our town’s majestic Academy of Music Theater was filled to the brim at a benefit concert held for victims of the December 27th arsons that shook our community. Arlo Guthrie, ever himself, mused that the world isn’t looking so different from when his father wrote songs about drought and a “severe economic downturn” or the songs just have a “really long shelf life.” In any case, after the Supreme Court handed votes to corporations, it was pretty wonderful to fill a large hall with voices belting out This Land is Your Land.
One thing resonating from the evening, from Arlo Guthrie himself, was his open-heartedness, his generosity of spirit. Decades into performing, his voice seems to retain its strength, as if that quality acts like a buoy.
Back to crocus shoots, I keep reminding myself how improbable they seem each year, pushing through winter’s frozen, ragged crust. I know there’s only one way to keep hearing—and singing—about a land made for you and me, and it’s to keep feeling the utter sadness about people’s struggles. Without open heart, you can’t feel the sadness; without open heart, you can’t see—or feel—the hope. We’ve been here before, Arlo reminded us, and we can take steps forward again, board a train to the city of New Orleans, find the land made for you and me, claim it as all of ours.
