It is What it Is

 I'm as much of a Michelle Obama admirer as anybody -- you might even call me a wannabe. Damn I wish I could've written that book, married that guy, had that soapbox. My reaction to her keynote speech last night? What she said. 

What we've all been saying, for four years, at least within the confines of what my daughter refers to as my "bublé." That he's unqualified. That he has soiled the office and our country. That we are better, but that this time around we need to work harder at it. 

I feel like a bit of an outsider, as unexcited as I was about Michelle's speech, as inspiring and true and articulate and from the heart as it was. I certainly hope that it maybe, got to a few folks outside my bublé, folks who hate him but might indeed settle into powerlessness and resignation. It is what it is. 

It was great shade, Michelle repeating his use of a once meaningless phrase that acquired a whole new heap of meaning when attached to over 160,000 deaths. But the point for us, going forward, is that it is what it never should have been, and it is going to be the opposite of what it is now. It had better be. 

Which was exactly my takeaway from night one of the Democratic Convention. I already know what Michelle Obama thinks, and that I -- and most people I associate with -- agree wholeheartedly. What I don't know is how many Republicans will come out and speak, and how loudly they will speak, and to whom. What I don't know is whether Bernie's steadfast followers heard -- or will heed -- his message, powerful and timely as it may be, this time around. What I don't know is whether, despite all our best efforts and intentions, corruption and cheating and in-your-face lawlessness will again win out. Whether we will settle for the promise to do no further harm from a postmaster general who knows he has to face Katie Porter next week. Whether  the Cowards (formerly known as Republicans in the Senate) will be able to convince people that the Intel Report finding Russian collusion with the Trump campaign actually found no collusion with the Trump campaign. Whether Bill Barr will abandon all pretense of ethics and deliver his teased October surprise. And whether the news media will continue to air uninterrupted lies, as if they are news. 

It is what it is, and it sucks. Bigly. The glossy production was all good, but the real work begins now. 

M.V.P. IT HAD TO BE YOU!

She's too pretty.

That's what somebody said to me back in the day, long before we knew how the Democratic primary would unfold. Had I thought the man saying it was sexist, I might have been offended, but I sort of got what he was saying. I've never heard anybody complain about a president being too handsome -- certainly not the current one -- but this is our culture. Handsome, good. Pretty, bad.  What is charismatic in a man is threatening in a woman, not just in the highest office in the land.

Well, things have certainly evolved since then. "Too pretty" has been replaced by "too ambitious." I admit I've had reservations about Kamala Harris, at least as a VP pick, but mostly because I think of her as a prosecutor, and I thought her talents could be better used elsewhere. I've watched in awe as she skewered the somehow un-skewerable powerful men who have come before her in the Senate. I soured on her during the campaign, but I soured on everybody during the campaign, particularly the ones who dared to expose any fissures in the party. Yes, my fear of another four years of hell is that great. 

Campaigns are like dating, sort of. People are much more likable when they're not angling for something. Politicians are always angling, but campaigns bring out angling on steroids. Still, even after Kamala threw her support to Joe, I liked her again but I had my reservations, thought she'd be far more useful as attorney general. With all the qualified woman in the "veepstakes," I thought there were plenty of fine alternatives. 

And then today arrived. And I heard today would be the day. And I took under advisement all the imminent lines of attack against all the others -- whether justified or not -- and I had my Kamala epiphany. Only moments before the news of the pick broke, I realized it had to be Kamala. She was the one and only right pick, the one who could excite people and check all the boxes and, perhaps most importantly, go on to skewer Pence in a debate and out-Teflon Teflon Don. He will throw all kinds of shit at her, and I am confident it will go splat, right back in his face. 

Shortly after the announcement, my friend texted to tell me she had opened a bottle of champagne and was toasting Kamala. Coincidentally, I had done the same. The news was more than a relief. It was cause for celebration. It was exciting. It gave me hope -- a thing in short supply these days. It gave me a glimmer of real light at the end of what has seemed like an endless dark tunnel. 

Yes, she is pretty. I admit it, I want my hair to look just like hers. Yes, she is ambitious. Duh. And she is smart, and she is tough, and she has proven that she can wipe the floor with some of the biggest shit-heads this administration has brought to bear on our country. And hopefully Maya Rudolph will revive her sultry Kamala on SNL. 

Here's to you Madame future Vice President, and to you, Mr. past Vice President, for making such a wise choice. Let's get this done.

Back to Earth

By the time I was fifteen years old, splashdowns had become a "thing." Maybe we'd hear about it, maybe we'd catch the the grainy and twitchy live footage on television. Manned space travel is about as old as I am; neither of us has ever known a world without the other. One of us never ceases to amaze, and I'm pretty sure it's not I.

Fast forward to the summer of 2020, when life on earth has become surreal, particularly in America, that hotbed of ingenuity that has somehow morphed into a cautionary tale of chaos born of complacency, a country at war with itself.  But splashdowns have come out of a decades long hiatus, and they could not have come at a better time. 

I flipped on the television and surfed through the channels, hoping for a little respite from handwringing pundits mulling over the latest unprecedented presidential outrages. Enter "SpaceX Dragon." I was transfixed. Transported, really, back to my childhood, watching with my father as the Dragon's precursors slipped out of the clouds and splashed down with precision, wondering each time how that was possible. I could imagine, back then, that a man (or woman) would walk on the moon, but I don't think I could have imagined what walking on earth would be like, in 2020. 

I watched as the capsule swayed beneath its four giant parachutes, seemingly suspended in place while it plunged with unimaginable speed toward the Gulf of Mexico. I could see the opaque haze of a hurricane staying fortuitously at bay in the distance. I watched as the rescue craft floated precariously close to the landing spot, thinking this was the mother of all trust exercises. I realized that, my own ambivalence about life on earth these days aside, the joy of return must have been unequivocal. I imagine these astronauts, like those before them, have the right stuff, the stuff they will need to cope with our earthly problems.  

Purity Tests and False Equivalencies, Redux

Standing in line for an ice cream cone on Wells Street the other day, I watched two young black men, who had been chatting amicably through a car window, begin to play wrestle. They were laughing, and it made me smile. Not so for a young white woman standing nearby, who turned even whiter and, with a look of abject terror on her face, scurried off with her cone. She glanced over her shoulder the entire time, at least until she was down the block and across the street and, frankly, I had lost interest. 

As a lifelong democrat and generally decent albeit flawed human, I am all about equality. I believe in our current reckonings, most of which were accelerated by the horrifying elevation of a misogynistic, racist, all-around abominable person to the highest office in the land. In the world, technically, before our fall from grace. 

I am not black, and cannot pretend to know what it feels like to walk in a black person's shoes. I cannot say, with certainty, that I would not have been tempted to scurry years ago, when my enlightenment may not have been in as advanced a stage as it is today. Five years from now, I may wonder whether I would have even noticed the men chatting on Wells Street, had they been white. 

I am a woman, and though, as a young attorney, I was called "honey" by a judge and even endured an occasional unwanted ass pat, I have never experienced the sort of vile and traumatic invasion of livelihood or personhood for which others seek -- and deserve -- an accounting. I am Jewish, but have never been a personal target of anti-Semitism. Though some Jews of a generation before mine found it difficult to buy a German car, I am inclined to forgive for the sins of the fathers, assuming lessons have been learned. When JFK protected black students entering the University of Alabama, he asked why a black man should have fewer rights than a white man. It did not occur to him, then, that the theory should apply to people of all genders, but that certainly does not undermine his legacy. 

So here we are, drowning in misguided notions of unattained ideals and unattainable purity. The well-intentioned @MeToo movement was immediately endangered by politically motivated false equivalencies. Exhibit A -- Al Franken. The long overdue @Blacklivesmatter movement was endangered by the carelessly worded "defund the police" slogan, hijacked by the usual suspects to suggest that we liberals are fighting for a lawless new world. Now, some are giving those same bad actors another gift, suggesting we topple monuments to founding fathers and cease to honor past leaders who lived long before civil rights legislation was even a thing. 

The time to honor the slave-owning founders of our imperfect union is past, wrote Lucian K. Truscott IV in an Op-Ed in the New York Times. Mr. Truscott is black, a great-grandson of a great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, whom he owned. 

As a child, Mr. Truscott spent much time at Monticello, Jefferson's ancestral home; he and his brother viewed it as their family playground, and was told he would be buried there, as his ancestors -- black and white -- have been. Now, with statues of brutal confederate leaders being removed from public spaces, Mr. Truscott advocates that Monticello is monument enough, that the Jefferson Memorial in D.C. be taken down, replaced with a memorial to Harriet Tubman. He went on to explain: It’s a shrine to a man who famously wrote that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence that founded this nation — and yet never did much to make those words come true. 

Slave owning. Founders. Imperfect union. All men are created equal. Thomas Jefferson's slave-owning past has long been acknowledged. So have his accomplishments. I am not a historian, but this much I know: Jefferson was ahead of his time, an advocate for religious freedom and a loud and effective voice against tyranny. He was ahead of his time and a product of his time. He could not have imagined that "all men" would one day come to mean "all men and women, no matter their color, no matter their sexual orientation." Blacks were viewed as not fully human long after Jefferson died, and we have not yet come close to achieving full equality for all, no matter how far we think we have progressed. Our imperfect union continues to evolve, and remains far from perfect. 

Mr. Truscott, I get what you're saying, and I would love to see a monument to Harriet Tubman -- and countless other heroes and heroines -- standing prominently in our nation's capital. But we need to keep our eye on the prize, which is, right now, our collective soul. Which means honoring the visionaries of our past who have, in their inherently flawed human way, moved us forward. Which means getting rid of the forces of evil now in power, who seek to push us back. Creating a purity test, either for those who live now or those who lived long ago, does not serve us well. 

My Second City, though the Lens of Pandemic and Protest

LAKEFRONT.

I could see the sparkle of the water long before I pedaled up to the concrete underpass with the confirming inscription. The interlocking steel barriers were gone, but still, I glanced around to be sure I wasn't imagining it, that the beautiful shoreline I had fallen in love with 36 summers ago was again open for business. 

These days, I head south, a choice that might have seemed unthinkable to me years ago, when I first settled into life as a north-sider, and then migrated to the northern suburbs. As progressive a city as Chicago is, there is an invisible but overt north south segregation. 

Yes, the city is diverse, and the streets, to the north anyway, are a mosaic of color and foreign tongues. But on the south side, just south of where Soldier Field and football bring Cubs fans and Sox fans together for a brief season of unity, the whites are few and far between, tucked away in insulated pockets amidst large neighborhoods where many of Chicago's black lives are lived. 

Even in non-pandemic times, the south lakefront has little in common with its northern counterpart. It is largely unvisited by tourists, and its running and bike paths are relatively uncongested. There are spectacular views of the city, but little sense of its bustle or its commerce or its tourism. Instead, there is a pristine shoreline and broad swaths of prairie grass. At least I assume it's prairie grass, knowing as little as I do about gardening and botany. What I do know is it is beautiful in its wildness, its irregularity, its splotches of random color. But still, as I said, it's where the black lives are lived, too close for comfort, to many of us.

I confess to my ignorance. I had seen "Juneteenth" on my Google calendar for years, but I never wondered for more than a fleeting instant what it was. I don't remember anybody mentioning it, and I never bothered to ask. I never knew Fort Bragg was named for a Confederate general, I never knew the Mississippi flag included the Confederate battle flag, I never knew that slaves in Texas remained enslaved for two years after emancipation. I knew Aunt Jemima had racist connotations, but I never spent much time wondering why the syrup still bore the offensive picture. 

Since I moved back downtown last spring, I have biked all over my second city, the city I fell in love with so many years ago. It is progressive and smart, my adopted hometown. Almost everybody is wearing a mask, or at least has one close at hand. We smile at each other -- as best as we can -- with our eyes as we give each other wide berth on the sidewalks. The rules are enforced with signs that are both gentle and firm, and we comply without much complaint. We have collectively applauded the protests, we have collectively mourned the devastation done by the looters, and we watch, with hope, as the plywood boards covering so many of the storefronts are painted with colorful messages of peace, love, and understanding. Still, we shy away from the parts of the city where black lives are lived, where Covid-19 has selected so many victims, which makes me wonder how much those lives can really matter, even to those of us who like to think we have always done the right thing. 

I am reluctant to share the secret of the southern lakefront, uncrowded, peaceful, unspoiled by curiosity seekers. But, against my own self interest, might I recommend a spin through the prairie grasses, maybe even a detour into the majestic patchwork of neighborhoods south of our imaginary but insidious dividing line. We already share a lake; it's time to share the experience. 

Demings, Harris, Abrams, Rice. Pick One, Joe.

I admit it. I was wrong.

It bothered me, all this chatter about Biden needing to choose a black woman as his running mate. I wondered why we were again eating our own, we Democrats, holding our candidate's campaign hostage for petty identity politics. I will vote for Joe no matter what, no matter whom he chooses -- any gender, any color, even a tuna fish sandwich, as a reformed Republican claims in a recent ad. 

Shame on me. I cannot possibly know how important it is, knowing only, as I do, how unimportant it is to me to have a middle-aged Jewish woman on the ticket. My only connection to the kind of pain American blacks feel is historical -- pictures of gaunt and tortured Jews behind barbed wire fences, grainy videos of people, like me, being shot into mass graves. It happened there, not here. It happened then, not now.

The past few days have been catastrophic, and they have been enlightening. A white policeman squeezed the life out of defenseless black man as the world watched. While the only ones who could have stopped it not only remained silent but even leant a knee, to hold the doomed man's legs down while he gasped for air. We are, collectively, shocked, though we have no reason to be. It has happened before. Often. All too recently. Breonna Taylor. Freddie Gray.

I was not surprised by the ensuing violence, even the torching of a police station. A police station. I wanted to shake my finger at the rioters, remind them that not all cops are bad, and that killing and destruction are not the answers. Well what is, then. If a dying man's desperate cries -- I can't breathe -- are not enough. If each horrific news report is not enough. If a nation's grief is so palpable it draws long quarantined citizens out en masse, blows fears of a deadly pandemic away with the smoldering ashes of a community, will that be enough? I'm guessing not. 

An acquaintance, a casual acquaintance about whom I know very little, posted a letter on Facebook today. She was a teacher (I didn't know that). She had quit being a teacher (I didn't know that either). She had taught in the places we privileged people don't go, and had seen the despair, seen the seemingly endless cycle of oppression and poverty and misery that perpetuates itself and leaves an entire segment of the population stuck under our knee, unable to breathe. Having taught only three years, she listed the names of eight of her former students who are now dead. And those, she says, are only the ones she knows about. 

I think I empathize, but really, I cannot. I am ignorant, I have no idea what it feels like to live inside black skin. I have no idea what it is to worry, as a black mother worries, that her child will not make it home from school alive. That her teenaged son will be arrested for, well, breathing. Mostly, all I worried about was hurt feelings. Or a little anxiety about a test. Or that somebody else's kid was -- heaven forbid -- smarter than mine. 

I was wrong, wrong to think that when there are four eminently  qualified and impressive black women on the VP short list, there is some reason not to narrow the search. Pick one of them Joe. We need her ears, her voices, her wisdom. And we need the memories that live in her psyche, and hers alone. We need her to breathe life into a dying nation.

Distancing in the Dark

The lights went out last night. Right in the middle of an episode of Breaking Bad, my television screen went dark. Shame on me for becoming a Netflix junkie so late in the game, but I was despondent. Well, maybe just annoyed, but the pandemic tends to magnify. 

A push alert had warned me of flooding, but nobody had warned me my evening of binge watching, the thing I look forward to all day, would be interrupted. On a day I had decided to go wine-free, just to see if it was still possible. (It was. Barely.)

Zoom cocktail hours, walks to Whole Foods and Target and, yesterday, the somewhat guilty cheat of Sunday dinner in person with my kids (they have a large table) notwithstanding, the isolation has seemed overwhelming. Darkness didn't help. I heard commotion in the hallway and poked my head out, surprised to see everybody else had done the same thing. It was oddly tentative, the head poking, nobody daring to venture too much into the communal space. Some even wore masks, determined to ward off an unlikely onslaught of stray viral droplets. Though back-up generators kept the hallway lit, we all withdrew quickly into our own darkness, comforted to know we were at least, still, in the same boat. 

As power outages go, it really wasn't so bad. There's no heat wave, as there usually is when the power grid goes haywire, and the city lights outside helped. I rustled up every candle I could find, filling my small apartment with dancing shadows and a somewhat nauseating mix of scents, including something called "karma." I've discovered that karma is better felt than smelled. 

I crawled into bed with my phone and my Kindle, hoping the batteries would outlast the blackout. Feeling, for some reason, as if my suffering had just increased tenfold. A pandemic topped by darkness and no Netflix. And no wine. I wondered how much more I could bear. A lot, if what others are going through is any indication. 

The lights came on within 90 minutes, but I stayed in bed. I face-timed with my son, and talked about the world with him for a while. Politics, pandemics. As always, he gave me a bit of a history lesson, and I went to sleep, still discouraged about the state of things, still worried about all the unknowns, but content that I had seen all my kids that day, one way or another, and they are all fine, they had all made me laugh, and, at the end of the day, I knew more than I had when I woke that morning. 

This morning, I might know more than I knew yesterday, but still, the unknowns loom large. Tonight, though, there will be wine. And Netflix.