Indifference is exactly what cynical politicians want from you. They’re counting on it. Their success depends on convincing you that your vote doesn’t matter.
What’s the trick? the man asks. The trick is not caring that it hurts.
Later, when I became more familiar with the narrower path to happiness to be found in television and the movies, I’d become troubled by questions.
For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.
I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We’re not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around congress.
I just had a stroke and it was pretty epic.
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.
It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.
But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of responsibility – their own, that of others – slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.
When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.
And you won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,” she said, a point that I found most compelling.
It’s sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, and worried about him, I was glad not to have to live with him. I just left him to himself and never looked back.
If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening. My.
How could we judge other men until we had stood in their shoes? This.
We have our own ways, our own memories, and what has happened between all of us is hard to undo.
I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge? There was a trick there somewhere, although what the trick was, who was doing the tricking, and who was being tricked, eluded my conscious grasp.
That’s probably what had drawn me to Regina, the way she made me feel like I didn’t have to lie.
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.
Of course it hurt,” he said, taking a sip from the jug. “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.
That is the one thing that makes me a Democrat, I suppose – this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government.