Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.
People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.
I tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell – that was one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too. The two pictures collided, leaving me tongue-tied.
Gramps returned from the war never having seen real combat, and the family headed to California, where he enrolled at Berkeley under the GI bill. But the classroom couldn’t contain his ambitions, his restlessness, and so the family moved again, first back to Kansas, then through a series of small Texas towns, then finally to Seattle, where they stayed long enough for my mother to finish high school.
I don’t worry about the survival of the novel. We’re a storytelling species.
The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person. I.
Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion.
If people can learn to hate they can learn to love.
Some of it was just a function of my getting older, I suppose, for if you are paying attention, each successive year will make you more intimately acquainted with all of your flaws – the blind spots, the recurring habits of thought that may be genetic or may be environmental, but that will almost certainly worsen with time, as surely as the hitch in your walk turns to pain in your hip.
In few other professions are you required, each and every day, to weigh so many competing claims – between different sets of constituents, between the interests of your state and the interests of the nation, between party loyalty and your own sense of independence, between the value of service and obligations to your family. There is a constant danger, in the cacophony of voices, that a politician loses his moral bearings and finds himself entirely steered by the winds of public opinion.
When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal.
We think of faith as a source of comfort and understanding but find our expressions of faith sowing division; we believe ourselves to be a tolerant people even as racial, religious, and cultural tensions roil the landscape.
Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you’ll have a chance for a better life.
I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.
My liberty depends on you being free, too.
Just about every scientist outside the White House believes climate change is real, is serious, and is accelerated by the continue release of carbon dioxide. If the prospect of melting ice caps, rising sea levels, changing weather patterns, more frequent hurricanes, more violent tornadoes, endless dust storms, decaying forests, dying coral reefs, and increase in respiratory illness and insect-borne diseases – if all that doesn’t constitute a serious threat, I don’t know what does.
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or who you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.
America has not the option as to whether it will or it will not play a great part in the world,” Roosevelt would argue. “It must play a great part. All that it can decide is whether it will play that part well or badly.
Have I told you that they are all part of you? Have I told you that you are part of them and that you are the future?
In 1980, the average CEO made forty-two times what an average hourly worker took home. By 2005, the ratio was 262 to 1.
When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath.