Gabrielle Giffords: It's Personal To Me

Gabrielle Giffords is still in critical condition, although there are some reports that she has regained consciousness.. A crazy young man shot her and 17 other people, killing at least 5 of them last time I checked. One of the dead is a 9 year old girl. I have been listening to this story unfold. I can’t look away from it. I am horrified that this congresswoman was shot at close range, in her home state in front of a grocery store while she was doing her job.

At one point today, I sat in my car listening to the radio outside of Safeway. My four year old was sitting in the back seat, playing her Leapster and I just started to cry. For me, this act was personal. It hit home. Gabrielle Giffords was one of twenty congresspeople targeted, literally, by Sarah Palin’s PAC. She, along with other Democrats who voted for healthcare reform, was placed in the crosshairs on takebackthe20.com. Giffords was even on record expressing concern about the safety of herself and her colleagues after this page launched.

In July a crazy man was headed to my office to lie in wait and exact revenge for the workers who died in the BP oil spill by shooting 14 people who work with me. He too, was a lone gunman. He had heard about my organization through Glenn Beck. He was driving erratically on the highway and was intercepted by the California Highway Patrol in a 12 minute gun battle on highway 580. I thanked God again today for those officers. But the fear and the frustration and the panic of what could have been resurfaced for me today.

Gabrielle Giffords was doing her job. She was at a Safeway taking advantage of an opportunity to meet with her constituents and learn about their concerns. Had things turned out differently, I would have been walking into my office on a Monday morning when Byron Williams opened fire – today, my girls could be motherless. That is my enduring nightmare. One moment you are doing your job, simply trying to do the best you can by your family. The next moment is your last. This is not the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is not a healthy democracy where ideas can be debated.

When I step back from my incredibly emotional ledge, I can recognize that we do not yet have all the facts. I am aware that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck did not plot directly with these men to do harm. But don’t they, as public figures, have some responsibility for the words and images they promote? Do they take a moment’s pause when something like this happens to reflect on whether or not they had a role in causing harm?

I am a project manager. When I screw up a project I manage, I am accountable to my boss and my organization. Who are Palin and Beck accountable to? Do they bear any responsibility for the words and images they promote? What happens to our discourse when we choose the language of violence to make a point or tackle a complex social issue? How are we all harmed by reductive language and emotional, tribal politics more interested in power and the next election than in finding solutions that can help to lift us all?

There is a lot of conversation about the quality of our political discourse right now. It can be tempting to imagine that this means we all have to agree. But the real challenge is to learn to disagree; to make sure that we debate ideas and do not attack people; to start our conversations with the notion that the “other side” has the same goals in mind, the betterment of our country and our lives, and that we often see different paths to achieving this goal. Don’t we know that we are all in this together?

Hello 2010

Welcome 2010. You with your fresh promise, your mid-term elections, continued economic recovery and hope for full equality. Welcome to new challenges, old friends and new beginnings.

This year, I will be trying to find a voice and rhythm for this blog. Expect postings that are personal, political and just plain random. Up to now I've managed only a handful of posts in just over two years. I've tried to keep my thoughts at a pretty high level and have waited until moved to write. Well 2010, you may be subject to my mental diarrhea. So, apologies in advance for my flights of fancy, stories of baby poop and half baked political analysis.

Thanks for playing. Let the random thoughts begin!

Election Day

Today is a day of emotion. You can feel the buzz of it all around as people engage in our democracy deeply and personally.

I spent my BART ride into work reading about all the propositions that haven't been widely in the news. It is fascinating what these pieces of legislation say about us as a society - particularly the three California initiatives that revolve around the criminal justice system. I am heartened that we are looking for ways to begin to move our criminal justice system from one of incarceration to one of rehabilitation; disgusted that our prisons and police want to have a percentage of the budget allocated in the same way that we allocate money to education; and deeply saddened at our willingness to increase the prison population, make sentencing more prescriptive and find new terms like "gang-related" which are only code for young men of color.

These potential amendments in particular give me great pause today. Are we really prepared to throw away a whole segment of the population? Are we so short-sighted that we believe incarceration is a better option than health care and education? Did you know that prison planners look at 2nd and 3rd grade test scores as a reliable method of creating and constructing prisons? Why are we so eager to fund incarceration for segregation rather than rehabilitating young men so they can become responsible and productive members of their communities?

I have no answers just now, only questions. And I'm sure more will crop up throughout the day - more news as it develops...

Tribal Politics

With election season coming to a rapid and dramatic close, it seems like a good opportunity to let everyone know that they suck. Have you noticed that this election has become tribal in its vindictiveness? People are just making things up because they can't stand the other team. I am as horrified by the people who say "I've never voted Republican in my life" as if to say that they never stopped to consider the possibility that there was a person not on their team who might take better care of them than a fellow Democrat; as I am of the people who are running around calling Barak Obama an Arab or a Muslim as if that necessarily means that the man is evil and untrustworthy.

Let's face it, each team is trying to grab and maintain power. I think the best thing we could do is begin to form coalitions that defy right and left to make change happen in the world. More on that later.

you get what you pay for

I've been thinking a lot lately about how it is we spend billions of dollars on war and continue to cut spending on education and social programs. The rhetoric of "tax increases" to reinstate spending on these programs is mind blowing. That congress is actually arguing about whether or not to find a way to offset Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) relief is astonishing. Do we really think that our country can function without those billions of dollars provided by the AMT? That it is ok to go right on cashing more checks we can't cover?

So, back to spending - if we're not willing to spend money on government and infrastructure, we get crappy roads, our children fall behind from an inadequate education, if they even manage to inherit a planet they can live on...we get what we pay for.

Likewise, if we spend billions and trillions of dollars on war, we are viewed as global bullies, we get violence and terrorism, we travel less out of fear and our children become even more isolationist deepening the cycle of mistrust...we get what we pay for.

There's a great op-ed in the New York Times a friend sent me from Tom Friedman. He asks the question why we - our government, our country, our citizens - can't seem to understand that the next big global marked is for green, clean energy. Can you imagine? An America committed to cleaning up our messes, cleaning up the world and in the process creating a new green economy to propel us forward into an age we could be proud of? I, for one, would love to start paying for that.

The Primaries Keep Rollin' On

I have some disjointed complaining to do about the primaries so please bear with me.

I'm ready for all of this nonsense to be over. Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad that people in states that haven't voted yet still get to feel like their votes matter. It's about time we were all engaged in the future of the country and the democratic process.

I don't mind the contest, I don't mind that there is not a presumptive nominee - I am over our candidates (all of them) fabricating weaknesses to get ahead. That's not the world I want to live in, and guess what...that's not going to fix the economy or change America's status in the world.

Yes Hillary, it IS about personality and not substance. Haven't the last eight years of the Bush regime taught us that? That substance isn't really a key voting factor for the American people... And let's be honest, voting is totally emotional. Why else did women rise up after being spanked by Gloria Steinem? I even had to pause to see if I felt like it was important that a woman get a fair shake and if that really meant that Hillary should have my vote even if she wasn't my first choice in the race.

Guess what Barak, I support you AND I believe that Hillary was really against NAFTA from the start. Can you imagine the wife of a sitting president actively voicing dissent for a major policy change to the public? Once you start moving forward on that kind of initiative everyone jumps on board or the ship is in serious peril. An actively dissenting wife (or cabinet member, or VP or any other spokesperson for an administration) is not the kind of gift you give to the modern media.

While we're on this tangential tear, please, oh please dear media, stop trying to slice and dice us all into oblivion. If the demographers are to be believed, my vote should break out into a million little pieces: Latino, woman, college- educated, youth...OK, maybe not youth.

It recently occurred to me that when the media talks about the youth vote, they're not really talking about me. In fact, no one seems to talk about my generation much. (Gen X if you didn't guess.) It's like we've disappeared, the slackers the media believes we are and the demographic too small for the retailers to care about. I won't shed any tears over that, flying under the radar is a talent I'm willing to cultivate.

The Latino Vote?

I couldn't be more tired of hearing the term "Latino vote". Who are these amorphous Latinos? Where did they come from?

Just to be clear, here is a little something about my family background:

My mother is an immigrant from Peru. She was educated in a convent school and came here when she was 18 to work as a nanny for a family in Marin County, CA.

My father was born in Upland, CA, the fifth of ten children to a mother from Michoacan who walked across the border in El Paso, TX when she was six years old in 1909.

I check the box marked Hispanic/Latino/Chicano.

I am proud of my heritage and the legacy that has allowed me to earn a college degree.

So, back to my original question: Who are these amorphous Latinos? And when did they start voting with one mind? I don't have to look beyond the confines of my own family to realize how foolish it is to categorize Latinos as some kind of monolith.

I'll spare you the suspense. I voted for Obama. If I had to guess, I'd say my mom voted for Hillary, but to tell you the truth I don't really know. (I'm tempted to call her right now.) My dad probably voted for McCain. I have cousins who are Republicans and uncles and aunts who are dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. My point here is that we are a family. We share grandparents and direct history. We were raised in much the same way with a strict work ethic and a belief in family. My father and two of his brothers are veterans. Between the 25 or so of us who share blood ties across two generations - add another handful for my cousin's kids who are eligible to vote - you probably have a fairly representative scope of the spectrum of politics in this country.

So please, spare me the platitudes and stereotypes of the "Latino vote". Spare me the single voter issue crap about immigration. Spare me the insult of imagining that I am a demographic and not a full-fledged human being.