DISCLAIMER: Not intended as a Bernie-Hil diary although I’m for Bernie and there’s some political revolution in here. As for Hillary I blame her campaign for the thrill I’m missing since she still gives me a thrill. At the last debate I thought, “Look, if only those two were running the country. Look at how they’re standing together.” It was the most intelligent conversation I’ve heard between public leaders since Bill was president.
For many of us, idealism and self-interest are plainly joined around class and lifestyle considerations. We can’t eat, work or get dressed, get clean and get to work unless a panoply of things go right in sequence. Get a little bit out of line and it becomes delicate. Do anything substantially different and the chances of an expense that can’t be handled go way up. Idealism gets us through, but it also connects us with everyone else around us. Idealism about America is an important factor looking at minority consensus around America which is that people just want to vest already and enjoy the rights they should already have had; for the most part, people of color or other differences just want the deal they’ve already been promised. Lately, thanks partly to computers and definitely to bloggers, it’s become clear that urban development itself is greatly to blame, or rather that blame goes to either a lack of adequate urban planning or a lack of budget or usually both. Neighborhoods are allowed to decay until big wigs can swoop in to do major development and then all the little people get kicked out. But our main concerns are still immediate lifestyle needs: food, shelter, toilet and shower, a way to get work and a way to show up ready. That’s my idealism. It’s consequences could be revolutionary for policy.
Maybe I’ve struggled more than most to find stability psychologically for myself. Like many single parents, my responsibilities for my kids grounded me. I can be cynical and think in vicious ways that undermine my willingness to live, but I can also enrich my energy by thinking motivating thoughts. Get that paycheck, realistically, counts as one of them. Get to work, get home. Are my clothes clean? Did I shower? Is this my stop? My son thinks I’m on the spectrum and it sounds like I could be, but these lifestyle considerations are what most people deal with, resolving hundreds of little things every day.
The ability to live with any purpose and decency at all is precious. When my son was very young and he told me he wanted to be superhero, I told him he should just stand for anything, pick something good and stand for it, and he would have to be a superhero to deal with the challenges.
I’ve been reading about Grover Cleveland lately. It seems a lot of 21st Century Republican thinking comes from Grover Cleveland-style railroad outlooks. The changes in this country certainly were dramatic then. What interests me about the U.S. South is how social pressure in regional niches used threats of joblessness, exile, and family exclusion to sift through the many possibilities of what white can and does mean. The oppression of black people in this country has been the U.S. mega-industry, meta to both cotton and tobacco as well as how much else? But it seems many in the South have always been ready to change, provided that their own regional niche was behind that change, that the transformation would be consensual and genuine. These folks have seen nothing for their trouble except stress, punishment, and the pleasures of trying to live as good people, caring about the right thing. There has to be a way for all of us to become stable Grover Cleveland’s of a new American idealism. One where everybody vests. One where we build a vast community of citizens looking out for the well-being of a system that protects our lifestyles. Self-interest plus coexistence equals idealism.
One of the most important things about American white is how it provides a framework of socio-emotional cohesion, binding groups in a feeling of togetherness / a common bond or interest. Such a framework has obvious advantages. Many liberals like me (I’m 57) used to think we already lived in a country no longer in bondage to active perpetuation of massive racial imbalances. Too bad we were wrong! From here as a spoiled and privileged white male it looks to me like bad things happen to black people twice as often as to anybody else, just because they are black and 10,000 other things that go with being black in America. This really makes the bad stuff stand out and a lot of it is so wrong that it should absolutely not be happening half as much to decent poor white people. I’ve known people who self-identified with a poor white mentality whose main concern about a highway stop was not being killed by the LEO. This was so weird to me. But I’ve been protected, apparently.
I’ll wrap this up, hoping for some comments. If Hillary is nominated maintaining some strong Bernie Sanders political revolution idealism is going to be vital to 2 years later, 4 years later, getting out the vote, etc. Today’s young voters will never forget the politics of Bernie because this has been a major social event including sudden fame and celebrity, e.g., Bernie tweeting through the 1st Republican debate and the young FeelTheBern-ers eating it up. For people who struggle, keeping their idealism alive is what produces the physical energy to get going. We have to triumph in our own regional niches and find our local ways to be great together. Sort of as if Occupy had a few seats alongside Chamber of Commerce types and neighborhood/community representatives. Here in Los Angeles it is a mind-bending (think “Inception”) effort just to picture this. The County of Los Angeles is staggering in itself and its diversity is born of Central American history as well as East Coast and Pacific rim history. Sunny SoCal has been pumped as a tourist destination since the 1880’s. Communities were born, with migrations of dozens of prosperous white settlements fundamentally different from the dozens of other white settlements that moved out here and now prosper (e.g., Ontario, Anaheim). How can we even imagine being united in one voice? In one voice of diverse voices? I’ve been trying to picture it since about day 2 of Bernie’s campaign, thinking about his call for political revolution. We need a stable idealism that support long-term local socializing (in the flesh and digital) around political involvement, resolving important issues that matter both to the grassroots and the big wigs.
Suggestions/feedback?
