Up, Forward & Left: We the People Lead
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.
Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost.
”39,917 notes (via oliviacirce)
Yes, I still feel hostile to the idea of the Clintons taking over the party and putting all their people in charge. I still feel like her people are hostile to progressives. I still feel like we can do better. But I also know that progressive outcomes are better correlated with raw power than ideological purity. Obama is freer to let his progressive flag fly now that he doesn’t have to face reelection, but he doesn’t have the numbers in Congress to do anything.
The big question we have to ask ourselves as we assess the 2016 candidates, is how big can than they win? Can they win big enough to retake the House and win back 60 votes in the Senate?
It all starts in that bleak month of January, 2011. Faced with Tea Party Republicans on a roll and a defensive back-tracking president, progressive leaders from the labor movement, other progressive organizations, and the Netroots movement met together to talk about how we could create a progressive populist center of gravity powerful enough to pull the president in our direction. What we believed is that we had not been effective over the previous couple of years in telling our story of how the economy works and why Americans should choose progressive policies that focused on helping low- and middle-income families. We invited to the discussions smart message folks like Stan Greenberg, Celinda Lake, Paul Begala, Drew Weston, and Van Jones to help us craft a narrative that would have a strong appeal to the vast majority of American voters. This is what we came up with, a progressive economic narrative that we could all rally around. And the progressive movement came together to tell that story. Labor union presidents started telling that story in their speeches, and union organizers began telling that story in their organizing work. Online organizations like Rebuild the Dream and Moveon started using some of this language in their emails. Bloggers started writing about it in their blog posts. Broad progressive coalitions on the budget fights started getting briefed on how to use it in their budget messaging. Networks of state and local progressive organizations like USAction and the Center for Community Change started using it in their local organizing work. Progressive think tanks like Campaign for America’s Future and Center for American Progress told the story in some of their messaging work. Progressive academics like Jacob Hacker used some of the language in his landmark economic planProsperity Economics: Building an Economy for All.
2 notes
Billmon:
… there are some striking similarities between the current political cycle (the Age of Reagan) and the previous one (the Age of Roosevelt).
[…]
A long time ago, back at my old blog, I wrote a couple of long posts about the dialectics of American politics—the back-and-forth flow of power between the two major parties—and how the parties themselves are constantly being changed thereby.
This reflects the reality is that in a democratic (well, quasi-democratic) system, victories and defeats, even big ones, are never final. Rather, they set in motion the partisan changes that eventually drive the next cycle.
In the American system, this process can be very deceptive, since it usually (but not always—just ask the Whigs) results in the transformation of the two existing parties, rather than their replacement by new ones.
So it has been both in the Age of Roosevelt and the Age of Reagan.
(Posting this mostly for the two links in the preceding blockquote.)
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The conservative movement is too stupid to live, but the Republican Party is too advantaged by law to die.
It is incumbent that the American people, of all political stripes, begin to demand a return to regular order: a normal process of policy making that reflects our small r republican values and respects the Constitutional vision of lawmaking.
At the eleventh hour, Congress and President Obama reached a deal to address the fiscal cliff. As our analysis shows, the deal focused on tax revenue and included a number of changes to the tax code, including a permanent extension of the Bush-era tax cuts on income below $450,000 for families and below $400,000 for individuals. This deal left major issues unresolved, including the debt ceiling, the automatic spending cuts known as sequestration, and a final version of a budget to fund the federal government in the current fiscal year.
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