Friday, November 7, 2008

Leaving Lake Almanor


Well, today we pack up; tomorrow we head down Deer Creek canyon to the San Francisco bay area. I already miss the peace and quiet, the beautiful trees, moonlight on the water, the bats swooping at dawn and sunset, and the occasional surprise visit by the likes of a pygmy owl or a giant vine maple beetle (prionus californicus). But, we’re returning to the pleasure of many friends and city life.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Random Thoughts on the Election

At an unpleasant dinner in Panama City, Panama, in spring 2004, I was roundly cuffed about by a university professor regarding the Bush administration and the American system of government in general. He was convinced that we are brutal bullies. I say “we” because, indeed, we Americans are in this together. I paid my taxes and I voted along with everyone else in 2000, and the choice was George W. Bush. The professor stomped on my every effort to say that, despite a long history of “re-arranging” Latin American governments, there was another side to my America, one with a bill of rights, enduring human values, a representative government and the ability to transform itself every four years. The relentless professor had been through a divorce recently. I could see why. No doubt his ex-wife felt as rotten and angry as I did.

But even in the darkest days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration with terrible news of American torture perpetrated in Iraq and hideouts elsewhere in the world, I clung to the belief that things would change...that one day President Bush would turn over power peacefully to another…that our history, constitution and bill of rights are so large and so formidable, no individual president or administration could undo our system of government.

We had another election in 2004. I was disappointed with the result. I felt like one of the butterflies in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem:

“even as butterflies are beaten back
by hurricanes
yet do not die
They lie in wait wherever
they can hide and hang
their fine wings folded
and when the killer-wind dies
they flutter forth again
into the new-blown light
live as leaves.

Time passed, and we’ve just finished another election. A year ago, I would never have guessed at the sweeping vindication of my trust in the American system of government.

The election of Barak Obama is transformative, a watershed event. Born well past the WWII, too young to be drafted for Vietnam – but old enough to have experienced 9/11 with the rest of us. Product of a hippie mother and Kenyan father. Raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. He does represent a new generation of tax-paying, voting Americans, 40% of whom can claim multi-cultural, multi-racial roots. And, I’ll be interested to watch how, as president, he leverages his huge following over the Internet to deliver the modern version of FDR’s “fireside chats.”

I'd heard over & over during the campaign that it would be transformational to elect a black man. I'd poo-poohed this concept, because I thought of Obama as a multicultural, generational-change candidate who is part black (see above). But, at the announcement of his election, I saw that it was not inaccurate to say that he is our first African American president. Which brings me to Abraham Lincoln, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King and Rabbi Sydney Akselrad.


History is a great thing. It shows the power of time and enduring human values. Over the objections of his entire cabinet, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Supreme Court struck down “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education. Martin Luther King declared we shall overcome. He led a march in Selma, Alabama. With Jesse Jackson. With Rabbi Sydney Akselrad, the rabbi who married my husband and me.


When I saw Jesse Jackson in Chicago’s Grant Park with tears in his eyes as Obama’s election was announced, I cried too.

I thought of Rabbi Sydney Akselrad marching in Selma. He was a frail person with terrible eyesight, a keen sense of humor, an outsized humanity, a huge heart. How could he face the violence and anger? He just did.



However it goes in the next assuredly turbulent months and years of the Barak Obama administration, no matter if he takes a course that I disagree with, this particular moment in time is rightfully a celebration of all that America stands for. We have the ability to transform ourselves, not instantly, but just see how quickly! President Bush has been gracious and offers his ready cooperation in the transition to a new administration. Our system of government is still bigger than any one president, any one party, any one component of our society. The pendulum swings…. We may not have perfect government or a perfect union, but I’ll keep on paying my taxes, I’ll keep on voting, I’ll keep on putting the American flag in front of our house at Lake Almanor each day, just as my Dad did.