blogger interrupted

I was getting sick watching MSNBC on Friday.  Physically ill.   Cable news, 24/7, doesn’t lend itself well to a discussion of race in politics, especially when a man like John McCain, who owns the luxury of a spoon fed media-worship he’s cultivated over years, is the one who is picking at America’s racial scabs with his own finger nails.  

But Eric’s post brought it home.  His own mother sent him one of the anonymous email smears the other day.  Eric and I both have made a loud practice of publicizing senders of these smears, by posting their email address.  But then Eric got one from his mother.

This is how insidious this thing is. It’s like a hyperactive viral form of cancer. So now what, right? Post mom’s email? Post her friends who sent it to you?

The ever present poison in the air of this presidential campaign is race, and the use of race by the most vile among us to divide even our own families.  It would be laughable watching the punditocracy dance around this fact all day long, if it weren’t so pathetic.  This poison is a pollen we breathe in every minute of every day.  Every person you encounter, anywhere, is infected by it, either the virus itself, or the antibodies to fight it.  To discuss this presidential campaign without discussing this poison is like going to visit the doctor for the toe you stubbed on your chair when you suddenly went blind.  How on earth did I stub my toe?  But sir, you are blind.  Really?

Divisive hate politics is our generation’s “contribution” to American democracy, and the perfection of it is solely the property of the Republican Party.  It was never going to be a surprise to see race used in this way, this year.  The surprise was that it began with a Democrat using it against another Democrat, but even that isn’t such a shock.  

The shock I felt last week was that the poison has become so pervasive, and yet so ignored.  The poison hangs in the air like a stench over an open sewer.

But that nausea I felt on Friday, and then sadness, finally has given way to a kind of awe.  It’s as if America entered a time machine as a country, and we’ve all been transported to another time.

This must have been what it was like in American households around 1860.  

In 1860, the issue of race was a cancerous national issue reduced to a presidential election, and every American’s opinion on it reduced to one vote.  It’s the only other time in our history that this has happened.  Of course, the issue then was war vs. peace, slavery vs. freedom.  The issue now is no where near as weighty.  

But in 1860, as now, there must have been this unspoken silence in families, at breakfast tables, at shops, in schools.  That elephant in the room which we all now recognize in our own lives, was there in 1860.  It had to be the same discomfort.  It had to be the same queasy feeling, the same unease, the same walking-on-egg-shells.  

In 1860 before Brother A joined the Federal army, and Brother B the Confederate, the exact same pall had to have hung over that family.  Someone advocating abolition in 1860, or Abraham Lincoln for president (the two were not the same thing), had to be worried that someone at the dinner table had just read the latest study on how the brain’s of slaves were biologically inferior and prone to violence.  

Of course, in 1860 there was no way for a viral cancer to spread on the internet, like the poison in 2008 has spread in a matter of months among an otherwise racially undivided electorate.  But the effect is the same.  Eric’s mother sent him a total lie in an email.  People in my family certainly believe these complete lies.  Both Eric and I are repulsed by their beliefs.  None of us want to talk about it.  Ever.  

I made some calls today at the Obama office in Parma, and overheard one of the volunteers training someone how to hold a house party for Barack.  Something leapt out at me.  The volunteer kept saying something like,

“Look, it’s hard to hear something repeated to you by someone you love that is a total lie.  I know how hard that is.  But you have to say, I still love you, but if you have some facts to prove what you say, I’d believe you.  I can’t believe you, if what you say is totally untrue.  But I still love you.”

This is the legacy of the Republican Party, and the atmosphere in which we will choose a president in 2008.   It made me physically ill last week.  I could barely bring myself to blog.   But today, I am just counting myself lucky to be alive when this battle, which our country fought first in 1860, is again being fought.  Not this time with guns, but with ideas, voices, and votes.  

The best part is that we’re going to win.  America’s come a long way since 1860, even though there are times when it seems we just keep repeating the same mistakes on race.  But these forces, which lie dormant until evil stokes them up again, are no longer as powerful as they once were.  They can still pit families against one another.  But truth, and the freedom to speak it, are far more empowered today.  It won’t be pretty, and it will certainly be difficult, but this evil will be joined in battle in 2008.

And with those two weapons, we will relentlessly bludgeon this evil back into the fetid sewer from which the Republican Party harvested it, after having sown their seeds for decades.

That’s gonna be a great feeling.

Popularity: 8% [?]