Thoughts for my skeptical friends

The only reason to be disappointed that a president is not a perfectly flawless messianic figure is if you originally held the mistaken belief that any president could ever be a perfectly flawless messianic figure.

The only reason to remind me that a president will not be a perfectly flawless messianic figure is if you think I originally held the mistaken belief that any president could ever be a perfectly flawless messianic figure. You needn't, for I didn't.

If we both accept the fact that no president ever could be a perfectly flawless messianic figure, it makes little sense to express disappointment or to "temper your enthusiasm" based on the insufficiently leftist leanings of, say, a particular president-elect. Knowing that no real president can fully embody your platonic ideal, you know that yours will always be the task of an activist. You will always be working to push and pull and insist and cajole the powers-that-be into making the decisions and taking the actions that bring the world closer to your vision. This is the case whether the president were a moderate Democrat or a radical Socialist.

This is not a bad thing! This is forever our task and our fight and our very mission in life. Why look so disappointed when you say, "We'll just have to keep holding his feet to the fire?" If that's our task in any case, why not take a moment to rejoice that the feet will now belong to someone more thoughtful, gracious, and sincere than his predecessor? If our task will never be done, we rejoice that for a moment that parts of it may become a bit less arduous. We rejoice that the feet belong to someone who at least speaks to ideals of oneness and equality. We rejoice that the feet belong to someone who finds it important to make his core message the notion that there is now no male nor female, slave nor free, gay nor straight, red nor blue...

Maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe, like you said, you've just had your heart broken too many times. You've watched too many charismatic leaders killed or co-opted, and you can't muster up the excitement one more time. From your perspective, after many broken love affairs, we revelers seem foolish and naive, entirely too optimistic and unaware of the hard work that lies ahead of us. But warnings from elders about broken hearts has never stopped young people from falling in love. This is our first real taste of it, and it's glorious. We're excited by these heady beginnings and these wonderful new feelings, true, but we're also energized by the sense of potential ahead of us. We feel like nothing is impossible; we feel willing to pour our lives into the work our love demands. So we have laughed, and cried, and danced, and drawn accusations of messianic fervor when--for almost the first time in our lives--we have refused a sneering cynicism as our first resort.

We're no dummies, really. This love will be hard work. We know. But we want to do the hard work, because love is also beautiful and delicious and crazy and good.

Remember?

Caucus Chaos

Hey, slap a sticker on my jacket, I caucused yesterday!

This was my second caucus; since we moved across town last year, this was my first time caucusing in our current precinct. There were 21 of us in our precinct: 20 for Obama, 1 for Clinton. The lone Clinton supporter was delightfully good-humored about the fact that the percentages, when applied to our allocated number of precinct delegates (7), gave all the delegates to Obama and none to Clinton.

I enjoyed the hands-on feel to the caucus; I liked chatting with neighbors about politics for a few minutes, hearing voices raised passionately in other precinct caucuses smashed into the same elementary-school library. I was impressed by how many people crammed into the building. And when the caucus organizer asked people to raise their hands if this were their first time caucusing, probably about three-quarters of the people present raised their hands, to whoops and applause from the rest of us. It felt very personal, and intimate, and very much like the core root of democracy.

Still, just as in 2004, I was a little taken aback by how chaotic and disorganized the process was. When I showed up at the elementary school where 7 or 8 local precincts were meeting to caucus, I was told we were all gathering in the cafeteria to begin. In the cafeteria, folks were sitting in their precinct groups, but the signs were taped to tables and thus invisible from a distance. It was all but impossible to squeeze through the crowd of hundreds of people in order to find the right precinct. And I was one of the lucky ones who had already registered to vote and had known my precinct number! If you didn't already know it, you had to go scrutinize a single map taped to one wall, and there were reports that the map was incorrect, anyway. I'm still unsure whether I was supposed to have shown my voter registration card to anyone; nobody asked to see it.

And I must admit that as much fun as a caucus can be, I still don't quite think it gives everyone a voice. I think of that lone Clinton supporter in our precinct, whose choice is not represented on a statewide basis. His fraction of a delegate doesn't get to combine with the other fractions of delegates; they all just get rounded down and shunted out. So I guess a statewide vote would be a bit more fair, after all, even if it doesn't cultivate a sense of community the way a caucus can.

Anyway, I caucused and volunteered to be a delegate to the county caucus in April. That will be a new experience! Then I walked back down the hill to sit and cuddle with my Chloe. She had her knee surgery on Thursday, and it went as well as can be expected. Her entire leg is shaved, hip to ankle, with a long line of staples holding her surgery incision closed. It looks bad, but I know she should be getting back to normal just in time for sunny weather and outside play!

I've been knittin' a mitten

Unfortunately it came out too small. I was too afraid to divert from the pattern, having never navigated the construction of a mitten, and so that's what I get...one too-small mitten. I think I know what to do to make its mate fit my hand more accurately.

I biked home from work last night at dusk (taking the direct route on 24th up Capitol Hill...a mistake I shall not repeat until my legs get quite a bit stronger) and immediately headed back out again so I could cast my provisional ballot in yesterday's election. I wasn't terribly informed, and left most bubbles empty; it was really just Proposition 1 that I was determined to vote for. I didn't think it would pass (and it didn't), but I still wanted to cast my vote in favor. It would have implemented a "regional rail and transit system between Lynnwood, Shoreline, Northgate, Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, SeaTac airport, Kent, Federal Way and Tacoma," as well as funded projects on various roads in the region, as I understand it. It was to be funded by a regressive sales tax, and various environmental groups made persuasive arguments against the roads portion of the package; despite those good arguments in opposition to the plan, it was nice to briefly imagine the idea of getting around the region without a car.

I grew up on the ass end of nowhere. We lived 20 miles from town. If you didn't have a car, you stayed home. There was no getting dropped off and picked up by the parents unless you could do whatever it was in a small enough time frame that the parents could run some other errands in town before picking you up again--no running in and running home when the round trip was almost an hour.

I'm sure that's a big part of why I get so drooly over public transit projects--even Metro, which already has its fair share of drool and other bodily fluids crusted in the crevices of its buses. My very first public transit memory is of taking the Max train on a visit to Portland when I was about 8, and zipping to the zoo or OMSI or somewhere grand and impressive. After that, I remember when I was about 15 I visited a friend who'd moved to Eugene. On Saturday night we decided to go see a movie. We walked down the street and caught a bus that took us right to the mall where the theater was, and it blew my mind, man. I was a little awestruck. How did she know where the bus would take us? How did she know where it would stop, and how could you make sure it stopped where you needed it to? Wasn't it all just a little too easy?

When I moved up here for school I had to get cozy with the bus system in order to go to work or ever get off campus on my own. One of the first days after moving in, my roommate and I decided to go explore Seattle. "Let's go to the Pike Place Market!" we decided, so we hopped on a bus and headed downtown. When we hopped off the bus we promptly lost all our bearings and strolled off in exactly the wrong direction. But we did find our way back to the bus stop and back to school, and from then on I was all about the bus system. To and from work every morning, up the hill for groceries, downtown or the U District on the weekends, and I got along without a car just fine for six years. I even tagged along with a friend when she wanted to go all the way to the SuperMall in Auburn one summer Saturday.

Then I spent a tiny bit of time in Boston, and in London, and realized almost for the first time that public transit could do more than merely get you around town. You could live just as far from London as I had lived from my hometown, or even farther, and still get on just fine without a car.

It's possible to live in Seattle--even way down at the southern edge of it--without a car. But honestly, it's not very easy (and I imagine it only gets harder the further you get from the city center). There are about 3 bus lines that run within easy walking distance, fortunately; two go downtown, and one goes north through the U District up to Loyal Heights. The one that goes to the U District only comes this far south until about 7:30 p.m. on weekdays, and not at all on Sundays. After that, you have to transfer on Rainier to one of the other buses coming south from downtown (which is going to kick my ass when I start evening classes in January, finishing class at 9:30 p.m. And, appallingly, it may just be quicker and easier to come home on the bus, pick up the truck, and drive all the way back to the U on those nights, ridiculous as it sounds.). But one of those two has a varying schedule, and only half of its runs come this far south. And sometimes the bus is just too jammed full to pick up any additional riders; I've seen them blaze past bus stops without slowing when that happens.

Well and all. No transit option can satisfy every possible route configuration for every person, of course. But for now it looks like I'll be stuck fantasizing about expansions to my carfree options.

"A bunch of people who haven't yet managed to keep the lights on."

Too true to forget, from Atrios:

Even if in some platonic plane of reality partitioning Iraq is the correct thing to do, in our blinkered reality George Bush and his merry gang of morons are still in charge of things. And "helping people relocate" (translation: forcing them to relocate) would be a massive operation, fraught with chaos and violence, overseen by a bunch of people who haven't yet managed to keep the lights on.

Of course, for "partitioning Iraq" you can substitute anything--reforming education, addressing health care, preparing for disasters. However wonderful the idea, however lofty the goal, however profound the inspiration, this crew WILL screw it up. They don't seem to know that the devil is in the details, and they always let that devil escape--whoopsie, there he goes again--to dance chaotically through the ruined shrapnel of whatever dreams they were trying to harvest.

For the love of civilization, no matter what a beautiful road trip they may invite you on, stop giving them the keys to the car.