Going Abroad, Thinking of Home: Personal Reflections about the Elections

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 25th, 2012
Presidential Election 2012 Word Cloud © Vectorportal | Flickr

I am off to Europe today, leaving the excitement of the elections with ambivalence. On the one hand, I won’t be completely up to date and in touch with the latest developments and won’t be able to work for the re-election of the President. On the other hand, to be honest, I haven’t been working on the campaign this year, apart from occasional small contributions and apart from my clearly pro-Obama commentaries. I also must admit that being away, I hope, cuts down on my anxieties about the election results. This election is driving me crazy.

I have been trying to figure out why I am so tied up in knots about it, why it seems to me that the election is so important and why I am so invested in the results. After all, there is a chance that moderate Mitt, and not severely conservative Romney, is the alternative.

Moderate Mitt, perhaps, wouldn’t be so bad. Perhaps, he is honestly revealing himself as he has been rushing to the center in recent days, with the identical foreign policy to Obama’s, guaranteeing that the rich will pay their fair share and promising to work with Democrats in forging a bi-partisan approach to economic growth and fiscal responsibility. Proud of his great accomplishment in effectively insuring universal health insurance to Massachusetts residents, perhaps, I shouldn’t even worry about his pledge to repeal Obamacare on day one.

Then again perhaps not: there is no way of knowing what Romney will do, who he really is, and that scares me. And even scarier, are the people who support him and will make demands upon him. From the crazies who denounce the President as a post-colonial subversive, bent on destroying America, to The Tea Party activists, to the neo-conservative geo-political thinkers, to supply side economists, who imagine that austerity is the path to growth (as in Great Britain?), to those who want a small non-intrusive government on all issues except those concerning sexual orientation and women’s bodies, to all those who just want to “take America back.” I am far from sure that . . .

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October 25th, 2012 | Tags: , , , ,

Race and Racism in Everyday Life: Talking about Trayvon Martin

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 13th, 2012
Million Hoodies March, Union Square, NYC, March 21, 2012 © David Shankbone | Wikimedia Commons

Remember Preston Brown? He is the senior lifeguard at the Theodore Young Community Center, where I go for my daily swim. For a long time, Preston and I have been joking around about current events, joking with a serious punch. I play the role of the privileged white liberal, he, the skeptical black man. We first developed our parts in a year-long confrontation over the Obama candidacy. The skeptical Preston laughed at my conviction that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, and he thought it was absolutely hysterical that I thought that Americans would likely elect either a black man or a white woman to be President. As I have reported here, we made a couple of bets, which became the source of general community interest, and which Preston, to the surprise of many, paid up. We had a nice lunch at Applebee’s. It ironically, but presciently, ended with a small racist gesture coming from our waiter. We celebrated together, and we sadly noted that while things had changed, the change had its limits.

As a participant observer of Solidarność in Poland, the great social movement that significantly contributed to the end of Communism around the old Soviet bloc, I appreciate limited revolutions. Solidarność called for a self-limiting revolution. Perhaps this is even the time that I should approve of Lenin: “two steps forward, one step back.” Yet, I must admit, I have been disappointed with the stubborn and sometimes very ugly persistence of open racism after the momentous election of President Obama. While I think there is more to the Tea Party than racism, the calls to “take our country back” and the refusal of many to recognize Obama’s legitimacy have been extremely unsettling. Preston’s skeptical view was wrong about the majority of Americans, but he was right about a significant minority. And his concerns have a lot to do with the recent doings in Sanford, Florida.

Yesterday, Preston and I had a brief discussion about Trayvon Martin, which revealed to me, once again, how it is that race is . . .

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April 13th, 2012 | Tags: , , , , , , ,