I’d like to think I have some good insights.
Having a father who is a historian and who grew up poor helps.
Especially since he was always willing to teach me over late night conversations.
Having seven uncles who served helps give perspective, too.
Growing up on a block where I was usually the only white kid has made a powerful difference.
And working on a family farm with my grandparents and uncle and aunt made a lasting impact, too.
Having a mom who was and is a community organizer, an RN who taught a generation of nurses and is now a climate activist continues to make a huge difference in my life.
As did my first college job, in 1987, working with a Catholic nun and social worker finding families to place with the Big Brothers Sisters program in Harlem in a time of AIDS and crack cocaine.
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This, and so much else, informs who I am.
Stories. People. Lessons. Mistakes. And above it all.
Perspective.
Humbling, powerful perspective.
About who I am.
About who I am not.
About where I come from.
Of what I’ve seen.
Of what I know.
And what I don’t.
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I hate poverty.
I was working as a labor organizer on a home healthcare workers’ campaign in Fresno, California, and door after door I encountered the powerful reality of want and need and loss.
One door sticks out.
I went to find a worker who was caring for a disabled son.
She wasn’t home. But her son was. And he answered the door to reveal an apartment with nothing in it. No furniture. No drapes. No carpet. No TV.
There was a sleeping bag and some random garbage piled in one corner.
And he answered that door with such hope and kindness and care.
His mom wasn’t home, but that moment reminded me of so many doors I visited in NYC.
Apartments howling with stories that you’d rather not hear.
The grandmother cooking in the fifth floor walk up in East Harlem who broke down in tears when she saw us through the door, in fear, in shame, in the knowledge that we knew her secret of a kitchen covered in roaches and littered with filthy food.
It’s one thing to see that kind of thing on a Batman TV show; it’s another thing for someone, a real person, a real family, to live it every day.
It reminded me of some of my friend’s homes in the neighborhood I grew up in.
Bare floors. Little furniture. Nothing shiny or new or warm.
More chaos than anything else, really.
Because that’s what lack and want are made of.
That’s the life that poverty and ill health often, but not necessarily always, makes.
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I get that Donald Trump won this election by winning Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Florida.
And I think I get why.
Millions and millions of people are angry about a lack of jobs and income and opportunity and feel they have nothing to lose. They went with the Donald.
Millions more people embrace an ideology that sees Donald Trump as a “flawed vehicle” to get the policies they desire. (Just as some saw Hillary Clinton as a vote they could not make, for their own ideological reasons.)
Some millions of people hate. That’s nothing new. I saw it in the neighborhood I grew up in. The N-word used against Blacks. The G-word used against Asians. The W-word used against Latinos. The F-word used against gays. Out loud. In the street. In your face.
When you consider how far we’ve come when it comes to tolerance of each other—and we have made very real progress-- it’s no surprise that America has got bigotry left in the gas tank today.
And, finally, there is a substantial subset of the nation that knows better and would never outwardly express their prejudices and preferences, but willingly turned a blind eye to this dangerous hate-monger because of their perceived self interest.
Greed and lack of perspective does that to people.
Funny, like many, I’ve seen that in my life, too.
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But that’s where we are left today.
That’s what we have to deal with.
And we are dealing with it in the middle of a progressive wing of the Democratic party that, frankly, too often seems like it doesn’t know much or talk much about poverty and want and fear.
Our wing of the party is too often like the ideologues on the other side.
We are too rarely humble enough to realize our own privilege and wealth and safety.
And safety is good.
People are dangerous when we act out of fear.
But when we take our safety for granted. When we act as if everyone should be just like us and think just like us.
When we don’t even try to stop to listen.
Then we are going to get called on our bullshit.
And we did.
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The 2016 election was in part that.
Do we have a 99% chance of winning or 96% chance of winning?
Give me a break.
Only a movement absolutely caught up in themselves could indulge that kind of talk when the stakes were so high.
And yet we did.
Right here.
When people should have been getting off their asses and getting out the votes; too many of us were here bullshitting.
And that’s nothing new.
That’s been the case since the very beginning here in the netroots.
It’s part of how we operate.
We chat and argue and prognosticate.
And far too few of us build community and organize to make change.
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My next door neighbor knows how.
He grew up a Black man in the Mississippi Delta.
He took time just this weekend to tell me what Emmett Till and Medgar Evers meant to him growing up.
Lessons of bravery, and lessons of fear.
And what he’s doing right now is bringing people together.
He’s weaving together all the people on my new block.
Many of us are South Asian immigrants thrown together in a bedroom community in the Bay Area.
Many of us are living next door to people their families back home might never accept.
But here we are, and slowly, bit by bit, all of us are learning to accept each other, and to know a bit more about each other and our traditions.
And a lot of that is thanks my neighbor, who is learning about Eid and Diwali and sharing a little bit of himself at the same time.
That’s building something.
That’s how bravery and pragmatism conquer hate.
Slowly, like water, wearing down rocks.
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We all have a choice how we are going to hold our elected leaders accountable in a time of Trump.
We all have a choice about how we are going to speak to each other, to listen, and to learn.
When people make fun of social justice as something easy or frivolous or luxurious, it makes me cringe.
The work is hard work.
But it can be fun.
It can give meaning.
Every single day.
The challenge is not how hard we can hate.
The challenge is how pragmatically we can love and organize and build.
I’ve got many other thoughts I’d like to share, but tonight I had to share one from the heart, and the gut.
I’ve seen so much.
I know that all of us can be so much better than this.
It’s time for each of us to do our part. It’s time to get to work.