Beyond Single Issues

Flying to Chicago yesterday I sat next to a fifty-ish woman, a nurse by training, who was coming from Virginia to attend a conference with some of the young men with whom she works. She was playful and teased me, claiming that the two young men seated behind us were both her sons: one was African American and the other was white.

After she slept for an hour, we began a conversation about the state of the economy as we watched the stock market roller coaster on the DirectTV CNN coverage. We shared how we both realized that our retirements were now greatly delayed. She is married to a dentist and together they go on medical missions to Central America. She and her husband had been looking forward to spending their retirement doing medical missions in developing countries.

She volunteered that she wasn't happy with either candidate--Obama or McCain.

I volunteered that Obama's community organizing work had been greatly influenced by the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

"How can Obama be a Christian and still believe in abortion?"

I didn't immediately respond to her comment, because I wanted to make a point. Instead I went back to the economy, and we shared our mutual concern about the displacement of families, the food insecurity too many children are experiencing, the loss of jobs, the loss of government services.

She defended George Bush and said that it is unfair to blame him, because this economic collapse just so happened to have occurred during his administration. She threw out Fannie and Freddie as being to blame, of poor people buying homes they couldn't afford.

I suggested that Bush had made very poor appointments, that throughout the federal government, professional departments had been politicized. The best people were not in positions to regulate mortgages and the sale of securities, and ward off the chaos. I also explained how mortgage companies targeted communities of color and exploited people's naivete by convincing them that their new homes that they couldn't afford would continue to gain value, thus protecting their investments.

We both agreed that this economic crisis was caused by greed.

That's when I told her that I believed in choice, that my husband serves on the board of a local Planned Parenthood, and that our daughter is an escort.

"You like me, don't you?" I asked. She nodded. "See we both care about our communities. We don't have to agree on everything. But a single issue shouldn't prevent us for working together to make our communities better."

She didn't punch me.