Community Action

I admit to being jittery yesterday, working alone in my office, trying to deal with all of the unexpected: someone tried to charge $8,000 through our website, and tried over 200 times. The filters worked, but I unexpectedly spent time increasing the available protections through the guidance of a young, patient support person over the telephone. Thank you, Traver, for your kindness and patience.

All day long the day got more complicated. One vendor said a bill was past due; that required finding an image of the canceled check and sending it out. A conference call had to be arranged for 9:00 pm. Everyone I spoke with was feeling overwhelmed. Somehow I managed to admit that I was and with that out in the air, others confessed their unease.

On my way to a late afternoon meeting the traffic was horrendous, meaning that I had to get off the highway and wind my way through the back roads to get there during rush hour. I didn't have the confidence I ordinarily have while driving, so the added complexity of driving on streets with stop lights and cross streets made me wary.

And I was late. I hate being late. My arrival did constitute a quorum at least, so I was welcomed.

And then the meeting began, a group of concerned citizens who care about our communities, diverse, every shade of skin, every accent, every primary identity. We wanted to do something to relieve the community of its angst in a way that created community.

As the conversation continued, as each of us participated, and everyone did in a lively discussion, all of the jitteriness disappeared. All of it dissipated.

Because we had gotten outside of ourselves and become a creative, living, consensus.

We are going to explore having public hearings where people from around the county can come and tell their stories about housing: buying an inflated valued home that required too much income to maintain, predatory lending and how it feels to be conned into financing, losing a job and therefore losing a home, and perhaps the most pervasive, fear of losing a home. What we realized was that because of the complicity involved in many of these predatory mortgage deals, homeowners knowing that their income was been inflated on the application forms, people feel shamed into silence. We want to get through that silence and listen.

We want to let everyone know they are not alone. We are not alone. And our insecurity and fear are isolating. We have to work through it and find the commonality.

Priorities--From the Start

Jon Stewart asked Barack Obama just before the election whether he was sure he really wanted the job. Certainly things in America and the world have rapidly changed since Obama first stood on the steps of the Illinois State House in Springfield and announced his candidacy almost two years ago. And as we get closer to Inauguration Day, the Bush administration seems to be going a little wacko again: bombing civilians in Afghanistan, bombing into Pakistan, and getting too close to the borders with Syria for the health of the planet.

With just 76 days left, the Bush administration is capable of doing anything.

What should the new president's priorities be? We have millions more Americans about to be thrown out of their homes in foreclosure; we have a planet that is rapidly warming and disappearing resources, drinking water, and fossil fuels; we have an economy that has collapsed from deregulation, greed, and mismanagement; we have an educational system that is no longer serving the interests of either the families whose children attend, the teachers who earn a livelihood, or the nation which needs an educated workforce; our infrastructure of roads and bridges is deteriorating; our health care system is bankrupting families and small businesses while not making modern medicine accessible to the people who really need it; and our voting system is so flawed that it is inevitable to have another hanging chad, contested election like we had in Florida in 2000.

We can no longer afford to engage in an arms race, especially since the arms race is with Russia once again and China whose might we haven't even imagined as its economy expands. I often think about Star Wars and how the Rebellion beat the evil Empire despite its Death Star with small, targeted strikes. That is how our new renegade enemies will keep us alert, but the new president hopefully will not use fear as Bush and Cheney did.

Then there is the little matter of prosecuting the officials in the Bush administration responsible for the war on terror that includes such techniques as torture, rendition, and illegal surveillance. In the documentary "Boogie Man" about Lee Atwater, it is suggested that if Bill Clinton had prosecuted the Bush I administration for its role in Iran Contra, the architects of the Bush II administration would all have been in jail or disgraced. We might have avoided the last eight years.

We can't wait for President Obama to set his priorities. We have to set our own in our own communities. We saw a network of coalitions working together on the ground to elect this intelligent and composed man. We met neighbors and made new friends. We reached across labels. So why don't we start at home?

Why don't we start now?

The Whole World is Watching and Holding Its Breath

Today I had lunch with a man who joined Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department back then. He helped to draft the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This gentleman friend is almost twenty years older than I am, so during our lifetimes, there were still men and women living in the United States who had been born in bondage; they had been slaves.

When he helped write the Voting Rights Act, he never imagined that tomorrow he would be voting for an African American man for president who has a good chance of winning.

I spoke with my daughter this evening. She is a college student studying in Prague for the semester. She has already cast her ballot for Obama. She called me while she was filling out the absentee ballot so that we could share her first vote together just as she and I had shared most of my voting from the time she was about two or three until 2004 when she pressed the lever for Kerry although Bush won.

At first, she was furious with me for voting for Obama in the primary.

"Your whole life, " she rebuked me on the night of Super Tuesday, "you have wanted to vote for a woman. How could you not vote for Hillary."

I told her I voted for Obama because I believed that he could change the tone of election politics, end the era of Lee Atwater and lies, I believed that he could engage young people in civic life, that he could attract men and women whose faces might look different, but who wanted to make the United States of America a proud citizen of the planet.

She was still really angry at me that night.

Just now, just tonight, she told me she understood why I had supported Obama all of this time. She understood that Obama had indeed changed the tone of the election, that he never went into negative, he never attacked character, he never tried to divide.

He offered us ways to heal.

My friend Rebecca who works full time, has three adult children and two grandchildren, a husband, too, and who has been traveling to Pennsylvania on the weekends to get out the vote, asked me the other night: What are we going to do after Election Day?

We are going to make this happen, this real collaboration, this real community that includes everyone.