rivka

The first of what is likely to be a continuing series:

1. "I'm going upstairs to take my shower. If you need me, come up to the bathroom."

2. "I love you, good night. I'll see you in the morning." (leaves the room without any fuss ensuing.)

3. "Your tummy hurts? Does it hurt like it's achy, or like you're going to throw up?" (receives clear, comprehensible answer.)

4. "Hey, let's go to the library. Here are your shoes and coat - put them on while I get our books together." (leaves the house less than ten minutes later.)

Okay, so only 1 and 4 are going to become totally impossible when the baby gets here. The other two will still conceivably happen with Alex. (Or, conceivably, not. I am expecting her bedtime to go to hell when there is a baby competing with her for attention.) But there are ways in which parenting an older child spoils you, and it's going to be hard to start at square one again.

Dear vehicular traffic,

If you are driving along a downtown street with heavy foot traffic, and it is raining hard, and there are massive puddles in the gutters, there is no law that says you must slow down to avoid throwing sheets of icy water up onto pedestrians.

However, if you don't do so? Then you are an asshole.

Sincerely,

Woman who is soaking wet up to the thighs despite carrying a golf umbrella.

At dinner last night, Alex announced, "Some people with white skin are mean to people with brown skin."

Yikes. "That's right," I said.

"And some people help them get away from the people who are mean."

"Did you learn about this at Sunday School today?" She nodded. "Who helps them?"

"People." She thought for a moment, and then said, "People with brown skin had to do aaaalll the housework."

"That's not fair!" I said. She nodded. "And other people helped them get away?" A lightbulb went off in my head. "Did you learn about Harriet Tubman?" She smiled, and nodded again.

This was surely the point for a parental message about values, but as God is my witness I had no idea what to say or how far to take it. I stuck to her terms: "We always want to be the people who help, and not the people who are mean."

I mentally sorted through and discarded various other things I could add, like "it doesn't matter what color someone is" (demonstrably not true) and finally came up with: "It's important to be nice and friendly to everyone, no matter what color they are. Even if they have purple skin."

"Even if they have blue skin," Alex contributed. We ran through a few more colors, and the conversation was over.

---

I would have put this conversation off, if I could. I haven't been in a hurry to teach Alex about prejudice and bigotry and discrimination and inequality. I fully recognize that, among adults, "I don't see color" becomes an excuse for failure to confront racism and privilege, but among preschoolers it seems like a fine starting position. Or do I have blinders on? What is the age at which I'd feel comfortable sitting my daughter down and explaining that people who look like her have done awful things to people who look like some of her classmates and cousins?

A few weeks ago we were looking at pictures of Sasha and Malia Obama. (One of Obama's unique qualifications in the Presidential race, to Alex, was that "he has little girls like me.") After we'd sorted through a dozen or so pictures, she said, sounding as if it had just occurred to her, "They both have brown skin."

"Yeah," I said. "That's because Mr. Obama and Mrs. Obama both have brown skin, and children are usually the same color as their parents." I wondered if she had never noticed before that Obama is black. (We had been over the heritability-of-skin-color thing before, when she asked why some kids have brown skin.) It certainly didn't seem to be something she thought was noteworthy about him. And why would she? In her three and a half years of life experience, where would she have encountered the necessary background information?

Alex is starting off from a place of innocence. When she tells us (as she's been doing lately; the preschool years are a time of categorization) "Most families in our land have a dad in them, but there isn't a dad at Nick and Allie's house," or "Some kids have two moms, and some kids have two dads," she is completely unaware that those are weighted, fraught categories. She's just describing. Michael and I cheerfully reinforce the normality of all of those family structures. We want her to know, from the very beginning of knowing, that there are many equally valuable ways of being a family. And yet, the passage of Prop 8 makes it so abundantly clear that it's not as simple as Alex's happy categorizing.

As I try to feel my way through parenting, my feeling has been that the right thing to do is to establish bedrock principles of equality and acceptance from the start, so that when Alex encounters concepts like prejudice and discrimination they will feel wrong to her on a gut level.

And you know, it would be so tempting to stop there. It is hard, hard, hard to violate her innocence by teaching her about the rest of it: the history and present course of discrimination in our country and in the world, the ways in which we benefit from prejudice even though we reject it, the moral responsibility we have to change the world to be more like we wish it were already.

I guess I should be grateful that Sunday School gave us a push forward yesterday. Part of me feels like it's too early, like three-and-a-half is too young to know about slavery and racism. But when would I think she was ready? When would it be time?

...I guess that's why we take her to church for moral guidance, huh?

Okay, by request: the script for the Christmas pageant I wrote. ( Read more... )

I spent twelve hours yesterday driving to Harrisburg PA, getting out the vote for Obama, and driving home. It was a much better use of those twelve hours than the fretting which I would have inevitably done if I'd had time. ( Read more... )

I'm crying.

Being American feels different now.

I just made last-minute contact with the Obama campaign to verify plans for tomorrow. They're diverting me to a "staging office," because there's no possible way the Harrisburg campaign headquarters can hold all the volunteers who are coming. My campaign contact reassured me that there will be indoor sitting-down work available as well as canvassing. (I can probably walk door-to-door for four hours or so, but not for the 8.5 hours I'm planning to be in Harrisburg.)

Harrisburg is a 90-minute trip from my house. I'm planning to leave around 7:30, arrive there at 9, stay until 5:30, and get home again around 7 or so. Then acceberskoorb, lynsaurus, and unodelman will come by for a while to watch election returns. Hopefully they will still like me after they've seen what I'm like at a high pitch of nerves. Or maybe I'll be so tired after a long day of campaigning that I'll be more bearable?

Things to do tonight: pack up a bunch of high-protein, high-calorie snacks in case it's hard to get food on the run tomorrow. Make brownies and cut up veggies for returns-watching. Get Alex's things ready so I can get her out of bed and straight out the door. Refresh fivethirtyeight.com until my fingers bleed. Fret.

Arranging for someone else to take your kid to school is more complicated in the carseat era. I looked through the nursery school directory for kids in Alex's class who (a) live close enough to walk to school, and (b) don't have parents with high-pressure jobs who need to get to work super-early. I wound up with a family I don't know terribly well - just to exchange a few sentences here and there, not someone Alex has actually had playdates with. I knew they were big Obama supporters, so I went ahead and left them a begging voicemail and got a very nice voicemail reply.

I made contact with the mom in that family this morning at school drop-off. "Bring her by any time! It's no trouble! We're up at the crack of dawn!" I explained that I would send Alex's breakfast along with her. "We've got plenty of breakfast food! Don't worry about it!"

"Thank you so, so much," I said.

"No, thank you," she said sincerely. "Thank you for going to Pennsylvania."

"I have to do something," I told her. "Otherwise the anxiety is going to kill me."

A while back I posted about McCain's apparent lack of a ground campaign - and especially the lack of a nationwide organizational structure capable of matching up against Barack Obama's. At the time, the discrepancy in the ground campaigns seemed so incredible that I was half-convinced there was some kind of weird Trojan Horse thing going on - a stealth ground campaign we couldn't see.

According to the Washington Post, apparently not:

McCain has faced a severe spending imbalance during most of the fall, but the Republican nominee squirreled away enough funds to pay for a raft of television ads in critical battleground states over the next four days, said Evan Tracey, a political analyst who monitors television spending.

The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain's strategy.

The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.

"The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground," said one top Republican strategist who has been privy to McCain's plans.

The Post article quotes a campaign advisor saying that negative ads are more likely to change people's minds than personal contacts are. And maybe that's what the McCain campaign believes. But to me this reads more like a campaign that has realized that it can't and won't win (check out this piece of desperation), and is doing what it can to poison the well and make governance harder for the next president.

The problem with my giving up/spoiler interpretation is the overwhelming evidence that the ground campaign has been lacking from the beginning, even in swing states where it was presumably needed most. That link is to a 538.com article called "The Big Empty," a summary of their experiences visiting 50 McCain offices in 13 battleground states. It's a devastating indictment of the campaign - check out their photos, in particular.

On the flip side, Obama's ground organization has been truly revolutionary. Everyone with an interest in practical politics should read this lengthy, thoughtful, and fascinating analysis of how the Obama ground campaign is structured, and their intense efforts to develop, nurture, and sustain volunteer leadership.

The "New Organizers" have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so "top-down" and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or "bottom-up" organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.

Win or lose, "The New Organizers" have already transformed thousands of communities—and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation. Obama must continue to feed and lead the organization they have built—either as president or in opposition. If he doesn't, then the broader progressive movement needs to figure out how to pick this up, keep it going and spread it to all 50 states.

As I read the article, I kept thinking of my experiences working with Dean For America in 2003-2004. Many of the organizing principles sounded like grown-up, much-improved versions of the work we were trying to do in the Dean campaign. And indeed, the success of the Obama organization developed from both the DFA organization and Dean's work to develop a nationwide Democratic Party structure in his work as the Chair of the DNC.

Because I'm still a Dean partisan in many ways, I'm so thrilled to finally see public recognition of the brilliance of his 50 State Strategy. When he took over as head of the DNC, a lot of people thought sending paid Democratic organizers into places like North Carolina was a dumb waste of money. Dean looks like a genius now.

I love this anti-prop-8 ad narrated by Samuel L. Jackson:



And in case there was any doubt: Post this on your blog if you're in an opposite-sex marriage and you don't want it to be "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage cheapens or hurts it somehow.

Yes, of course. Unquestionably. Absolutely.

We have lesbian friends who are expecting a baby six weeks before we're expecting the Niblet. There is no difference between their family and ours. Their son ought to have the exact same right to be born into a stable, legally protected, societally-recognized marriage that our son will have. And the same obviously goes for our GLBT friends who don't have kids, as well. Love is love. Marriage is marriage. Families are families. Sexual orientation should have nothing to do with it.

Alex says, "This is the Scary Mama pumpkin and the Scary Child pumpkin. And the Papa pumpkin is gaming."

Carving pumpkins into jack o' lanterns is a pretty weird ritual, if you think about having to explain it to someone unfamiliar with the practice. (Richard Dawkins wouldn't approve at all.)

Alex was much more involved with the project this year, although she was pretty dubious about actually reaching her hand in to scoop out pumpkin guts. But she consulted heavily on the design, scooped a fair amount of the guts out with a spoon, and helped me pick out seeds to save for roasting.



Under the cut is a bonus picture of Alex, just because I love it. ( Read more... )