This diary started out as a comment in a wonderful diary by wu ming, and I decided to expand my thoughts a bit. I was unsure about posting this as a diary, but I have something to say and I hear the daily orange can be a good place to share thoughts with like-minded people, so here it is.
Also, Obama doesn’t surface until the end of the diary, but he is sort of the impetus for the diary. That being said, this is a diary for all Kossacks and not just Obamaniacs. For the record, I would be very happy with a President Clinton; however, the Obama stuff in my diary is true and I find it deeply moving personally, which is why I want to share it.
One further note: I have noticed at times in the past with personal diaries that readers will demand or expect more information or proof from a diarist that personal information is true or accurate. I am willing to assure you that these things are true, but I am not willing to "prove" them by revealing a great deal more about myself. If that makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to skip this diary or to treat it as fiction. Thanks.
I did a family tree a few years ago, and I found that my earliest roots in the United States are deep, like 17th century deep, from English and American Indian and later other western European people. My most recent immigrating family members came from Prussia in the 1820s. My mother’s family was absolutely rooted in Texas, close to one town, named for her family’s surname, for generations from before the beginning of the U.S. annexation of Texas into the present day. With the exception of two American Indian roots on my father’s side, every shoot on my family tree is white and western European, while the excavation of family records, letters and diaries has shown that this has been a tradition on both sides of the family which seems (sadly) to have been carefully preserved through slavery, klan membership, and racism and xenophobia of many manifestations.
In short, immigrants and the immigrant experience have been almost absent from my family history and my sense of personal history until very recently. I remember having an assignment in 5th grade where I had to interview an adult who had immigrated to the United States, and it being very difficult for my parents to help me find anyone who fit the bill. And I lived in an increasingly international Houston at the time. By contrast, in my own life, I have always had friends who are both first and second generation immigrants from countries all over the world.
I have also always been progressively minded. I don’t know if it was caused by the stellar liberal education I received at a private school, or if progressivism is somewhat in-born (I like to think of it as a sort of combination). Despite the fact that my grandparents on both sides regularly and casually referred to black people with the n-word, and my parents did not but also did not object or explicitly teach me any differently, I always inwardly (and, as I grew up, outwardly) rejected racist and xenophobic thinking. In fact, I was perpetually and deeply interested in people who were different than myself. As I look back (and it did not occur to me at the time), my best friends growing up were, almost to a person, non-white or recent immigrants. My best friends in elementary school were the daughter of a second generation Italian American and a little boy from Singapore. My posse in high school was made up a Greek-Dutch girl (1st gen), an Iranian-Italian (2nd gen), an African American, and another white mutt like myself. My first boyfriend was the second generation son of Polish immigrants, neither of whom could speak English. I also found myself in high school and college deeply interested in other cultures; I took Russian literature and Jewish Studies (despite having no connection to either Russia not Judaism) and a variety of language and history courses, just to learn about different people.
At the same time, none of my siblings nor either of my parents did likewise. My siblings were following in the long established traditions of separation and superiority characterizing the thinking in my family for generations, and, while I was not forbidden from studying multi-cultural arts and history, I was chided for "wasting my time" doing so.
In recent years, however, immigration and multiculturalism has hit my family in two major ways. First, after the death of my father, my mother, who had been married to him for 25 years, started dating again. She dated men locally in Texas, but found someone she really liked through the internet. He lived in Canada and only had a few more years of work before he could retire with excellent benefits (Canada’s good like that); so, despite her intense desire to stay rooted in Texas, she decided to move to Canada to marry the man she had fallen in love with. I honestly did not think that she would ever do it; her connection to the area was strong (she had flatly rejected moving to New York City years earlier when my father was offered a dream job there for significantly more money and prestige), plus she was someone who genuinely and strongly believed that the United States is the best country in the world, despite knowing very little about the rest of the world and having traveled to none of it outside of a few touristy Caribbean beach resorts.
When she first moved to Canada in the summer of 2002, my mother understandably had a hard time. The climate is very different from that of Texas, especially in the area where she is, and she had no friends other than her husband (whose newly divorced first wife had histrionically spread rumors around the town about how she had "stolen" him). It was hard for her. Furthermore, my mother’s politics were severely challenged by the swelling anti-American sentiment in Canada at the time; George Bush was beating the drum to war with Iraq, and the Canadian media was not drumming right along as the U.S. media had been doing since the fall of 2001. My mother had never been passionately involved in politics before, but she had several pet issues that meant a lot to her politically. As long as I’ve known her, she’s always been staunchly pro-choice, a believer in the power of education, against flag-burning, extremely proud of her presidential vote for Nixon (she still says she’d do it again), and a solid Republican on taxes. On the last point, she believed that rich people should be able to keep their money, not necessarily because they’d earned it, but because her family had become rich through connections to oil companies, and she liked that money and wanted to keep it. One thing I have to give my mother credit for, is she did not (and does not) bullshit about her politics; she’ll tell you why she believes in something even if it makes her look terrible. Furthermore, she had voted for Bush in 2000, because he was a Texan and an oil man and had promised to lower taxes (despite the fact that the residual money she gets from oil royalties is not enough to live on, and she is by no means wealthy enough to benefit from Bush’s policies). She was angry about his stance on abortion, but not angry enough to take action or to vote differently.
In 2003, it was hard to talk to my mother about politics. She had bought all of Bush’s "Islamo-fascist" bullshit and thought the invasion and occupation of Iraq was necessary to stop a nuclear attack on the United States and to get al Qaeda, since Bush was asserting that the organization was somehow based in Iraq. I remember having conversations with her wherein it was clear she did not understand the fundamental difference between the Taliban and al Qaeda, nor between Hussein and bin Laden. It was a particularly difficult time for me, as I consider Colin Powell’s justification for use of force in Iraq at the U.N. to be THE catalyzing moment in my political life. It’s when I knew I had to get out in the streets and DO something; it’s when I felt like a giant fool for believing Ralph Nader’s assertion that Democrats and Republicans were all the same; it’s when I became a Democrat and, like many new converts to an ideology, I was militant. As I’m sure was the case for many reading this diary, I felt angry and alienated from many people I deeply loved, including my mother, due to political differences on the war.
In the 2004 presidential election, my mother was voting for Bush again, despite her growing opposition to the war in Iraq and her growing conviction that he was deeply stupid or evil or both. She was starting to come around, but she could not bring herself to vote for Kerry because he "bothered" her. I know it’s a ridiculous reason on which to base one’s presidential vote, a fact which I pointed out to her repeatedly and with exasperation, but she had decided to vote for Bush yet again.
In the years since the last presidential election, I have seen a sea change in my mother’s thinking. She gradually stopped complaining about Canadian news coverage and started talking about it with slight admiration. At first, I was hearing about her admiration of how the CBC would talk about each and every Canadian soldier who had been killed in Afghanistan. She started noticing that the U.S. media rarely even mentioned Afghanistan anymore, despite the fact that our soldiers were still dying there. When I told her that the American media was not allowed to show military caskets, she was stunned and then very angry. When Bush made it clear that he would not be pursuing bin Laden anymore, my mother called me, furious. When Bush ignored and then smirked his way through the Katrina disaster, she was outraged. She started watching Keith Olberman religiously every night; she used to call me and talk to me about the Special Comments. Today, she has now come to be perpetually disgusted by the media in the United States, by its fear-mongering, by its obsession with celebrity gossip and little else, by its lack of international scope and perspective. Even Keith’s silly segments and obsession with O’Reilly and Fox News send her off. She recently told me that she’s so grateful to be out of the United States and living in Canada – "You are losing your freedom down there in the states, and Bush is destroying the Constitution, and now here comes the recession and who knows what will happen in Iran." The change in perspective offered by the Canadian media seems to have revolutionized her thinking.
At the same time, my mother has been several years bonding with her husband’s family. His mother is as deeply rooted in Saskatchewan, Canada, as my mother was in Texas. His father, on the other hand, was a first generation Ukrainian immigrant, who had escaped the Soviet Union after being liberated as a teenage boy from a labor camp. In 2005, I went up to Canada to visit my mother, and we ended up spending a few days with her husband’s parents. When I was talking to his father, he mentioned being from the Ukraine and I started asking questions. He started talking and, with the occasional question from me, spent several hours relaying his story – from his youth in the Ukraine under Stalinism to the effects of Nazism to his escape and immigration to Canada to establishing himself in that new country. I was interested in his story, but it wasn’t earth-shattering to me; I was familiar with these events, I had read similar stories in novels and history books. My mother was utterly moved, however. She had never pressed her father-in-law for his story, and she did not know much about the stories of the people who had lived through Stalin and Hitler. (She’s an educated woman; I just don’t think she ever really cared or thought about such things on a personal level). After that encounter, I would notice my mother personalizing politics in our conversations. Later in 2005, my sister had a child, my mother’s first grandchild, and she called me really upset one day – "Can you imagine what it must be like to have a child in Iraq with what’s going on over there? What if your sister lived there? Can you imagine?" Of course I could, I had, I had been reading Riverbend’s blogging about what life was like over there for young women just like me. I had been reading Juan Cole’s expert analysis on what life was like for Iraqis all over that country. But it was the first time it had occurred to my mother in a significant way that Iraqis were real people just like her. I believe that, because of her connection to immigrants who had been really affected by events in other parts of the world, she was really beginning to think about the world and to empathize with the people in it.
I think that the two experiences – the immigration to a new country and the deep connections she has forged with her new in-laws – have had the effect of broadening her political perspective and her worldview. She called me the other day, and stunned me by telling me that, for the first time in her life, she was registered as a Democrat and would be voting in the primary for Barack Obama. She still believes in the Republican taxation philosophy and the inviolability of the American flag, but for the first time, a candidate’s world view was the thing that she was most interested in. She brought up the idea that she thought Obama’s internationalism was an antidote to his relative lack of experience – "He knows about the world; he’s lived in Indonesia, he has family in Kenya; he’s going to think twice before he destroys this world the way George Bush has done". I found myself agreeing with her and mentioning that he also had experienced both black and white America. I believe – and I have seen in the case of my mother – that being exposed to the broader world, to different perspectives, to people from every walk of life, equips us to engage the world in human terms and to avoid the sly pitfalls of xenophobia. When we know Muslims and Middle Easterners, it makes it harder for us to accept terms like "Islamo-fascism" and to accept policies that rely on the popular assumption that one Muslim country is just like another (Afghanistan=Iraq=Iran for many Americans). When we think about the women in Iraq giving birth just like we do, it makes it hard to justify "shock and awe"-ing Iraqi cities with aerial bombardments. Yesterday, at the Oprah Winfrey / Michelle Obama / Maria Shriver political rally for Obama, one of the speakers (I believe it was Oprah) talked extensively about Barack’s wisdom. Wisdom comes, in part, from experience and curiosity and love for the world that can only be achieved through traveling and reading and moving and meeting people who have done all of those things about and around the world. Obama does not have a monopoly on this kind of wisdom, but to me, and to my mother, he seems to absolutely exemplify and embody that spirit of worldliness and movement and change that is the story of so many immigrants.
My mother was looking for a presidential candidate that shared her experiences and values, and for the first time in her life, he wasn’t a rich white old Republican, but a young man of America and Asia and Africa, of black and white, of working class and high political office, of movement and change and vision. And you might not respect the opinion of a woman who remains proud of her vote for Nixon or who refused to vote for Kerry because she just didn’t like his look or the sound of his voice, but that’s my mother. Or, at least, that was her. And I think that, for the first time in her political life, her eyes have been opened to seeing the other people in the world that Republican ideology so utterly ignores. On a very personal level, Obama is the right candidate for my mother right now as her eyes are opening to the world, and it’s a fascinating and wonderful thing to behold.
I mentioned earlier that there are two major ways in which immigration and multiculturalism has hit my family in recent years, and my mother is only one half of that equation. I think I’ll reserve part two for another diary, though, as I’ve written enough for now.