Happy Mother's Day to Two Awesome Moms: Mine, and Chelsea Clinton's
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Happy Mother"s Day to Two Awesome Moms: Mine, and Chelsea Clinton"s
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Hillary Clinton reminds me of my mom. She always has. I remember the headbands when HRC tried to win affordable healthcare for all back in 1994 – my mom had a perm back then, and the same pantsuits. Hillary defied and reinvented the role of First Spouse. She crashed into our living rooms at the twilight of broadcast television: a liberal gunner on Capitol Hill, crusading for single-payer, putting her heart and mind out there, naively, full of hope and vulnerability, to fight for a fairer society. Congress tore her to shreds. The armored Hillary we know today rose from the ashes of that moment. Call her a Phoenix. Put on armor to survive, or retreat and die.
What my mom loves about HRC: single payer, “not some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette”, NOT baking cookies (!), her wicked intelligence, her stamina and endurance, her grit and determination, her pragmatic progressivism, did I say her insane intelligence, and her pretty killer outfits.
My mom is a canary of her generation. Where were you during the Vietnam War? My mom was an anti-war crusader, who (full disclosure) went to North Vietnam, following Jane Fonda on that infamous trip. She cut sugarcane in Cuba with the pro-revolution Venceremos Brigades (!!), swiftly returning home with the firm conviction that manual labor, and communism generally, were not really the way to go. I came to consciousness as a kid in the 80’s, so my early memories of mom are shoulder pads and workout leggings and a high-flying career in hyper-over-drive, and a Nordstroms shopping card when Nordstroms was still just a shoe store. Mandatory organic broccoli every night for dinner, and no TV except Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.
Then my mom realized she couldn’t change the world just by fighting against it, so she went back to law school when I was in college and become a public prosecutor. It was weird; I thought we were against the racist patriarchy. She decided she could do more to protect the environment by locking-up polluters, and more to make sure defendants got a fair trial by having the prosecutorial power to offer them a fair deal. She made compromises, joined the system, and started looking to make real incremental improvements in peoples lives. She realized that sustainable revolutions are forged over decades, step-by-step, not in an instant.
As my dad always says (stubbornly misquoting Winston Churchill): if you’re not a communist in your youth you have no heart, and if you’re not a capitalist in your age you have no brain.
HRC is the mom my own mom would have been, could have been, if she had not been changing diapers and driving carpools and cooking dinner and watching her kid’s crappy soccer games. Someone had to put a thousand cracks in the glass ceiling so that my mom’s promise to me that I could be anything I dreamed, anything I wanted to be, would actually become true someday. HRC was living for both of them.
The thing is, my mom would have made an epic, awesome president. Conscientious. Reliable. Resourceful. Dogged. Pragmatic. Inquisitive. Unflagging. When my grandmother was dying, mom’s persistence and determination and force of will overawed even the doctors. My mom fought-off breast cancer while finishing law school, a bruising battle that left her always an infection away from the emergency room. And through everything, she is always there for me, always one step ahead. (In high school, how did she just instinctively know that I snuck across the border to go clubbing in Tijuana?) A shelter in a storm, a captain of a leaking patched-up family ship sailing through pirate waters to unknown shores. Willing to do whatever it takes to get done whatever needs to get done.
Hillary Clinton is one of the most qualified people ever to have run for president. She is also sometimes wrong on the issues. (She was catastrophically wrong on Iraq in 2002. Along with more than 2/3rds of Americans. She has yet to outline a concrete progressive vision on trade. But neither has Sanders, or, really, anyone else. And she recognizes that she was wrong to support her husband’s disastrous tough-on-crime policies that destroyed poor, largely minority communities and fueled an era of mass incarceration.) Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether those mistakes represent genuine poor judgment, or the self-preservation of an ambitious political long game.
No one is perfect, my mom least of all. Four decades — of parenthood or public life — is a treacherous journey: when someone has to make decisions, they will sometimes get it wrong. Although my mom sometimes drives me crazy, and often in the moment I think that she is crazy, my mom (and HRC) is right on the issues, and prescient, and dogged, and brilliant, and resilient–thousands of times more often than she is wrong. We don’t hear about the countless right decisions Hillary made every single day as Secretary of State or Senator or in her pretty stellar pre-political career. Like rabid pack dogs, Hillary’s foes only pounce when they smell blood, pulling us all into the melee. HRC is a doer of deeds, a crafter of deals, a pragmatic progressive, a Phoenix, a survivor. Her revolution is an evolution, reflecting her convictions regarding the outer edge of what is possible in the times in which decisions must be made.
To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the one who points out how the strong woman stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the woman who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends herself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Happy Mother’s Day to two awesome moms. Thank you, for daring greatly.
Source: All Huff New feed
Happy Mother"s Day to Two Awesome Moms: Mine, and Chelsea Clinton"s
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