Hope is not enough
I have about a million things going through my head right now. I'm registered green and supported McKinney in the primaries, and am terribly disappointed that Matt Gonzalez is on Nader's ticket. I campaigned for Gonzalez for mayor in SF when he ran against Newsom, but I've lost any respect I had for him.
I'm in New Mexico, which is somewhat a swing state, so I'm throwing my vote to Obama. I just want to see him win by a landslide. I want it to be a thrashing. I want the GOPniks to know that they lost, and lost bad.
But I'm a 31 year old white radical that came of age politically during the WTO protests in Seattle, and the whole "hope" thing has me on edge. My Grandma, who is 93 now, told me a story about when she was little. She grew up in Tulsa, and was around for the race riot in 1921. She had to have been around five but she remembers it vividly. One of her father's black co-worker came to the house during the worst of it and her father, my great grand-father, hid him in a closet to keep him safe. Her mother was scared to death because had he been found the house would probably been torched. That story has always inspired me. But I'm scared of hope because I'm scared that white people don't understand that that sort of danger is what we may need to put ourselves in. Shit, I'm scared that I don't have the courage to put myself in that sort of danger. Because the right-wing is going to attack, and hard.
Hope is not enough. I'm sure that the people here know that. It isn't Obama that I lack faith in, it's all my fellow white folks.
I'm in New Mexico, which is somewhat a swing state, so I'm throwing my vote to Obama. I just want to see him win by a landslide. I want it to be a thrashing. I want the GOPniks to know that they lost, and lost bad.
But I'm a 31 year old white radical that came of age politically during the WTO protests in Seattle, and the whole "hope" thing has me on edge. My Grandma, who is 93 now, told me a story about when she was little. She grew up in Tulsa, and was around for the race riot in 1921. She had to have been around five but she remembers it vividly. One of her father's black co-worker came to the house during the worst of it and her father, my great grand-father, hid him in a closet to keep him safe. Her mother was scared to death because had he been found the house would probably been torched. That story has always inspired me. But I'm scared of hope because I'm scared that white people don't understand that that sort of danger is what we may need to put ourselves in. Shit, I'm scared that I don't have the courage to put myself in that sort of danger. Because the right-wing is going to attack, and hard.
Hope is not enough. I'm sure that the people here know that. It isn't Obama that I lack faith in, it's all my fellow white folks.