a story about my mother
My mother immigrated to the United States in 1987, where she completed a master's degree at the University of Massachusetts, brought me into existence, and then moved her family of three to Toronto in 1990. During the six and a half years we lived in Canada, she and my father both became Canadian citizens. We moved back to the States in 1996, but my mother did not apply for U.S. citizenship until a decade later.
She became a citizen not too long before the contentious midterm elections of that year. Being of solid liberal persuasions myself but lacking suffrage, I beseeched my mother to register with and vote for the Democratic Party down the ticket. How could you bear another six years of Rick "Homosexuality Is a Plague Unto God's Green Earth" Santorum representing the wondrous Keystone State, I asked her? But she was unmoved by my pleas and reiterated her affiliation as an independent. She was, I think, very much that middle-of-the-political-spectrum swing voter, biased towards neither party and perhaps slightly disdainful of the muck that characterises the American political system around election season. Certainly, whenever I accidentally launched into a rant about George Bush and the Republicans over the dinner table, she would always ask me why I cared so much.
A year or so passed, during which the 2008 presidential primaries began to dominate the headlines. There was that Clinton vs. Obama thing, but, for some time, I could not make my mind up towards the two (I should like to think my dilemma was common to many in the Democratic Party: I was fascinated by Barack but harboured a suspicion that Hillary was the smarter candidate to nominate -- clearly, my initial impressions were very incorrect!) and threw my lukewarm support behind Joe Biden. (He is Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- I couldn't help it.)
I went home for Thanksgiving last year, and I still remember that, when my dad picked me up at the bus stop in Philly, one of the first things he told me was how my mother had suddenly turned political. She spent her evenings watching CNN election coverage, probably had a better grasp of the state of primaries than I did, and found herself increasingly drawn towards that skinny black senator from Illinois with a funny name. There was something different about him, she would say -- yes, he was a politician, but he was not like the others. While I was home, she constantly reminded me to make sure that I was registered to vote, that I knew how to apply for an absentee ballot. A few months later, she switched her party affiliation to Democratic in order to vote for Obama during the Pennsylvania primary, and she has gotten into more than one argument with my dad about donating money to the Obama campaign. The longest phone conversation we have had to date was about the ridiculousness that was Sarah Palin.
The Obama campaign has been credited more than once with bringing more people into the political process, and the last person I ever expected to be affected by that was my mother. And, yet, it happened -- somewhere along the line, between the repetitive television commercials and phone calls from field offices, she was inspired, and after slogging through the whole of this fucking election, it is Barack Obama's articulation of a greater, forward-looking, more inclusive America that has made the difference. Perhaps, as the cynics say, inspiration is thin, airy, insubstantial, not unlike hope and the audacity to believe in its realisation, but I believe differently, my mother believes differently, and maybe, at last, this country may just cast its lot in with the unlikely story that has been our past and the soaring narrative that will, with fortune, be our future as well.
Signing off, V.M. Bell
She became a citizen not too long before the contentious midterm elections of that year. Being of solid liberal persuasions myself but lacking suffrage, I beseeched my mother to register with and vote for the Democratic Party down the ticket. How could you bear another six years of Rick "Homosexuality Is a Plague Unto God's Green Earth" Santorum representing the wondrous Keystone State, I asked her? But she was unmoved by my pleas and reiterated her affiliation as an independent. She was, I think, very much that middle-of-the-political-spectrum swing voter, biased towards neither party and perhaps slightly disdainful of the muck that characterises the American political system around election season. Certainly, whenever I accidentally launched into a rant about George Bush and the Republicans over the dinner table, she would always ask me why I cared so much.
A year or so passed, during which the 2008 presidential primaries began to dominate the headlines. There was that Clinton vs. Obama thing, but, for some time, I could not make my mind up towards the two (I should like to think my dilemma was common to many in the Democratic Party: I was fascinated by Barack but harboured a suspicion that Hillary was the smarter candidate to nominate -- clearly, my initial impressions were very incorrect!) and threw my lukewarm support behind Joe Biden. (He is Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- I couldn't help it.)
I went home for Thanksgiving last year, and I still remember that, when my dad picked me up at the bus stop in Philly, one of the first things he told me was how my mother had suddenly turned political. She spent her evenings watching CNN election coverage, probably had a better grasp of the state of primaries than I did, and found herself increasingly drawn towards that skinny black senator from Illinois with a funny name. There was something different about him, she would say -- yes, he was a politician, but he was not like the others. While I was home, she constantly reminded me to make sure that I was registered to vote, that I knew how to apply for an absentee ballot. A few months later, she switched her party affiliation to Democratic in order to vote for Obama during the Pennsylvania primary, and she has gotten into more than one argument with my dad about donating money to the Obama campaign. The longest phone conversation we have had to date was about the ridiculousness that was Sarah Palin.
The Obama campaign has been credited more than once with bringing more people into the political process, and the last person I ever expected to be affected by that was my mother. And, yet, it happened -- somewhere along the line, between the repetitive television commercials and phone calls from field offices, she was inspired, and after slogging through the whole of this fucking election, it is Barack Obama's articulation of a greater, forward-looking, more inclusive America that has made the difference. Perhaps, as the cynics say, inspiration is thin, airy, insubstantial, not unlike hope and the audacity to believe in its realisation, but I believe differently, my mother believes differently, and maybe, at last, this country may just cast its lot in with the unlikely story that has been our past and the soaring narrative that will, with fortune, be our future as well.
Signing off, V.M. Bell