I received this email from my daughter the morning after the Democratic Convention "This lead in the New York Times made me tear up thinking about you and your generation. Thank you for all you did!"
"Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, who sacrificed personal ambition for her husband's political career and then rose to be a globally influential figure, became the first woman to accept a major party's presidential nomination . . . , a prize that generations of American women have dreamed about for one of their own."
Of course I was thrilled about Hillary's nomination as the first woman candidate to represent a major political party. And I am indeed deeply grateful to my daughter for her acknowledgment of what my generation did to pave the way for a female presidential candidate, and potentially for election of a female president. I am thrilled that we now can celebrate women in the Senate, Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as those serving as CEOs., fire and police chiefs, and in military commanders. All of this was an impossible dream when I assumed a leadership position of the NH state Legislature in the 1970's.
But I am not feeling elated just yet. yet. I've been disappointed before Geraldine Ferraro, the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). I will celebrate when Hillary wins. Too much misogyny surrounds the current situation. Hillary is the proverbial "better qualified" candidate, with more knowledge and experience than the competition. Yet she's held to a higher standard. She has to worry about how she dresses, her hair, her sagging chin, her husband's public infidelities. In some ways not much has changed.
I don't want to be an old curmudgeon. Obviously I'm delighted. However, what really excites me after the Democratic Convention is that Hillary has shown us a way past identity politics. Every one of we mothers identifies with the black mothers who have lost their sons, and the Muslim parents who lost their child in Iraq trying to save his fellow soldiers, and the mother of the homosexual child, as well as the wife of the dead police officer. As they told their stories, the color of their skin, their religion, their sexual orientation was not what was on our minds. They spoke to our hearts and as our eyes filled with tears, we identified with them because we are wives and mothers, fathers and brothers, sons, daughters, and cousins as well as friends. Many of us have felt boxed in by identity politics, forced to choose between one segment of ourselves and another. The gift the Democratic Convention gave America was permission to say "I am human," and there are many aspects of you and of me. We will not come together by promoting only our own needs but by helping each other will all of us benefit.
To be fair, the Republicans started us thinking in this direction when they nominated Sarah Palin for vice president in the previous presidential election cycle. Many females just couldn't vote for John McCain simply because there was a woman on his ticket. Identity politics proved weak. We need more than a similar package to convince us we have similar interests.
The myth of the Lone Ranger as the enduring American icon was also tarnished by Hillary and the Democrats. The Lone Ranger, that iconic character of American independence, like all superheroes had a sidekick who didn't get much of the credit though he did a lot of the work. Tonto, the Indian, scouted and explored and allowed the Lone Ranger to succeed. Hillary brought us back to the Constitution, which protected the rights of both the many and the few, the majority and the minority. "We the people" are a collective. As has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, "We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."
What exhilarates me today is that we all have a roadmap for diminishing our identity differences. We are all more than our face or body or skin color. If we stop putting each other into boxes, we can learn from each other.
To do that, we need to forget name-calling and politically correct calling out, and instead relate to each other as curious, compassionate human beings. Let's stop chastising each other and applaud all of us who helps both our own group, as well as others. After all, we are, in part, "the other."
I'm not a cockeyed idealist who believes that if we just sit down and talk we will all get along. The Constitution was written to protect all of us against our worst selves. We need those protections, but we also need to call upon the very finest qualities we as human beings have.