Why I Support Barack Obama

...which is surprising based on how strongly I feel about women taking leadership positions and being equally included. I remember being angry as a kid realizing that I often saw Jeopardy with three male contestants but never with three female contestants. (That's changed.)

I've been hearing a lot recently about how older voters seem to support Hillary more and younger voters gravitate toward Barack. An NPR piece I heard recently gave two reasons that make sense to me:
1. Older feminists and members of the Civil Rights movement feel an affinity toward Hillary because she was part of those movements, while we as younger voters take that for granted.
2. Younger voters are attracted to Barack's message of hope. That is certainly the strongest pull for me. We've grown up tired of seeing older people perpetuating their ideas of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and American imperialism. We'd like to see something better. (Now, I'm not saying everyone over 30 is a bigot, mind you, but, at least as my generation perceives it, the majority of people who think that way are older than us. There are plenty of people who actually grow in wisdom as they age, and I'm grateful to those around me that teach me about life, but don't we all know someone 60 years old who thought he knew everything there was to know at 20, and has changed not at all for the last 40 years?)

However, this doesn't address my largest concern with Hillary Clinton becoming president. I was conflicted about my feelings between the two at first until I read an article in Newsweek that pointed out that the Bushes and the Clintons have occupied the White House for 20 years straight now, and Hillary becoming president would continue to keep the power within only 2 families. Now if you're older, it might be easier to overlook, but think of how long 20 years seems to a 20-something like me. I was born in the Reagan administration, but the first election and first president I remember is George H.W. Bush, who was elected when I was 6. If Hillary is elected president that means when I am 31 (or 35 if she gets 2 terms), my entire living memory would be of only 2 families in power. That's possibly a third of my lifetime. It smacks of dynasty and is distasteful to me, however much I like some of Hillary's ideas, particularly health care. So, while I would probably vote for her in 10 or 15 years, if Indiana has any say in the matter (which it probably won't), I'm supporting Obama.

An incidental concern I've heard some mention is that Hillary is too polarizing to the opposition. Meaning that if she was the nominee, more conservatives would come out to vote, just to vote against her because they don't like her. I think there is some truth to that, but it wouldn't make me choose someone over her if that were the only concern I had. Why? Because while I think that few hard-line conservatives would admit it (because it would mostly make them unpopular), it's not really a problem with Hillary that they have. It's a problem with women. Yeah, they dislike her personality, but it's going to be similar to the personality of any woman that can go that far in politics. I suspect that what they dislike is how vocal she is, how strong she is, how she speaks her opinion, which is not what they think a woman should be. So while they (mostly) say that they support having women in leadership, they don't like any of the women capable of doing that.

That's my opinion, to have it on record before this all shakes out. Super Tuesday is in two days, and it seems quite likely that there will be a clear front runner after that. But...who knows?

Of Socialism, Communism, and Terrorism (Ah, the -isms!)

Today was the last day of summer school, so now I have about 6 weeks until school starts up again that are pretty much work free! (I have a half-day training in Rosetta Stone in July, and a full day Leadership Retreat in August, and I will be doing some reading, decorating, and planning in the meantime, especially in early August, but quite little compared with how much I normally work. And I can have lots of days with no working at all if I want.) Not to say summer school wasn't fun. But I kind of wished it would have started an hour later so I could have slept more. Oh well.

Yesterday, after the first hour of class, I ended up talking to one of the ENL students relating to the essay he'd done on his test about foreign policy and the military. He asked in particular why the US and Venezuela have such relationship problems now. (For those of the uninformed, Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, recently called George W. the devil, and Bush, while not so colorful in his language, has been very strongly disapproving of Chavez.) I tried to explain it the best I could, because I do have what I believe is a pretty good theory, though I'm sure my explanation came across much less articulately in Spanish than it will as I try to explain it in English here:

As I see it, the main problem is that Venezuela, in contrast to the US, is very socialist. Chavez is a socialist. Most news outlets refer to Venezuela or the Chavez government at some time or another as "leftist". I don't think the problem is really a left/right one, though it seems slightly suspicious that Bush ("right wing") is anti-Chavez ("left wing") and vice versa, and in contrast, I'm more progressive (read "leftist") and am much more approving of Venezuela's policies, though I don't consider myself informed enough to really speak specifically to any of them.

Actually, I think the real issue is the leftover ethos of the Cold War. As I tried to explain to my student, adults just a bit older than me grew up in the Cold War, with fallout drills and this desperate fear of communism. Rather than being just an alternate political system, or even a bad alternate system, it was taught as a monster, a bogeyman of sorts, the demon that could destroy the world if we didn't "contain" it. While communism and socialism are not the same thing, they are deeply linked in people's minds, and this primitive childhood fear overrides a lot of adult reason. And the majority of adults today lived through the Cold War; a very significant portion of adults today were in their formative childhood years during the Cold War. I think this leads to a deep, innate, illogical distrust of all things socialist in a large percentage of the population. My student made the logical jump to how today we fear terrorists. That is the communism, the "bogeyman" for today's children.

In contrast, I grew up in the 80's, in the "detente", when the tension was beginning to cool off. We didn't have fallout drills; there wasn't the same fear of nuclear annihilation. It's true I did somehow or another still absorb some of that attitude. I don't even know who or what taught it to me, but I remember being deeply shocked learning about communism in 7th grade social studies. The basic tenet of communism is equality of all and that no one should lack basic necessities? Where's the evil part? However, I'm sure my indoctrination was much less intense, and I was able to think more logically about communism than my older counterparts. I don't particularly want our country to become communist, but I would like it to be more socialized.

In many ways I feel I am in a lucky in-between generation. Not old enough to be indoctrinated into anti-communist thought, but old enough by 2001 to not become perpetually afraid of terrorists. My formative years were relatively calm and relatively free of those sorts propaganda. Of course, it may just be my individual attitude and deliberate attempt not to be manipulated by the fear-mongering our politicians and media seem to push on us today. I was talking to a teacher at school recently who is older than me but was deeply affected in the bias kind of way by 9-11. I personally resent how politicians try to control us through fear. It doesn't make us a better people. I believe it makes us worse.

That's my sermon for now. It was an interesting thing to think about, one reason I enjoyed teaching the class this summer.