My Mother Takes A Stand

These have been dark days indeed, but my late Mom's most radical political act - you'll be surprised - gives us the right direction for the future.

On this day in 1934, a year and a half into FDR’s first term and the New Deal, but in a country still very much in the grip of the Great Depression, my mother was born. She left us less than three weeks ago, on Halloween, worn down at last by the ravages of rapidly advancing dementia and a devastating series of falls. Over these last months, as the election drew near I was always conscious that another life-altering event was also marching relentlessly closer. My writing slowed, as small daily necessities increased. Then the cascading last crisis. And the truly unavoidable. Thus, on Election Day we held her wake and on November 6th her funeral, that warm and bright morning dawning in steep contrast to our vast understanding of loss.

The cemetery grass crackled under our feet, so late was the summer weather, so dry this autumn in New York. It didn’t take much to imagine the return to biblical dust. But it was supremely challenging to eulogize such a long life of service on the morning after an election won by a crowd of playground bullies who spit upon the kind of high aspirations my mother had for the generations of students she had in her grade school classes. (Her eulogy is here).

It is difficult to reconcile the kind of life my Mom led - a teacher for 50 years, a constant volunteer in her community, and a pillar to her family - with the cruelty and coarseness that prevailed in our national election just as her own life slipped away. The kids would call it trauma. I’d call it exhausting, like wearing some kind of emotional ballast that weighs down each step. And added to that are the endless hot takes and post mortems. How the Democrats failed. Why we lost votes with - pick your affiliate group - young people, white women, minority men, the working class (define that one, folks). So much blather, so little time. 

Better to ask: why does this country favor a degenerate guttersnipe of a man? Why did it choose mean-spiritedness, spitefulness and squalid bigotry? Why do people enjoy garish clowns, their cadre of lickspittle handmaidens and playground bullies, and the always present human temptation of the scapegoat. Refugees and trans kids this time around; vulnerable, culturally weak and an easy target for the threatening bile raised by scum like the Elon Musks of this world.

My mother was no political radical, but she did do one amazingly radical political thing with her life: she voted the straight Democratic ticket in every election for 70 years. 

She grew up under FDR and remembered his death in 1945 almost like the premature death of her own father just three years later. She loved JFK and took me as a toddler to his new gravesite. She voted for Stevenson, LBJ, Humphrey, McGovern (I was in the booth with her), Carter, Ted Kennedy, Mondale, Dukakis, Bill Clinton (who she loved), Al Gore (who she did not), Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton (also a fave), and Joe Biden (another Catholic in the White House, as she pointed out at the time). Of course, her parents were both Democrats and she grew up in a staunch Democratic household. Her father was Democratic ward leader in Yonkers in the Al Smith years; her mother served on the housing commission. They were all New Dealers.

To my Mom, Democrats won the war (there was only one conflict answering to “the war” when I was a kid, and this was during Vietnam), saved the country from the Depression, sent a man to the moon, spoke for a new generation, created Social Security and Medicare and - later, I must note - became in her eyes the political party of fairness to others too often let down by American society. The Republicans were (early on) the party of Nixon and the rich and (later on) the party that bigots all seemed to gravitate towards. During her lifetime, as a relatively conservative Kennedy Catholic Democrat who grew up in a tightly-knit white ethnic middle class neighborhood, she embraced civil rights and marriage equality, immigration reform, and even a form of feminism. She was proud of her kids when they got involved, and she liked to talk politics. I don’t want to paint one of those overly idealistic pastoral scenes she was so fond of on her walls; Mom had significant blind spots, certainly judged against the strictures of her grandchildren’s generation.

But her unbreakable allegiance to voting Row A in New York State had me thinking as I studiously ignored most of the “what Democrats must do now!” desiderata of various pod bros and follower farmers. So much of their exhaust fumage centered on messaging, slogans, advertising and outreach to the various subgroups. So many of them were glued with some kind of sticky fluid to the carcass Trump, as if he will survive forever. It suggested a simpler way: a stronger organizational bond to the Democratic Party itself - to a basic series of ideals that are both aspirational and oppositional (to the brownshirts). Party loyalty. Maybe that’s the next big thing. 

In any case, what goes around comes around. Should this republic survive the outbreak of cultural cancer it is currently facing, this gang will have its day like all gangs do. Rather than pull the switch on some flashy new strategy, I think we who oppose this metastasizing madness should stand back a bit - and let them fall. Kamala Harris, in my view, fought valiantly against the vast populist infection that swirls throughout the developed world, an anti-incumbent fever that’s both a hangover from the pandemic and the zombie-like staggering of people who are both clueless and terminally angry. Water hits the rock, and recedes back across the sand.

We can and should vocally oppose the worst excesses - particularly those who make blood sport of victimizing our neighbors using government power. We must all speak out. But no big rally will change this. No fundraising campaign will reverse it. We can’t simply organize harder. Some of this is now, sadly, beyond our ability to control or change. We are at the top of the first big rollercoaster drop, and the ride’s gonna go down. It will be cold comfort to see so many of those who voted for this man and his gang materially damaged by their coarse demigod.

I’m not very religious, but my mother was. And as she was carried from the church in which she’d spent six decades as an active parishioner, with her adult grandchildren as pallbearers, we emerged into the bright sunlight of the day after Election Day. And we kept going. Through these last two weeks. And we’ll keep going. The last time I was alone with Mom, very briefly by her hospice bed, I told her that if someone came for her, it was okay to go along. A couple of hours later, she did. 

It is a fine thing to have a mother at your side for 62 years. A very fine thing indeed. I’d wish this gift for everyone.