fox

I related the story this morning, but here is the bit I was thinking of:

The experience with the Driving Master emphasizes the profound truth of of an old story.  If you don't know it, it's time you heard it.  If you know it, you ought to hear it again once in a while.

The story says that a traveler from Italy came to the French town of Chartres to see the great church that was being built there.  Arriving at the end of the day, he went to the site just as the workmen were leaving for home.  He asked one man, covered with dust, what he did there.  The man replied that he was a stonemason.  He spent his days carving rocks.  Another man, when asked, said he was a glassblower who spent his days making slabs of colored glass.  Still another workman replied that he was a blacksmith who pounded iron for a living.

Wandering into the deepening gloom of the unfinished edifice, the traveler came upon an older woman, armed with a broom, sweeping up the stone chips and wood shavings and glass shards from the day's work.  "What are you doing?" he asked.

The woman paused, leaning on her broom, and looking up toward the high arches, replied, "Me?  I'm building a cathedral for the Glory of Almighty God."

I've often thought about the people of Chartres.  They began something they knew they would never see completed.  They built for something larger than themselves.  They had a magnificent vision.

-- Robert Fulghum: "It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It"

Fulghum's essay is mainly about a driving instructor, but it could just as easily have been about, say, any given volunteer with the Obama campaign's Pennsylvania voter protection team.  Or any other state's voter protection team.  Or any other volunteer.  Or any voter, to be perfectly honest.  Don't you think?

That's all.  Good night, everybody.  :-)

So I don't have Fulghum's essay in front of me, but I believe the bit I'm thinking of is from his piece about Chartres, in which he points out that the people who began and worked on the cathedral there did so knowing it would not (in fact could not) be finished in their lifetimes. As I remember, the anecdote as he tells it has a person asking several individuals at work what they are doing. The stonemason said, "I'm carving stone." And the woodworker said, "I'm carving wood." And the glazier said, "I'm staining glass." And a woman sweeping up sawdust said, "Me? I'm building a cathedral to Almighty God."

( So here is a rough accounting of my day yesterday. )

I had some thoughts about the disappointment of those who are disappointed, and how I cannot at the moment believe that disappointment can possibly be compared to our disappointment (around which I have thought long and hard and decided not to use quotation marks) in the last two elections ( -- ) but instead, I will note this:

See, in the above timeline, how the cautious optimism persisted even as the thing looked surer and surer and surer? And then I got home and saw my flist, and one post after another where people were saying things like "OMG (almost!)" and "YES, barring electoral irregularities, WE DID!" and so on. It's kind of funny, how the Democrats and their usual supporters have learned that there is no such thing as too much caution, and how you can't count a chicken before it has hatched and survived at least a couple of days, and so on. Kind of funny. In a poignant sort of way.

Not letting it harsh my buzz, though. Not a bit. :-D

Oh brave new world! I am coming home now.

In Philadelphia. Can't sleep. Much too keyed up. Alarm set for 4am. Send tranquilizers. (won't get comments, so send a text if you need me to reply.)

Okay, y'all, I am about to fix my coffee and head out of the house, and the next time I return to my own apartment there will be a president-elect.  Holy crap.  Hoooly crap.  I may be starting to panic just a little bit, here.

Can anyone help me stave off my worry by suggesting what a person might bring to the lovely couple of complete strangers whose house she'll be crashing in for the, you know, very few hours she'll be able to sleep Monday night?  (I will send them a note when I return, naturally, but I think it's nice to have something upon arrival as well.)

Um.  Right.  Mustn't forget the EZPass.  I've got my bag.  Coffee's ready.

Oh, god.

538.com made me cry.

Back at the rally, after the march had left MLK Gardens, I'd gone back for the car while Brett took photos, and I spotted a very old black man in a sharp Sunday suit walking slowly at the very back of the huge march. He hadn't yet arrived at the voting center, and I decided to find him when I got back.

I wanted to go talk to him, to ask him what this moment meant to him. He was a guy who you take one glance at, and know, that guy's seen it all. I wanted a quote. I had my journalist hat on. I thought, this will be great.

So when I got back to the voting location with the car, I went to find him in the line. Eventually I spotted him, and was ready to walk up the few feet between us and introduce myself when I stopped in my tracks.

A young black boy, no more than eight years old, walked up to this man, who was at least eighty. The boy offered the man a sticker, probably an "I Voted" sticker, but I couldn't see. The man took the sticker and paused. Silently, he looked down at the boy, who was looking back up at the man. The man put his hand gently on the boy's head, and I saw his eyes glisten.

I didn't ask the man for a quote. I didn't need to. I walked over by myself, behind the community center, and I sat down on a bench next to the track, and wept.

To trivialize just for a second: you know how I loved The West Wing, right. And you remember the episode where Charlie gets a letter to the president from a little kid that turns out to have been sent to FDR in the 30's? And the little kid is now an old man, and his son brings him to the White House, and after he gets his picture taken with the president, he says "I'd like my picture taken with that young man, if you don't mind", and the old man is just bursting with pride for Charlie, because look how much the world has changed since he was a boy. That moment always had me misting up a little bit.

Y'all, that was nothing.

Fun with computers:  it seems (per samtheeagle, who I understand would know) that there are Technical (ahem) Difficulties causing machines in early-voting states to switch straight-ticket Democratic ballots to Republican without the voters' knowledge.

Fun!

It seems a workaround that works is to vote individual candidates instead of straight-ticket, and thus you can be more sure that you're casting the votes you intend to cast.  (I'd have recommended this anyway, machines or no, because I happen to believe that straight-ticket voting demonstrates what could look like a sort of lack of giving matters much thought -- wouldn't necessarily be, of course, because you could think about it and decide you agree with all the candidates and positions on one side and then vote straight ticket as it happens; just this year, I had a look at the sample D ballot for my county after I'd filled in my absentee ballot, and I'd got all the answers "right" without even drinking any Kool-Aid -- but nevertheless, at the moment for more reasons than mere appearances, voting individual candidates is a better-than-usual idea.)

As you've probably heard by now, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled today that the state law restricting marriage to heterosexually-composed couples violates the state's constitution.

At the same time, opponents of California's Proposition 8 (which would rewrite the state constitution to rescind the equal marriage rights currently enjoyed California's citizens) are running out of money, which makes it difficult to advertise and lobby and so on. You can make a donation to the cause of defeating Prop 8 here.



I know there are some of you who must prefer that equal marriage rights not be available to same-sex couples.¹ You'd probably phrase it differently; you'd probably point out that all you oppose is "changing the definition of 'marriage'" (with or without the word "traditional" in there somewhere). That is, most of you are not consciously opposed to equal rights for citizens unlike yourselves. (Many people are so opposed, of course, but I don't think that's true of my friends.) But in case any of you can be convinced, let me set up a thought problem.

Suppose you adopt a child. That child is yours, right, it's your child, and you are its parent, and it is your child, and it would be deeply, deeply wrong for people to

• (a) withhold certain parental rights from you (or filial rights from your child) on the grounds that you don't meet the traditional definition of "parent"² or
  
• (b) use scare-quotes to describe you as the child's "mother" or the child as your "son".

Adoptive parents are parents, and their adopted children are their children, and they have all the rights (and responsibilities) they would have if they were related by blood, and this is what we're saying should be true of all married couples irrespective of the genders of their constituents.

Maybe your religion is more specific about such things than the secular world is. That's fine. I don't think hardly anybody is saying the priests and pastors and rabbis and imams and whoever-all else performs marriages should be required to marry any old couple that approaches them. My own parents couldn't find a rabbi to marry them, for example, because they were not both Jewish. But any judge or other empowered government official (I don't know who all can do weddings; my brother was married by a mayor) who refused to marry a mixed couple would have been outside the scope of his or her authority, right? So what each religion sets as its standards is up to each religion's governor(s). But married people don't have to be married by a clergyman; and people who aren't married by a clergyman are just as married, in the eyes of the law (if not the eyes of your/their/any god or God), as people who are. So people who wish to be married in the eyes of the law, and who aren't interested in the eyes of any deity, should be allowed to marry.

If they've got a gripe with their religion, that's a separate question. Like I said, the religions' standards are their own business. But the law should treat all citizens equally. Legally adoptive parents are parents, and legally adopted children are children, and legally married people are spouses, and that is -- or ought to be -- that.

Thanks for your time.


¹ In case you're interested: Why I don't talk about "gay marriage" or "same-sex marriage", and if you're in favor of equal marriage rights, why I don't think you should either.

² (OED: "A person who is one of the progenitors of a child; a father or mother"; Merriam-Webster: "One that begets or brings forth offspring"; both dictionaries also note those who assume parent-like responsibilities, such as stepparents or adoptive parents, and list those right under "parent", but both dictionaries also acknowledge the extended use of "marriage" to apply to couples of the same sex, so let's not get into that just now, shall we?)

(well, in three hours ago, apparently, but I just saw it) --

The McCain campaign is abandoning Michigan.



I'll tell you what: all of a sudden I feel a lot better about watching tonight's debate.

I know when I put together questionnaires (which I did some in grad school and do some now at work), I often have the responses on a six-point scale -- an even number of options, is the point, so people can't just abdicate answering a given question. There's no button for "no opinion".

Still annoys me when I meet that on a questionnaire I'm taking, though. :-) In this case, there weren't questions on which I had no opinion, but there were ones where I felt like boiling it down to "agree" or "disagree" was too facile. (I mean, of course.) What I wound up doing was choosing "agree" when I found myself thinking "well, yes, but ..." and "disagree" when I found myself thinking "not unless ...".

I do pretty much agree with the result I got, though. ( Not quite a Socialist, but it's a close call. )

So I haven't caught any of the convention before tonight, but I wanted to be sure to see Obama's big speech (sure, I can see it on endless replay later, but it was important to me to see it in real time).  A home run, that's for sure.  I'll tell you what:  there are days when this seems more or less inevitable.  It's very encouraging.  I mean, I voted for Clinton and Gore and Kerry because that was who there was, but this is the first time a candidate I was pleased with made it as far as actually getting the nod (for the record, my preference in '04 was Howard Dean, so, yeah.  Clinton was incumbent in '96, of course, and Gore was a shoo-in in 2000, so 2004 has been the only election in my voting life where I've had a primary to deal with).  This will be the first candidate I will be glad to vote for, instead of just fine with voting for under the circumstances (or resigned to voting for, or shrugging and considering it a vote against the other guy).

There are other days, mind you, where I reflect that surer things have gone badly wrong before, and I won't really be confident until about November 15th.  It's not in the bank yet, you guys.

... But tonight was the first one, the feeling that it's inevitable.  Ten weeks.  We can make it another ten weeks.  Let's do this thing.

All day yesterday I kept hearing about the "last two"  Democratic candidates' debate last night in LA, and this morning I see again how they say the "two remaining contenders for the nomination", and all I'm thinking is, not that he was ever a contender at all, but did Kucinich officially drop out when I wasn't looking?

I'm feeling better and better about Barack Obama.

I was leaning a little Edwards-... well, Edwards-ward for a long time, simply because I didn't have enough hope that enough of our fellow citizens could bring themselves to vote for anyone but a white man to think of Clinton or Obama as the best nominee. (Tortured syntax, I know. Lots of embedding. I'll give you a minute. Everyone back with me?) If we could make one of these out of the three of them, it'd be a walkover -- instead of a heart/head/hands trio, we've sort of got a sincerity/experience/electability trio, and an amalgam of the three candidates would be the perfect storm, wouldn't it?

Alas, candidate-grafting technology is still unavailable to us, so we have to pick one. And I know it's still early days, so Obama could still end up not being the nominee; and I'd be fine with either of the other two as the nominee, truly, because even Bill Richardson could probably beat the (with apologies to my right-leaning friends) clowns and whatnot the Republicans are trying to decide among. But the more I pay attention over the past few days, the more I like Obama, and the more I find myself (despite how wonderful the phrase "Madam President" would be) hoping he wins, and, because the guy is a tremendous orator with that kind of effect on people, daring to imagine it, not with "if", but with "when".