The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

When I was a young girl, my grandmother purchased the apartment building she’d lived in. I lived there with my dad and my mom. My aunt, my dad’s sister, and her children (my cousins) lived there as well. This was in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, NY. Then, as now, Bedford-Stuyvesant was known as a tough neighborhood, and my mom and dad, as soon as could be arranged, purchased a house in an entirely different section of Brooklyn. My aunt moved out after awhile too – she moved to New Jersey.

My parents divorced when I was 8, and not too long after that, my father remarried – and moved back into my grandmother’s apartment building. He, being a community organizer, believed firmly in reinvesting in the community. Besides creating a community services center in the storefront of my grandmother’s building, my father and my stepmother purchased a number of other properties on the block. The dream was to purchase, renovate, and make productive the many otherwise rundown or abandoned buildings in the community.

That they accomplished as much as they did (the purchase of the several properties) was impressive because they were not rich. If anything – they were lower middle class, and their only income was whatever they would earn from low-income housing (only sometimes collecting rents) and the small salaries they paid themselves from grants brought into the community service center.

Out of the community service center, my father and stepmother coordinated social services for people in the neighborhood. The peripherally (or actually) homeless, the poor seniors shut in and unable to get about to take care of their basic needs – these were their clients. Helping welfare moms find both work and childcare was part of what they did long before Clinton coined the term “workfare.” Sometimes over a summer break, I would work in the soup kitchen that they ran. My dad taught me never to look down on people. The worst criminal could be a productive member of society… my dad had a way of organizing recently paroled men into neighborhood watches or other volunteer service.

My father, unfortunately, failed to live up to his own highest aspirations. He became addicted to drugs and over time, lost everything. My father’s demise took its toll on the neighborhood – the shining hope that had once been there – the belief that something good could happen on Ralph Avenue, and that maybe the residents there could be a part of it, died with my father’s failures.

At the age of 60, my dad was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Years of cocaine use is hard on a heart. This summer I spent a lot of time on the old block. I was working to get my father off the block, and into senior housing. His wife had died at the start of the summer, and I had a hope against all hope that my father would finally have improved living conditions that would let him regain some of his health, and some hope for living. I asked him what he thought of Obama’s chances. He thought that Obama would win. I asked him if folks in the neighborhood were excited about it all… he said no.

In the end, even after getting my dad set up in decent housing, he died. He was only 63, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe he died clean. Hopelessness, when it sets in, is worse than cancer – and even the excitement of this moment doesn’t reach fully into the deepest part of the inner city. Nothing short of a win – and real results – will bring hope to communities that are used to black failure, both at our own hands, and at the ever-present hand of racism.

So – today, with only a day and change left to this election season, I’m offering the one reason I never let myself offer before, for why I want Obama to win. I want him to win because he’s black. Because – I want people who are teetering on the edge of hopelessness, who’ve seen it all, done it all, and don’t believe in change – I want them to see change happen. I want that self-defeatist doubt to finally be itself doubted… I want hope to become real for those who don’t dare to hope.

I’ve had lots of reasons to want Obama to win. I’ve come around on universal health care. I absolutely want green energy. I am sick of corruption going unchecked. I’m concerned that government has gotten too complex for the little people to monitor it. I think Obama can bring about change in all of those conditions. But just for today – I want Obama to win, because I want it to be finally proven that it really CAN happen. And I want him to be a kick-butt president, because I have already seen what it looks like when a brilliant man with a generous heart and an innovative mind lets himself and others down. Obama has proven, against lots of odds, not least of which includes beating the trajectory of drug involvement, that he can deliver. I want to see him do it.

When my father died, it fell to me to go through his things, decide what to keep and what to toss. In a suit pocket, I found 2 dollars. It was all he had to his name. I promised to do a good deed with those two dollars, because as a Baha’i, I believe that good deeds done in the name of the deceased help their souls in the hereafter. I put one dollar in the bucket at a 12 step meeting – one that my father would have qualified for had he ever availed himself of the opportunity. I donated $20 And to the nice round number of 20, I’m adding $1. So, that’s 20 from me, and 1 from my dad, in support of hope, and change.

I donated directly at Barack Obama’s site and as part of Bob Cesca’s fundraising drive, which is here: https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/pf?outreach_page_id=69867

QT

I started to answer Sarah Palin’s speech point for point, but it just got tiring.  Here are tools to find out the facts for yourself:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/gop_convention_spin_part_ii.html

http://www.obamataxcut.com

http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxtopics/presidential_candidates.cfm

http://www.samefacts.com/archives/campaign_2008_/2008/09/palin_v_reality.php

But these statements need answering:

This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn’t just need an organizer.

Hard not to take that personally, but I long ago promised a post on the submect of community organizing and I’m delinquent.  It will be up by Monday, in honor of my dad, who I will bury that day.

In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers.

And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.

Yet another character insult, and this one highly offensive.  I wish John McCain has used his career to stay the course of change, but instead he is now lock-step with the far right of the republican base – the very same who have been running the country for 12 of the last 20 years, including the last 8.   But alas, it was not to be.

What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he’s done turning back the waters and healing the planet?

Frankly, though the nation may not be fully appreciative, if this were “all” that was accomplished – notwithstanding, this will have been a LOT to accomplish.

http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?showtopic=53990

http://www.exisle.net/mb/index.php?showtopic=48360&hl=cities
QT

Obama’s going to get a lot of flack about the “faith-based initiatives” announcement he plans to make today, as part of his major speech about faith.  He gets 100% support from ME, because I believe this is a fundamentally African-American perspective.

I’ll pause here to apologize.  I meant to start this project talking about sexism, but then my life went a little haywire – my dad and his wife, both chronically ill, needed my attention, and then my stepmother died – and while I will soon make an Obama Project post about her, I’ve not had the heart to do it just yet.  In the meantime, this issue has caught my attention, because it brings home for me how much like my Dad Sen. Obama is.

African-Americans are considered to be much more conservative than much of the democratic party, and in my own personal experience, I find this to be true.  Attitudinally, I’m one of those conservative minded folk.  I find it liberating to be divorced from political parties, because it forces me to truly vote my conscience, and not according to partisan agendas.   At least one reason why African Americans are so conservative is because of our rootedness in our religious experience.   Perhaps Obama was thinking of the African American experience when he talked about people clinging to religion – black folks do so to a large extent – and to the extent that we do, the community hangs together, and when we lose that binding tie – we fall apart.  For African Americans – religion has been the portal to freedom and progress across the board.  Churches acted as stations in the Underground Railroad.   Biblical passages acted as beacons of hope in the stride toward freedom.  Preachers railed about injustice through the generations – Martin Luther King is just the most famous – not the first or only example of this… and Malcolm X, though he was of another faith, was yet another example of the expectation of blacks that faith would be an active force in today’s world, not just in the promise of a better hereafter.

Community activism therefore, frequently began and ended at the church – and in a disgraceful crisis of black male absence from religious life, the way to attract black men to faith has been in to assure them that they were not going to be passive waiters on God’s Accomplishment, but active instruments of God’s Will.  If they could pray, and then get up and sign up 50 new voters, or march on Washington, or city hall, or whatever – men could believe that there was something worthwhile in Faith.  Obama came to faith in this way – a trajectory that isn’t uncommon in the black community.

My dad was also a community organizer.  Raised Christian, having taken a turn with Islam, and having been for a while a Black Panther (original black panther), community activism was the hallmark of his life for most of mine. And while many would suppose that a former Black Panther would be against anything “white” – when I was old enough to observe my dad in action – one of his biggest allied organization was Catholic Charities – the Catholic church in his community ran a homeless shelter/soup kitchen/day care center/etc.  My dad worked with them to find funding, ran his own community service center in which he processed clients and referred them to Catholic Charities, etc.  Funding that became available through Lyndon Johnson dried up under Reagan, and took a considerable toll on his efforts as a small community organizer – and therefore on the community in which he served.

Looking at my dad’s example, I know that increased funding to charitable organizations – including religious ones, would have been a boon to the community.  My dad lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn.  In Brooklyn, we called it ‘Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy” – which should give you a good idea of just how rough a neighborhood it is.  A community full of people falling through the cracks… the homeless who aren’t homeless enough to be counted as such, the kids being left to raise themselves as their parents struggle through addiction, the abandoned buildings that serve as tax shelters to whomever owns them but refuse to actually develop them (leaving the crack addicts to make these places their homes), etc… these aren’t problems government can fix alone – these are problems that absolutely require a partnership between the local community and the government.

My dad is now disabled, and I’ve been spending the last few weeks running around trying to get him situated with social services.  The bureaucracy involved is unbelievable.  Many reading this post will be squeezed, as I am, between children and parents needing care. But not many will be dealing with a parent who misses qualifying for medicaid by $24.00.  Not many will be struggling to figure out if HEAP and Section 8 will meet his need to survive on a budget of $769.00/month.  Not many will be banging their heads against a brick wall trying to get themselves established as the designated payee by social security for a parent who has short term memory loss, mild dementia, and is surrounded (and possibly influenced) by crack-addicts who know when his social security check arrives in the mail.  The bureaucracy that is absolutely necessary to ensure that our government services are being used appropriately – is in the way of the real person who needs help.  Local charitable organizations, including religious ones could help immensely – because being closer to the ground they are more able to make real assessments, and not rely on guidelines set  in abstract.

This perspective – one that rather disproportionately affects African Americans, is one that Obama has, first hand, as a community organizer from the South Side of Chicago.  I have no doubt that he’s seen this kind of problem first hand, over and over… and I have no doubt that this is what drives his decision to continue, and even expand, the faith-based policy that Bush established, while his personal eclectic background gives me confidence that he will genuinely apply the principles – it won’t be a “Christians only” kind of thing.

As a Baha’i, commitment to service is absolutely a fundamental of the Faith.  Much of the Faith’s efforts are wholly self-funded – only Baha’is are able to contribute to Baha’i funds.  That said – there have been a number of initiatives Baha’is have been involved in that have extended beyond the Faith and reached out in partnership with government and/or interfaith groups.  These would benefit from funding from Faith-Based initiatives – and I believe these would have truly transformative influence on the communities where they are based.

QT