Vote

 

I will spare you the regular gibberish about this being the most important election ever and the dire warnings that we will descend into civil war. I think all Americans of voting age should vote because it is our patriotic duty no matter who is on the ballot.

I endorse Joe Biden for President and hope you vote for him. But even if you support Trump or a third-party candidate: go vote. This is your country, and you owe it to yourself to be counted.   

My history of picking winners is pitiful. I volunteered for the Bill Bradley campaign in 2000 with zero regrets. Bill Bradley was a Rhodes Scholar who became a basketball superstar and served as a U.S. Senator from New Jersey for three terms. He was the kind of intellect we need in public office but also had a breadth of life experience that made him rise above the pack of regular career machine politicians. He opposed the establishment favorite: Vice President Al Gore.

At his campaign event on the night of Super Tuesday, I noticed none of the big screens in the hotel ballroom were showing any primary results. The party swelled and Bill Bradley came through the crowd toward the stage. Bradley towered above everyone else. He gave a brief speech where he mentioned that he would assess the future of his campaign over the next several days but also made us proud to have been part of the campaign and focused on important issues facing the country. The party wound down and I saw various political and intellectual celebrities there. Professor Cornel West was on the stage close to Bradley and I was glad to see former New York City Mayor Ed Koch (who for me is the one person in the world who will always embody New York City) giving interviews in support of the former Senator.

It wasn’t until I got home and clicked on the TV news did I see the actual results and Holy shit, we got killed! Al Gore’s political machine had made quick work of the Bradley campaign, and Super Tuesday was the coup de grace. Bradley dropped out of the race a few days later. I cast my vote for Al Gore that November with no enthusiasm for Gore but with the indignity that someone as much of a vapid empty suit as George W. Bush had no business getting the nomination of a major political party. I couldn’t believe Republicans could be so gullible to pick Bush over Sen. John McCain, who would have wiped the floor with Al Gore in the general election.

In 2004, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was the one who seemed to get it the most, who told Democrats that the people who drove around in pickup trucks with Confederate flags on them needed to be voting for Democrats too, because they needed healthcare and their kids needed an education. He was promising to take Democrats off the dangerous course of our own culture war. That promise evaporated with Dean’s campaign; I sent in my absentee ballot for John Kerry because he wasn’t George. W. Bush.

Both political parties are now broken. With Trump, we have the same incredulity that came with George W. Bush’s nomination: How could a major political party elevate such a fraud to the highest office of the land? With Biden, we have an establishment politician who had to embrace the excesses of the Democratic Party’s activist wing to secure the nomination.

But the disaster of the Trump presidency, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, makes this election a no-brainer. Biden was not my first choice, but he is the best choice of the two main political parties, and we stand to lose too much ground as a country with another four years of Trump.

All I ask my Trump supporter friends is that they judge the President by his record of the past four years. Would you have forgiven a Democrat who talked big and delivered little on patriotic immigration reform? Would Barak Obama have been able to shrug off reports of Russians paying bounties for American troops killed in Afghanistan? Would even George W. Bush have had the delusional gall to tell the nation that we’ve turned a corner on the Coronavirus pandemic as the U.S. breaks its daily record of new cases?

Please vote.

Celebrating Suffragettes at Washington Irving’s Sunnyside

While I would be content to sit in an air-conditioned space from late May through the end of September, I know people can’t live that way and remain productive members of society. The world is already positioned to encourage my children to be mind-numbed couch potatoes glued to electronic devices; we’ve got to counter that as best we can while we still wield some influence over them.

My wife found out about an event happening at Sunnyside, the estate of Washington Irving in Tarrytown, New York, which is not too far a drive up from Queens. We decided to go. We have three girls and with women’s political activism in its ascendency we must strike while the iron is hot to give them a sense of empowerment.

Vote Like a Girl was hosted by HistoricHudson Valley at Washington Irving’s Sunnyside. The author, best known for short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” lived in Tarrytown and his home is preserved as a historic site.

The event included a staged debate between a man who advocated for suffrage and a woman who denounced the suffragette movement, a parade of suffragettes marching from the visitor’s center to Irving’s cottage, and a reading from Susan Hood, author of Shaking Things Up: Fourteen Young Women Who Changed the World.  

The event was not only a celebration of the suffragette movement, but an encouraging look at a future with things that were encouraging to young girls. They had a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) room at the event that allowed girls to play in ways that helped develop scientific concepts, and an arts and crafts room that had some projects that spoke to the theme of the day, such as cross-stitching political messages and making Statue of Liberty-like crowns.

There were also fashion demonstrations, allowing women and girls to see what they would have likely worn had they grown up in the 1800s or early 1900s. And our girls tried their hand at kids’ games from that era—attempting to walk on wooden stilts or keep a barrel loop moving with a short stick both look a lot easier than they actually are.

Sunnyside is a great place to visit and was a winning trip with small children in tow. It is on the bank of the Hudson River and has sunny lawns and shady spots for picnicking.

Years ago I attended a holiday candle light tour there and it was excellent, showing visitors how Irving’s house would have been decorated during the Christmas season (e.g., lots of wreathes but no Christmas tree). In mentioning the candle light holiday tour to one of the employees there, she said that while they had been discontinued, they were very popular and that there was hope that they could be brought back.

While the cause of women’s suffrage is not exactly up for debate any longer in the U.S., the role of women in government and society continues to evolve. There are more female candidates running for public office than at times in the past and the revulsion of President Trump and the potential shift in the Supreme Court further right means that women’s issues are going to be central in our political dialogues over the next several years.

And if you are trying to raise girls, it is hard to cut through the constant noise of our common culture, where women’s place in society is not highly valued. Women who are given the largest platform are often not there for productive achievements that are desired or realistic for our daughters (the nine “most Googled” women of 2018 turned up zero scientists, elected officials, or Supreme Court Justices; all were entertainers or reality television personalities). So let us glory in the history of women’s suffrage and use that as a springboard to greater ends.