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All Politics is Personal
 It
was
Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of the House,
who once said that all politics is local.
With apologies to old Tip, I will go one step
further. All politics is personal.
Whatever one's political preferences, who
cannot admire
Barack Obama's verve, spirit, and
oratorical skills? But the words of his pastor,
the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who Obama has
revered and trumpeted as his inspiration and
spiritual advisor, make one shudder with
embarrassment for the candidate even as he
attempts to override, excuse, justify, and
separate himself from the pastor's hateful
rhetoric while avowing his solidarity with the
Reverend.
As for me, my reaction is visceral,
complicated, entangled with my life's experiences
and, therefore, deeply personal, just as Obama's
reaction was deeply personal. Of course, I am not
running for President and my voice is a tiny
whisper compared to his. But I treasure my one
vote and my reaction means just as much to me as
Obama's reaction means to him.
At the height of the
Depression, my family was
periodically dispossessed from our apartments and
took refuge at my grandparents' house in
Brownsville, Brooklyn. My father, a bookkeeper,
was serially unemployed, and luckily my
grandparents had at least one son who had the
means to buy them a tiny detached house where
family members economically squashed by the
severity of the depression could take refuge.
Frankly, I never knew where the money came from
to keep food on the table. I think my uncles might
have contributed something, but I was certain that
my dad would never have gone on the
public dole,
which was considered a disgrace. As a child during
those times, I never had a sense of deprivation,
nor can I remember anyone in the family whining
about America's injustice and discrimination,
despite the fact that
anti-Semitism was rampant in
those years and many doors were closed to Jewish
employment and housing.
Such bigotry was considered a fact of life and
far worse than the brutality and murderous
pogroms
of Eastern Europe that had driven my grandparents
to immigrate to the United States. At least they
were alive and free and there were, despite the
discrimination, enough avenues of opportunity to
assure their survival.
My grandparents had arrived
penniless in America around the turn of the
twentieth century and had lived here three decades
before the depression hit. By then their family of
six children had grown to eight, and their sons
were slowly finding their way into mainstream
America. I had little knowledge of their hardships
and struggles and happily passed through infancy
and pre-school days in the loving arms of my stay
at home mother and dad in blissful ignorance of
their economic troubles. When I entered
P.S. 183 in
Brownsville, we were living through yet
another depression whiplash caused by my father’s
layoff.
School days always began with
the pledge of allegiance and in our weekly
assemblies we began the proceedings with the
"Star Spangled Banner" and a rendition of
"America the Beautiful." We were taught to
memorize such poems as
"I Am An American" by
Elias Lieberman and the last stanza of
"The New Colossus" by
Emma Lazarus, and all of us knew it was
featured on the façade of the
Statue of Liberty. Later, when
Kate Smith forever memorialized
Irving Berlin’s great song
"God Bless America", we were taught the words
and would belt out the song at assembly with great
heartfelt gusto. Hung on the classroom walls, if
memory serves, was a picture of
George Washington.
All this happened in the height of the
depression, when many were unemployed and
economically deprived, but somehow the hard times
did not translate into any loss of faith in
America or in the gospel of freedom, or anything
to shatter our belief that our country was still
the land of the greatest opportunity. Indeed, as
part of the street lore for us kids was that in
the throes of an argument you could bet that
somewhere in the dialogue of contention were the
words, "Oh yeah, well it's a free country and I
can say whatever I want."
Sure there were lots of sour voices declaiming
that America was the land of the bosses, who were
called capitalist pigs, and there were many people
marching through the streets carrying the
Red Flag
replete with hammer and sickle and roaring their
protests. We were not what one might call today an
activist family. We thought of ourselves as
Americans, free citizens in a great land. Never
did we question our commitment to our country.
Yes, we were going through a bad patch and
Franklin Roosevelt told us that the only thing we
had to fear was fear itself and we believed
absolutely in that message. I still do.
While my world was in large part circumscribed
and ghettoized by like folks, most of them Jewish,
we were not immune to the world outside and
ventured out, cautiously to other equally
ghettoized neighborhoods, populated by immigrant
Italian, Greek, Irish, Black, Chinese and other
enclaves were people of like antecedents lived
together in exclusive communities. As we moved
about, cautiously dipping our psychic toes in
these alien neighborhoods, we contemplated these
strangers and they contemplated us. At times these
contemplations became confrontations and we often
retreated. Eventually these ethnic barriers
receded somewhat and confrontation became
tolerance and tolerance became, albeit grudgingly,
acceptance.
At Brooklyn Tech, where I went to high school,
every assembly began with
"The Lord's Prayer." As
a Jewish boy, I never felt uncomfortable reciting
the Lord's Prayer. It was simply part of the
curriculum and didn't in any way affect or intrude
on the possession of my own religious and cultural
certainties. I'm sure there were others who felt
differently. Nor did it bother me in the least to
sing
"Silent Night" and other songs of Christian
celebration. This was, after all, America and that
meant that the flag covered all of us, whatever
our race, creed or religion.
It is true that there was a sense of separation
between religions and races, and it was appalling
to us to see other people persecuted, reviled, and
physically abused in America because of these
differences. Such abuses were not part of the
personal culture of my childhood, except as it was
experienced as a Jew. This did not mean that it
was completely out of our radar range.
We knew that
Harlem was a place for Negroes
with its own rich heritage, just as it was true
for other ethnic populations throughout the city.
Of course, the black and white gulf was wide in my
youth. Although I went through all the phases of
the New York City school system and later attended
New York University, I cannot remember more than
one or two black classmates. It was as if we lived
on different planets.
But, alas, my father-in-law opened a
Stetson
Hat store in the heart of Harlem, which in an odd
way began my insight into the soul of the Negro
experience. No, it will not be within the clichéd
expectation of the traditional attitude of guilt
or pity for the many insults and terrible
persecutions the black people have endured for
years. What I saw on the occasions when I helped
out in that store on 125th Street was something
else, something bigger, something that transcended
whatever I felt before or since.
The hat was an essential accoutrement of a
finished gentleman in the days when I worked in
the store. It defined a sense of completeness and
dignity, and the black men who came into that
store brought with them a solemn dignity, a sense
of self-worth and elegance that was powerful and
intimidating. These were men who held their heads
high with an intrinsic pride in themselves that
nothing on earth could possibly dismantle. As they
looked in the mirror to see themselves in their
hats, I could feel the power of their dignity and
knew they had the pride and fortitude to stare
down any slight that might come their way.
I felt certain that these men defined
themselves as successful, assured, perhaps even
superior, since they had weathered all the storms
that had tried to thwart them and their ancestors
along the way to this moment. It was a lot more
than simply a hat that these men were buying and,
I must admit, I felt small in their presence and,
at the same time, admiration and respect. Believe
me, I am not exaggerating my reaction. I felt it
then and I feel it now and it will forever
influence my attitude toward these people who had
discovered the powerful weapon of dignity.
I know. I know. People will say I am
romanticizing, ignoring the damaging realities of
black persecution and years of cruel and
debilitating treatment at the hands of an
indifferent white culture. It is true that I do
ignore traditional sociological assumptions. But I
am moved by what my eyes saw and my heart told me
and that is that human dignity trumps self-pity
and the culture of victimhood.
These proud men in their wonderful hats spoke
eons about the black experience. These hats were
not made to be doffed to self-acclaimed
superiority. Indeed, they were not there to be
doffed to anyone. I am not an invisible man, their
demeanor told me. I am a person, a somebody.
Of course, these reflections are purely
personal (and political), but Reverend Wright's
words have offended me so deeply that I am
literally paralyzed by grief and embarrassment for
Barack Obama. God Damned America, Wright preached
to a cheering congregation. I am insulted,
chagrined, and disappointed by Obama's reaction,
and I have searched myself to the core to
contemplate its meaning, and this essay is a
modest attempt to explain it to myself and others
who will take the time to read it. Yes, all
politics is personal. It surely is.
Audacity means boldness and daring, not
rationalization of the unacceptable.
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