Category Archives: Messaging

I Want My Country Back

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I’m not sure which America she’s talking about either.

To be honest, I find these town hall meetings distressing. Grown ass people are practically throwing tantrums over a social reform agenda that they’d in all likelihood would benefit from. Most of these folks appear to be part of a socio-economic class that gives them health care, but still would lack adequate coverage if they were inflicted with a serious illness.

Rachel Maddow did an excellent account of the strategy or, strategery behind these town hall disruptions. Reasonable people can see through the menagerie and recognize that this is in fact, a politically orchestrated effort.

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These details notwithstanding, it’s still important to parse out language here.

This rally cry of ‘I Want My Country Back’, ‘I Want My America Back’ or some of my other favorite invocations, ‘socialism’, the Obama/Hitler analogies, —the ‘birthers’, and good lord, the ‘deathers‘— just drips with racism. I don’t say this flippantly, but the supposed fringe parts of the conservative movement have invented so many ways to say nigger it’s ridiculous. The language is loaded is white racism that it would be disingenuous of me not to acknowledge it.

However, in acknowledging racism in language is dangerous territory. When you’re trying to coax people to the middle ground, acknowledging racism shuts down communication. People get tongue-tied and lock-jawed on old narratives. They get angry, hurt and defensive. They feel guilty. They stop listening. They act out. No one wants to be seen as a bad person. I think what I’m getting at is that intent behind words like socialist in relation to the Obama Administration’s policies doesn’t sit well. I’m not sure if these folks know what socialism is. I think these words get tossed around and sits on tips of tongues without full awareness of the historic implications behind them.

I’m not sold on health care reform as it stands either. I’m in desperate need of concrete details from Congress and the White House. But I live in a democracy. I understand that the point of town hall meetings provides me with access to my elected representatives to listen to differing points of view that may ultimately (or so I hope) influence public policy to the benefit of my community. Shouting down anyone to the point that nothing is discussed isn’t free speech or democratic. It’s stupid. It’s selfish.

The left or anyone who was opposed to the Bush Administration certainly felt put out about the direction of the American experiment. I certainly felt that we were falling in a pattern that didn’t represent the values that our nation purported to uphold. I protested the Iraq War, and I could look to the left and right of me and see a broad based coalition of like minded people who felt as I did. I don’t imagine if town halls were held to levy support for the war six years ago, the left would be shouting down those who supported it. I don’t think we’d burn Bush in effigy.

While I can appreciate opposition to health care reform and that the extremes of the opposition may very well constitute a minority of the total population, I cannot ignore the pejorative nature of their critique. There’s bloodlust behind those words.

I want my country to find the middle ground.

Pastime Paradise

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I posting this as a stub.

As I was reading this post by TNC, my iTunes DJ randomly landed on this classic track. I don’t believe in coincidences. As the summer presses on, and our national debate centers around flash point issues of health care reform and race. Within those two issues are layered complexities of class and the shadow side of our American heritage.

I can’t remember who said it last year during the campaign, if it was a pundit, an analyst or Michelle Obama, but with advent of Candidate and President Obama, someone said, ‘Now we’ll find out how racist this country really is.’ That sentiment loops through my head as I try to sort through the barrage information and misinformation.

If you haven’t watched Alexandra Pelosi’s documentary, I think it’s worth at least a once over. I don’t feel that she necessarily presented these folks in the most objective light, but given the growing populist right resentment towards a reform agenda government complicated by their racial animus, maybe she wasn’t so far off.

There’s a fine line between discourse and disruption. A fine line between civil disobedience and sociopathy.

More later.

‘Teachable Moment’

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I think it was Malcolm X who had once said, ‘You got to make them laugh in order to make them think.’

Last night, the Colbert Report tried to disambiguate the furor over Gates-gate.

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The Word (flatulence, aside) picked apart why this drama struck nerves. The media frenzy over Obama, Gates and Crowley meeting for a beer, is frankly annoying. And to borrow, POTUS’s word (sans modifier), stupid. The amount of minutes devoted to trying to pick apart what racism and racist means in our culture in lieu of real reporting time to present useful details about the health care reform bill is the real tragedy.

You can’t cure cancer with a coke and a smile.

Public Option Now

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It should be restated again. We need health care reform now.

For one, like MSM, I got distracted by the Gates-gate episode. Following this very complex conversation or rather deconstruction about race, class, authority, law, free speech, and frankly, a story of two ‘reasonable’ men clashed which escalated about who’s member is bigger than the other, was riveting.

It’s already been said by many more wiser writers and minds than me; that Obama’s presser last week that the real message of the urgency of the need for reform was buried in the MSM coverage of a seemingly gaffe by POTUS.

I’ve been trying to synthesize my thoughts about the bubbling race in America today question for weeks now. I had a rather random post that was only to function as a primer for me to redress late. I felt something was coming. I just wasn’t expecting it to come in the form of segregated pools, excessive force/abuse of power cases, and the death of a pop icon.

Again, I digress.

I also started to draft a post about my recent trip to DC to lobby for reform. Particularly, I wanted highlight the people I met and why they were willing to bake in the late June heat, to push for reform and a public option. A few real life things happened that got in the way of that for me. And then my uncle died. I don’t meant to make him out to be some sort of martyr, but the significance of his passing and the health care debate cross hairs for me. He was diagnosed with stage four cancer in March. He didn’t have health insurance. It wasn’t provided to him through his job. I can’t help but wonder if there were a public option, would he have been able to seek medical attention months, years ago for a stomach problem that he could have easily dismissed as indigestion. He stopped treatment in June. Apparently he lived an expectantly longer life than any doctor would have conceived. He had a pre-existing condition that complicated his treatment with chemo. As my mother explained to me this past weekend, he had a childhood disease that should have been terminal. And it’s apparently genetic. The irony, if you want to call it that, is that my uncle may have saved the life of his children with the discovery of this disease that was responsible for the complicating treatment that would’ve prolonged his life. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.

The other story that seems to get lost is the face of the uninsured. It’s an issue beyond black, white and class. 43 million Americans do not have health insurance. I’ve heard reported (trying to verify) that the number of uninsured Americans under the age of 30 constitute the large part of that number. A detail that I don’t find too surprising. The low skilled worker, or the recent college graduate who have entry level jobs often are, for lack of a better word, shafted. Ask any bright, young thing who’s employed by a publishing house, magazine, or advertising company to someone who’s working as a janitor, security guard, or retail clerk. Do they have adequate health coverage, if any? Would a public option help small businesses who factor fringe benefits in employee compensation? Would small businesses be able to expand and hire more workers? Would that aid in our economic recovery?

I think Obama failed to explain these facts in a way that can incite urgency among everyone. MSM failed in deconstructing the argument in digestible bits that would push the conversation beyond what polls supposedly say about what Americans want: deficit reduction.

I’m biased of course. I’m part of a Venn Diagram of constituencies that’s affected by this. I want a public option. I’m a bright, young, African American, thirtysomething that would love the independence of not relying on an employer to provide health care coverage. I’d also love a system that would make it affordable so that people like my uncle can seek and receive care in instances where their employer can’t afford to provide them coverage. I’d also like for the forces that claim to read tea leaves through polls realize that my biggest care in the world is not the growth of the American deficit. I do care about it. But I’m a member of the generation that will carry the burden of many debts. I’m still researching the data, but my impression is that the national debt will increase with reform and without reform. I’d like to hear a sound debate about the rate of that growth if we don’t reform our entitlement programs now.

It’s food for thought.

MJ Legacy, Ctd.

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For those of you aren’t aware, Jay Smooth’s Illdoctrine video blog often offers the most insightful discourse on issues and themes in the hip hop world as well as pop culture.

His most recent post about MJ offers a deconstruction I haven’t heard too many places except in the comfort of my circle of friends, artists, writers.

It seems to me that mainstream media and its pundits, missed an opportunity to examine this hyper-reality that has manifested in our culture over the past 25 years or so. We watched Michael for nearly four generations in my family. You can’t say that about many pop stars. And I don’t think any of us thought about the kind of spiritual and emotional toll that takes on a person who is constantly watched, living in a meta-reality, between worlds, personal and public.

Disambiguation, Redux

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Toni Morrison shared some wisdom about language, culture, and writing at a talk about a month or so ago. I’ve watched it a few times. She hit some nerves for me that have been swimming in my head for years. Blogs, Twitter, SMS text messages, hyperlinks… all of these things that allow us to move and share information faster, regardless of quality is unprecedented.

Watching some of the opening statements for the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, I found myself returning again to this video:

The key point? There’s a difference between discourse and information. Literature, more specifically the novel, in this age will still act as a vehicle to organize information and human emotion. As Morrison says, ‘the novel can be a body of knowledge.’

I’m still processing, sorting, filtering, organizing…

Mad World

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I feel their sense of urgency. And I’m hopeful for their success in achieving self determination as a society. The people deciding who represents them. It’s not so much about the who’s the best leader for the Islamic Republic of Iran. It’s about respect for the process, the structure of the civil society itself. Mousavi is symbol now. I don’t think we’ll ever come to know what kind of leader he would be. But these protests do show that the people were seeking an alternative to Ahmadinejad, a leader that could be a vehicle for reform within their society. And the system failed them.

Remember 1989? There’s a weird symmetry in history. Deja vu all over again. I remember feeling the same desperate sense of urgency and hope and dread for the students in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. I was a tween then, but I understood the longing of an oppressed people challenging the system. Later when we started high school that same year, two German tourists spoke to my world history class and talked about the shifts they were feeling then in their own country. I asked them a question that I felt in bones. I asked them if they thought the Wall would come down. I still remember his facel, and he said, ‘I hope so. I sure hope so.’ It could not have been more than two weeks later and the unthinkable happened. I remember Jeremy running to class the next morning saying to me, ‘Syreeta! How’d you do that? How’d you know? You called it!’

All I can say is that people dream in a common language. If you heard those German tourists in my history class in 1989, you could feel the urgency for change. And I don’t think it’s a stretch that young Germans felt a kinship with the students in Tiananmen Square. In the wake of that tragedy, they might have found their courage to challenge the old order in their nation.

The poignant part of the President’s Cairo speech two weeks ago sort of reads now as a prophetic allusion to events that are now manifesting. Pundits have found fault with the connection with Civil Rights Movement and resistance movements -fringe to moderate- of some Arab communities to regimes. I felt that it struck a very raw nerve. Something that we all had to acknowledge. African Americans learned from the Indian struggle against British rule during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1947, India became a sovereign nation again. Our own history shows how civil disobedience can affect change. It ended injustices my forebearers suffered through. It gave me the right to vote without fear. It seems clear to me now that the Iranian kids heard him. Still, Obama can’t engage them directly. That’s not his purpose at this time. A statesman engages governments. This is a populist movement. And all we can do is watch, support, and hope that human rights are respected.

My color scheme is green so that they know that I’m with them.

Catch A Fire

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, originally uploaded by mousavi1388.

I don’t know about you, but I’m riveted by the events in Iran since the weekend. If you’ve been living under a rock, Twitter has emerged as the critical source for following the events in Tehran. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan has masterful coverage. A must read. Print media as it lives online has in-depth accounts, images, and analysis. Television has failed. Perhaps today we’ll see a difference in the type of coverage that the cable news and major networks will show than the pallid interest it had displayed over the weekend.

I can’t help but think if we had Twitter in 2003 during the height of the antiwar protests, would we have had a larger impact on the mainstream media coverage? Would that have stopped the invasion of Iraq? Hindsight remains fuzzy. But now? We have this technological infrastructure to support digital communication. And that communication supports civic engagement and action. Perhaps a revolution.

I’m watching these events very closely. We’re getting information in real time. This is the future of journalism. The future is now.