Hillary, Barack, and the Passage of Time

I've been thinking quite a lot about the passage of time this past week, as I've been celebrating three years' survival with stomach cancer. That's a short time, in the scheme of things-- less than 5% of my life, for example, less than a single Presidential term-- but a long time in the world of stomach cancer survival. Time, as we all know, is oddly elastic, especially for something that we measure so precisely.

I was reminded again about the elasticity of time this morning, when Robin Chapman and I gave a talk about our poetry anthology, On Retirement: 75 Poems, at Attic Angels, a local retirement community. In the talk, we describe the process of putting the anthology together, and also the arc of the retirement years as part of the process of human development. The audience was, as you might expect, mostly elderly; most, in fact, probably ten or twenty years older than either Robin or I, who are in our 60s. They were attentive and obviously interested in what we had to say, but I suspect that they--with their much longer experience of both retirement and the aging process--had more to teach us than we could teach them.

Among other things, those of us who have been retired for a while begin to understand that we are not indispensable. Our former employers have long since replaced us with younger, more energetic people: employees who still burn with the fire of ambition, and who see in the workplace possibilities that we long ago dismissed (out of cynicism or hard experience) as unrealistic, unwise, or simply too difficult to merit any expenditure of our time and energy. We have more important things to attend to: long-deferred avocational goals, causes we believe in, grandchildren, crossword puzzles and exercise classes to keep our minds and bodies strong. There are good reasons for retiring-- and good reasons (in addition to saving on our higher salaries and better benefits) that our employers were not unhappy to replace us with younger colleagues.

But none of us really feels "old." We know time has passed--two decades, three, four or more--but we still see ourselves as the twenty-somethings who fell madly in love; the thirty-somethings who gave our all to work; the young parents who spent weekends juggling toddlers' play time, grocery shopping, and endless loads of laundry. We need grandchildren to load our iPods and un-freeze our computers; we know that time and technology has moved along; but many of us are nostalgic for causes and passions that compelled us when we were college students. I remember, when I was a teenager, thinking that World War II was ancient history. In fact, I graduated from high school in 1962, only 17 years after the end of that war. Right now, we are about twice that far from the end of the Vietnam War; nearly forty years past the "Summer of Love." It all seems as though it was just yesterday, but surely, it is "ancient history."

Which brings me to the question of Hillary vs. Barack. I am, as those of you who know me are aware, a strong feminist. But we are long past the the Second Wave of feminism. That is a hard lesson to learn for those of us who were raised with limited options, when there were virtually no women doctors, no women lawyers, no women politicians, no career opportunities for girls other than secretary, teacher, librarian, cosmetician. The Second Wave was truly liberating for us; we don't want to give it up, don't want to acknowledge that times have changed, though four decades have passed. But even in the late 1960s, I had a hard time believing that a woman in the White House would be enough to ensure peace, though I certainly wanted to believe it. (How could a mother justify sending young men off to be killed?) Nonetheless I, like most bright girls of my generation, like--I suspect--Hillary Rodham, was brought up to "think like a man" if I wanted to be respected, to be taken seriously. Thinking like a man, acting tough enough to be considered for Commander in Chief by a still-sexist voting public, is not likely to produce a significantly different kind of president, even if she is a woman.

So the feminist desire for a woman in a White House is not enough to convince me to vote for Hillary. But even more, the understanding that time has passed (even when it seems to have stood still), informs my support for Barack Obama. I believe that it is essential to our democracy to engage young people in the political process. I want my children and their friends to feel the kind of passionate involvement that I and my friends felt during the Vietnam era. We believed that what we did would make a difference. And it did. We weren't very engaged in traditional politics; we were, after 1968, mostly turned off by the electoral system. But politics, in a larger sense, was an essential part of our life.

Barack Obama inspires this sort of commitment in a new generation. That is what I understand to be the consequence of his call for hope and for change. The new generation is the future of our nation, in the same way that the younger colleagues who fill retirees' jobs are the future of any workplace. It's particularly important, I think, that those of us who have experienced the cycle of hope and disillusion in politics since the Kennedy era, recognize how important it is that we return to a politics of hope. Imagine how awful it would be to have come to consciousness some time after 1970 or so! For anyone under the age of about 40 or 45, this is the case. A few years ago, I was working with a very smart, very politically savvy, very progressive younger friend who had trouble accepting the possibility that the political pendulum might have reached the far right of its swing, and that she could, in her lifetime, see better times. All she had ever seen of politics--all my children have ever seen--was so demoralizing and discouraging that she could barely imagine even the possibility of a different political mood, much less of progressive policies.

A politics of despair can only inhibit political participation, and will ultimately destroy democracy. Barack Obama not only understands the importance of a politics of hope; his speeches and his actions have already inspired millions of younger people to get involved in politics. That is why I am joining my children in their support for his campaign, and why I encourage you to support him, too.

Reminder: I will be reading from my memoir about fear on Tuesday, Feb. 19th (primary election day in Wisconsin), 7 PM at Avol's (at the site of the late, lamented Canterbury Bookstore in Madison). Please come if you can!