Facing the Political Future: a Sadly Personal Perspective

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Harold Ickes

I’ve been hiding from the news, which is weird since I spent most of my life as a journalist.  I’m not sure though, that after 8 agonizing years of W and then 6 frustrating ones with President Obama (much of it not his fault) I can face what the next congress will do.

Do you remember the various, endless Clinton hearings?  Even more than the impeachment battle, the moment that I keep remembering was deeply personal: Sen. Alphonse D’Amato questioning Deputy Chief of Staff (and my longtime friend) Harold Ickes, whose father, also Harold, had been Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, and credited with implementation of much of the New Deal.

His father, D’Amato told Harold, would have been ashamed of him.

I had worked with Harold when we were all young, so along with political anger came real pain that, beyond the issues, he had faced such very cruel personal grandstanding.

That’s not important in policy terms and is probably mild compared to the harshness that any witnesses at the pending, inevitable deluge of hearings under a Republican congress will face: two years of destructive power escalating the politics of obstruction to that of destruction.  Beyond what that will mean to our country, poor people, women, immigrants, ACA users, voting rights, Supreme Court nominations,  and the jeopardy we face around the world, none of which will receive much attention except as political weapons, it’s just not something that will be easy to watch, especially for an unrepentant dreamer like me.

VOTER SUPPRESSION: A REAL WAY TO HELP — TWITTER AND ALLIES FIND A WAY

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When votes are mangled on election day, when people are turned away, or misled, or intimidated; when names have been purged without notice or challenged illegally, it’s very tough to protect the outcome because it’s so hard to get to the site of the violation in time to fix it before voters give up.  At least it’s always been that way.  And because older machines go to poor, minority precincts, and because mean-spirited efforts to defraud less sophisticated voters often affect Democrats disproportionately, as reported in Rolling Stone, any effort that gets help where it needs to be faster and more effectively can make a big difference not only for for Obama but also for down-ballot races.

A crew of some of the coolest nerds on the Web have come together to harness Twitter and other tools to help.  It’s really simple; you can tweet (or text) violations, line lengths and other info, and use "hash tags" (these  #) so that people following the issue will receive the message on their Twitter readers and send help.  If you don’t want to bother with Twitter, text to 66937 and start your message with “#votereport."  (That’s a "hash tag" — see how simple?)   Bloggers like Nancy Walzman at PoliticsWest, who is based in Colorado where there’s much at stake, and Nancy Scola and Alison Fine at TechPresident can give you more details.  Our vigilance can really make a difference.

Just for fun, here’s a diagram of how it works.  Basically though, you just text or Tweet this the same way you do anything else.  And you should.  I also want to renew my plea (easy for me to say since I’m not a lawyer) for you to make yourself available on election day to protect the process, every committed voter, and, as far as I’m concerned, our country.

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CAROLYN GOODMAN, WITH GRATITUDE

 

Ben Chaney stood to the side
watching mourners fill a grave with the New York soil that gave Carolyn
Goodman her eternal blanket.

It is Jewish custom for family and friends to bury the dead
themselves, instead of leaving the task to hired hands. In life, Dr.
Goodman was hardly an observant Jew. But on Sunday at Mount Judah
Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, she exited this world in traditional
style.

Ben Chaney was there to say farewell. “God put his angels here at
the right moment,” he said as clumps of earth thudded across the plain
pine coffin.

The “angels” were his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and Carolyn
Goodman, women whose lives might never have converged had it not been
for a brutal June night in 1964 in Neshoba County in Mississippi.
Each lost a son that night. James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20,
disappeared, along with Michael Schwerner, 24. Six weeks later, their
bullet-scarred bodies were found in an earthen dam.

The three civil rights workers.

That’s how they came to be linked for eternity — two white boys from
New York, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, and a black kid from
Mississippi, killed for daring to affirm the right of black
Mississippians to vote freely. That right was not universally accepted
in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The deaths of the young men at the
hands of Ku Klux Klan members proved a pivotal moment for the civil rights movement.

Now, life has run its unrelenting course for their parents. Mr.
Schwerner’s mother and father died years ago. Fannie Lee Chaney died in
May at 84. On Friday, time ran out for Carolyn Goodman. She was 91.

“It’s been a rough summer,” said Ben Chaney, who was 12 when his big brother, James, was murdered.

Yes, he repeated: “God put his angels here. They carried a hell of a
burden for a long time. A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons
were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”

Seven Klan members, convicted of federal civil rights violations,
served but a few years in prison. Decades later, in 2005, an eighth
man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of manslaughter by a state jury
in Mississippi, and is serving a 60-year term.

“Strong women,” Mr. Chaney said. “They were able to endure, and
continued to have faith. They never lost faith. My mother didn’t, and
neither did Carolyn.”

Dr. Goodman, a clinical psychologist who lived on the Upper West
Side, did many things in her long life. With politics that fell
decidedly leftward, she had taken on liberal causes well before Andrew,
the second of her three sons, was killed. But perhaps inevitably, it is
as Andrew’s mother, a civil rights symbol, that many know her.

There she lay on Sunday, beside her first husband, Robert Goodman,
and in front of a long, swooping headstone marking Andrew’s grave.
Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, died five years after his son’s
murder.

“Everybody says Bobby died of a broken heart,” said Judith Johnson, a family friend.

On Andrew’s headstone, three sets of arms reach toward one another,
above words borrowed from a Stephen Spender poem: “He traveled a short
while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with his honor.”

MANY of the 65 people who stood over Dr. Goodman’s grave took turns
remembering her. She was caring but tough, they said. She would hear
out opponents, they said, but not hesitate to speak her mind.

Jane Mark, a relative, told of getting a phone call from Dr. Goodman
in 1999, during the protests and mass arrests over the police killing
of the unarmed Amadou Diallo. “Jane, we’re going to get arrested tomorrow,” Ms. Mark recalled Dr. Goodman as saying.

“On the spur of the moment, she could decide to get arrested,” Ms. Mark said. “But she wanted to have friends with her.”

Stanley Dearman, a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba
Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper that called for justice in the
murders, said Dr. Goodman felt no hatred for the killers. “She was too
fine a person for that,” he said. That point was reinforced by Kalman
Goodman, a grandson of Dr. Goodman.

One day, a man who spoke in a Southern accent went to her apartment
and said he had played a role in Andrew Goodman’s death. He was now
asking for forgiveness.

His grandmother, Mr. Goodman said, told the man: “If you want my
forgiveness, work in your community and help other people. That way
lies forgiveness.”

As far as he knows, the grandson said, the man went home and did just that.

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