My Mother, My Model

Serving as a delegate to the Democratic convention is a dream come true. I fantasized about this since I was a lonely politics-obsessed kid. Some background:

My mother and I, both isolated with mainly each other for company, talked about politics nonstop during the Presidential campaigns of the 50s and 60s. My father was deaf and worked 12 hours a day on our farm near Danville, Virginia. He was a refugee from Hitler's murderous regime in Austria and my mother had grown up on New York's lower east side. I am a real anomaly: a southern, Jewish farm girl. How did our family end up on a chicken farm surrounded by southern Baptists? That's a long story for another time.

My mother proudly called herself a "liberal" while disdaining the communists she met in NY who she deemed "manipulative" and not to be trusted. There were no progressive groups to join and the Democratic Party in Virginia was the only viable party in the state -- firmly in the grip of arch conservative Sen. Harry Byrd. We were 5 miles from town and my mother didn't drive.

In that environment, my mother did what she could -- talking around our kitchen table or on occasional visits to the nearby farmers, tradespeople, and laborers (when my father could take time from his chores to drive us). In the midst of long chats about the fickle weather, illness, money woes, and family history, people would drop the "N" word and that was my mother's signal to quietly raise the topic of "integration". She was always respectful -- invoking what we now call "talking points" from the Bible and local economic or political realities. But most of all, she appealed to people's simple decency and compassion for those who worked hard like themselves. She didn't change minds, the prejudices were too ingrained for that. Still, she made some people think a bit and I am convinced softened some attitudes.

And there were similar discussions on issues like government help for farmers and what was then called "socialized medicine" of which she was a stong proponent.

When I hear the adolescent, smart alecky, vituperative, tone of today's political arguments --both with our opponents and even worse -- intra-party, I remember her style-- the slow, careful, always deferential cultivation of those on the other side of a social or political argument. I aspire to that, but as you'll probably see if you take this blog journey with me, I expect I'll fall far short.