GREAT ELECTION -- A SECOND EXCHANGE

GREAT ELECTION – A SECOND EXCHANGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 5, 2008

“Hope is a lover’s staff; walk hence with that, and manage it against despairing thoughts.”

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), English poet and dramatist

A CHICAGO PROFESSIONAL MADE REDUNDANT WRITES OF THE ELECTION OF BARAK OBAMA AS OUR 44TH PRESIDENT

Hello Jim,

Waking up this morning was not very different from any other day. The same prospects - get the grandkids off to school (which was a bit more difficult as we all stayed up to watch Barack's acceptance speech) then resume the job search.

Fortunately, I was able to use a lot of my "downtime" to actively support Obama's campaign. I couldn't give much cash, could give him some shoe leather. I couldn't respond to your inspiring pieces on the election.

There are a lot of "how far we've come" retrospectives being delivered today with more to come. Growing up in inner city Chicago, I lived it. And, because of that, this to me is not that earthshaking, not that watershed event the pundits are making it out to be.

It has unfolded as if natural. The speech last night was delivered a few miles north of where Dr. King was struck by a thrown brick while marching in Marquette Park. He described the crowd as more hateful than any he had encountered in the South.

After King's assassination, rioters and looters ran past me from Cabrini Green to the shopping district on Chicago Avenue. I didn't feel endangered. The 1968 convention – the city council wars after Harold Washington's election as mayor, and then after his sudden death; police torture of black suspects; and many more blemishes on the city – were eased but not erased last night as Chicago celebrated the ascendancy of one of its residents.

I understand why the media was dominated by on the street interviews of blacks. This moment has so much meaning to people who have been actively suppressed. Let's not miss that the disaffected center over the last eight years got a taste of what it feels like to be ignored by the self named "education President," to be cheated out of their life’s savings, to be fodder for a war initiated by lies, to be pitted against each other by a government that promoted a scarcity mentality. This day has meaning for all of us.

The inclination to pile on is great, but it's counterproductive. We have a thoughtful, reflective president, with a multiple challenges. With this as a model, we may begin to change the course from one in which we climb over others to one in which we pull each other up.

Regards,

Michael

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael, I’ve always been impressed with your mind, your literate style, and strong almost powerful emotion that leak between your words. I know you have paid your dues. Now, when you want to collect on that lifelong investment, leveraging your expertise in the workplace to advantage, the opportunity has been withdrawn from you.

I’m glad you’re not bitter because that serves no one leastwise yourself. I am confident you will find the connection to do the good that cries out in you to be expressed. In a strange way, your situation and thousands perhaps tens of thousands of others like yours, seem to be in sync with John Dos Passos and his classic novel “U.S.A.,” which I am now rereading, although published in 1930.

Volume one of “The 42nd Parallel” describes working stiffs like us in the first quarter of the twentieth century, which the twenty-first century is becoming unhappily to resemble. If you get a chance, read at least this first volume of the trilogy.

As I’ve often written, we seem to repeat the same errors and to politicize our confusion with the same venom failing to understand why we must sometimes step back to move forward.

What President Obama will do in the present climate remains to be seen, but there is no advantage to him or to us to be polarized or paralyzed by the label of the “liberal” card.

Some people use the word as if it is an incurable disease. The force behind the concept is the myth of the average man. Man, having experienced more change in the last several decades than the previous two thousands years, has found the average man in something of a cage. Circumstances are such that he will unlikely rise above mass culture, mass technology, mass superstition, or, indeed, mass rhetoric without help.

It moved Jean-Jacques Rousseau in “The Social Contract” (1762) to reflect, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, has written a book “Conscience of the Liberal” (2007). This suggests his theory of trade and globalization is consistent with the wider world.

We need people such as yourself in the trenches motivating, monitoring, mentoring, and channeling people into productive lives. I see resurgence on the horizon of worker-centered operations in which equality of opportunity is front and center, where appropriate skill training and development are in demand. This is not QCC’s. This is the needy gritty of an electronic economy. Our schools are failing us; our workers are neither trained nor motivated to perform the tasks required of an up temple economy. The reality is the workplace is ever changing in its internal tension and external demands.

That is all I have to say on this subject, but I feel simpatico for you in your inner city experience of Chicago. I’ve carried a quote since grammar school of Carl Sandburg’s (1878 – 1967) description of the city:

“(Chicago) Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling City of Big Shoulders.”

It may sound romantic or idealized, and it is probably both, but Sandburg’s description pulsates with energy of the city. It is no accident that I love the place and places like it.

My da’s parents lived on the South Side of Chicago in the Irish ghetto. He was born during president Woodrow Wilson’s administration at Cook County Hospital. His mother died in childbirth, and his da took off for parts unknown never to be seen or heard from again. What an inauspicious beginning.

His Irish maternal grandmother reared him in Clinton, Iowa. He attended the same parochial Catholic school that I would attend, St. Patrick’s, dropping out after the seventh grade returning to Chicago as a teenager trying to make a living first as a bellhop and later as a bartender.

He met my mother, who was academy trained in St. Mary’s in Davenport, Iowa, while on one of his sorties back to his grandmother’s.

Months later I was born, they married, and returned to Chicago, where I remained with them until my sister was born. Thereafter my mother was confined to hospital for more than a year; my da returning to his own haunts in Chicago, while my sister and I were passed off to relatives separately and later together to foster parents.

We did not become a family again until I was five, my da now working in Clinton in president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s welfare program, the “WPA.” It was the Great Depression, and in many ways, although young, I would be more scarred by it than he.

My da, now in his early twenties, loving Chicago and the liberation of the Jazz Age, trying to get his Irish legs under him, was constantly bowed by defeat and humbled by failure, finding the pickings not too good, if existing at all. He retreated to the safety and less taxing climate of this crescent city on the Mississippi where his children and wife resided, leaving the city of Chicago he loved but didn’t love him back.

It is strange in a way growing up in a town of 33,000 at its height during World War Two preferring the city. My da worked during the war on the Chicago & North Western railroad as a passenger brakeman. We would get passes for the whole family, and he would invariably use them to go back to Chicago, or to Detroit, New York City, Washington D.C., Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles or San Francisco. Vacation was always an extended train ride about the country.

It was from this experience that I would always yearn for the city, the city streets, the noise, the anonymity, the streets glutted with people, with street cleaners and venders in kiosks, cars pumping their horns, trucks revving their engines, taxis watching the meter, and tourist buses screeching past, bellowing out impersonal history of the place in loud speakers, people walking with heads bent towards an imaginary wind, drunks or druggies staggering along (or were they sick?), faces approaching then sliding out of sight, the cacophony of the constant beat of dancing feet shuffling to a rhythm that spelled “hurry,” looking into show windows of department stores with dummy models dressed to the teeth, or bookstores with the latest best sellers and the promise of untold riches inside, going up elevators to the 75th floor like climbing a mountain, then descending cement steps in narrow interruptions in the sidewalks and into the bowels of the tunnels below to climb into packed subway cars, watching with fascination as these trains scampered through the boroughs filtering into lodgings and tenements as they whizzed by, or waiting on the empty subway platform for the next train to come watching welders in masks leaning into sheets of blue flame repairing car tracks.

As busy as the eyes, only the ears were busier, catching the speech of many English dialects, foreign languages, or colloquial expressions foreign to the ear. The ears are caught tight by the tendrils of the phrases, of the off colored jokes, the singsong fade of a story, the gruff fall of a sentence, the linking tendrils of speech twining the identity of the speakers region of birth, or the well dressed lady seemingly refined flicking her cigarette butt to the tracks below like a gangster in the movies, punching the air with the f-word in disgust, having missed her train even though another would soon be arriving.

Here in the city amongst the gray faces trembling in the grind and gears of metropolitan life I have always felt most alive, dieting on their collective energy and angst as if it were my life’s blood.

It should come as no surprise that I have spent my entire adult life living in such places as Chicago, Louisville, Tampa, London, Paramaribo, Brussels and Johannesburg, while working in scores of others about the globe. Interestingly enough, my children have all gravitated to the hustle and bustle of the city.

I return to my hometown with a sense of appreciation, but as a stranger. I had an idyllic youth, which I’ve written about, a two-parent family, parochial grammar school education, public high school and a land grant university education. There I had good guidance counselors, mentors, coaches, teachers, priests and nuns, and not to forget my attentive parents and supportive peers. So, I have been blessed with my Iowa connection. I mention this for reason.

It was Iowa, of course, that launched Barak Obama on the path to the presidency by preferring him to Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the Iowa Caucuses on his nearly two-year trek to the White House. I hope he will not forget Iowa. When the Iowa Caucuses turned their back on Hillary and chose Barak, it was a defining moment.

This peripatetic philosopher was thinking these thoughts as he walked today, of you his Chicago friend, who has demonstrated through diligence and commitment in Barak Obama’s presidential campaign that he will not be bowed by a temporary setback. My only suggestion is that you use the momentum of the work you have done for free now be turned to profit for you and your family.

Be always well,

Jim