Member since:
August 22, 2007

Unlike Barack Obama, I know how to hold a grudge...

October 26, 2008 05:31 PM EDT (Updated: October 28, 2008 03:32 PM EDT)

views: 453 | rating: 9.6/10 (28 votes) | comments: 66

Perhaps I admire Senator Obama because I am so unlike him in so many ways. First of all, I am a white girl who grew up in New England thinking Italian and Jewish people were practically another race. Thankfully, after education and exposure I completely embrace the one race that does matters, the human one. I am also a woman and therefore have experienced gender discrimination since the day I was born. As a second daughter, my father loudly mourned that I wasn't a boy. He and my mother also had the poor taste to bring this to my attention whenever I did not want to take out the trash, paint the barn from a high ladder or dig the twentieth fence pole.

After high school it was no silly Ivy League for me. I was privileged to attend the School of Hard Knocks, which included a four month stint in a factory in Salem, Massachusetts. I cannot fully describe how exhausting this work was, but if you can imagine eight long hours - minus two fifteen-minute breaks - bending over a microscope while welding dies onto transistors in exactly the right spot, you would have a taste.

I remember feeling extremely anxious every day of my employment, as although I am now relatively artistic, piece work of that sort required greater skill than I possessed. An eighteen-year-old runaway with $300 remaining in my bank account after paying first and last month's rent and a month to go until my first paycheck, I was grateful for any job. Having taken only a college prep curriculum in high school, I had no marketable skills.

John, our supervisor, was a big, burly man with a vulgar sense of humor and an intense practice of personal frugality. He walked back and forth behind our backs as we bent over our microscopes, burning fingertips and aching necks designed to speed our output. He would certainly have let me go long before I quit had he not needed a fifth person to contribute money to his work carpool.

"Lizzie, your dies are too low." "Lizzie, your dies are too high." "Lizzie, your dies are looking good, but you're too slow."

On the anniversary of my third month I began to read the classifieds for mental health purposes. My loser boyfriend told me to be grateful for what I had, a steady job in the electronics industry in New England in 1967. I was so depressed with the turn my life had taken, I contemplated suicide one Sunday night. My family and I were completely estranged, I could not afford a new pair of nylon stockings and there was a run on the only pair I owned.

The coup de grâce was when my boyfriend with little fanfair threw me into a wall and then smacked me around for a while before storming out. My crime? I had embarrassed him by expressing my own opinion about politics during dinner at another couple's home hours earlier. All these things held equal sway as I contemplated exactly how to kill myself without the benefit of gun or a second floor balcony. Pills were out as I didn't own even a bottle of aspirin. In this day and age I probably would have called a suicide hotline, but I didn't have a telephone. I did not even have a friend to drive me to a bridge. I was actually too poor to afford to kill myself.

Abuse, my birthright, had been one of the reasons I had taken off on my own in such an ill-prepared way. I was terrified of everything and believed the world was a frightful and dangerous place. To function I gritted my teeth everyday and hoped nothing bad would happen to me before I got home again. A feeling of doom that Sunday evening had closed in on me as I contemplated another week of factory work. I had no money, no opportunity, no family connection and no friends. In my teenage mind, men were exploitative and evil with the one questionnable exception of my grandfather, whom I was too ashamed to tell why I left home or ask for help.

He was my mother's father, but she hated him passionately over claims he was violent during her childhood. Still, she sent me to stay with him for several weeks every summer. In retrospect, her consuming hatred appeared to be about his unwillingness to turn over her trust fund. He had been kind and loving to me, but even though I had never seen evidence of anger or abuse from him, it was difficult to trust anyone. In my experience men made passes at you when you babysat for their children, fathers beat their daughters, mothers had psychotic episodes and people always turned away when a person was at her most vulnerable.

So I guess when Barack Obama picked Joe Biden as his VP, I was more than impressed. He ignored Biden's occasionally ill-phrased remarks - even those aimed at him - and looked at the overall person and body of work. Everybody knows Joe doesn't always think things through before he speaks, but that did not seem to matter to Obama. He saw a good man, a good senator, foreign policy experience up the ying-yang and evidence of a true champion of the people within Biden's resume.

No wonder women favor Obama over McCain by such a huge percentage. He is definitely an intellectual male, but he can be paternal in a good way which includes tolerance and acceptance of the flawed human condition. He knows our weaknesses do not define us although he will not lower himself to take advantage or aim below the belt at an opponent. He always sticks to the issues and leaves personality out of the equation. He's an example to me, as I have a hard time with the latter although I get it with Biden.

Joe not only wrote the legislation that has made violence against women prosecutable, but he introduced it into the Senate year after year after year and tirelessly championed it until it finally passed. There are a lot of women in this country who are alive because of it and a host of violent abusers who are incarcerated for the same reason. Let's face it. No woman is free when her sister, daughter, aunt, mother, friend, neighbor or grandma is being threatened, suppressed or abused. No man is either. Therefore, I don't care what Joe Biden occasionally says that gets him into hot water. We all know he is a very, very good man with the highest American values. And his wife is adorably shy, isn't she?

I am still holding a grudge, however, against Saturday Night Live's producers. We are all consumed with politics as our financial world crashes around us and whatever safety net some of us had seems to be melting away. Writers are always off the wall and strain good taste to make us squirm just a little, but the producers are the ones who are supposed to round this out. I think these guys might be forgetting what defines comedy.

Tragedy plus time.

Please SNL people, don't make fun of important things while we are trying to save this country. Nobody has a sense of humor when they, or their real life concerns, are the butt of the joke. Hey, I don't claim to be non-partisan, just opinionated. I will admit the Amy Poehler rap with Palin on SNL was hilarious, but that was really a soft poke at her after all, wasn't it? The Obama skits and caricatures? They just annoy me.

My pouting this week, however, is not over SNL or John-my-factory-supervisor or my deceased parents, whose unfortunate behavior turned my childhood into a misery to be survived. Nope, my real grudge is against William Jefferson Clinton. After the rest of us - with much less disposable income, political charm and skill - have been reaching into our measly pockets, using our personal cell phone minutes to call potential voters and doing our damnedest to get the vote out, Bill will finally appear at an Orlando rally with Barack Obama. Imagine. On the same stage. Hmmm....

He could have been enormously useful over this last several months, but with a week to go he's finally going to get up there and say, "Vote for Obama". Big f'ing deal.

F' you, Bill. In case you haven't noticed, we don't need you anymore.