I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: kamala harris

  • yep – this is who we are

    yep – this is who we are


    The images flashing across the television screen this week were appalling but compelling. I couldn’t look away, even when I didn’t want to see, much less believe, what was happening in my nation’s capitol. An estimated 10,000 of mostly white people who looked like me stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC where the Senate and House of Representatives were in session to count the votes the 50 states’ electors had sent to the two bodies for a ceremony that was usually a pro forma final recognition of the results of the previous November election.

    Not so much this year. Donald Trump, not unlike Humpty Dumpty, had sat on the largest wall of power in the world as president of the United States and had suffered a great fall when he lost his position in a free and fair election on November 03, 2020. Since that loss, apparently all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Donald Trump together again.

    The king’s men ran around the country challenging election results in scores of courts ranging from state and federal courts to the Supreme Court of the United States with the same decisions. Humpty Dumpty lost fair and square; please stop bothering us with baseless complaints. But Mr. Trump, who had spent most of his adult life in court battles long ago learned to believe the courts were fallible – even unreliable. He thought his appointment of not one, not two, but three Supreme Court justices during his term of office would finally give him the wins he so desperately craved through the legal system. Shockingly, to him and me, the courts held fast and repeatedly ruled against him.

    Meanwhile, back at the ranch or the White House if you prefer, the Covid pandemic raged on with more ferocity than a Category 5 hurricane. Ignoring the warnings of our medicine men, millions of Americans traveled throughout the country by plane, train, bus and automobile during the holiday season to visit friends and family who either unknowingly carried the coronavirus to the travelers or caught it from them. Rates of infections in the past two weeks have skyrocketed while hospitals and their staffs have been stressed to breaking points. Deaths stand at nearly 370,000 individuals today. Mr. Trumpty hasn’t noticed, or if he has noticed, he hasn’t commented on the losses.

    He did, however, promise that the king’s horses would deliver a hundred million doses of new vaccines by the end of 2020 when in fact Newsweek reported on December 28th. that the actual number of vaccines administered on that date was closer to 2.1 million. Another loss to absorb and ignore.

    Was it really just one week ago today that Mr. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State to ask him to find 11,780 votes to reverse the results of the November election in Georgia? Gosh, that bullying phone call, which accomplished nothing more than another revelation of his delusion, seems tame now compared to the events I witnessed four days later on January 6th.

    All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Mr. Trump’s big lie that he won re-election in November, a lie that he tweeted incessantly over social media, a lie that he used to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from his more than 74 million faithful followers who voted to re-elect him was the lie that led to the images of destruction and deaths in our nation’s Capitol this week.

    Many of the king’s men and women reported for duty at a large rally in which the king and his surrogates urged them to storm the Capitol to bring an end once and for all to the transition of power to anyone other than himself on January 20th. Mr. Trump promised to march with them to accomplish the coup that would guarantee Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would not replace him. It was Humpty Dumpty and Custer’s last stand. By the way, he retreated to the safety of the White House to revel in the dangerous mission instead of keeping his word to join the march.

    The painful images keep coming – new ones every day – the wonder of cell phone cameras recording the faces and horrific actions of mob violence in my country. I feel overwhelmed, depressed, shamed, sickened at the sights of the attack on our democracy displayed for the world to see.

    President-Elect Biden and I grew up in the same generation, and from his words of hope and his insistence that what happened this week was not what America really was, I knew he and I were on the same page. The man carrying the Confederate flag in the rotunda of the Capitol, the man sitting with his legs propped up on a desk in Speaker Pelosi’s office, the men and women shattering glass, breaking historic relics, vandalizing individual offices, in general disrespecting the building that represented the legislative branch of our government – those people whose actions resulted in the deaths of five others – they weren’t the Americans Joe Biden and I remembered.

    Nonetheless, we are the Americans who immigrated from faraway places, spread disease and killed the population living on this land in order to take the land from them. We are the Americans who used slavery to build on this land, to work the crops on the land, to be the backbone of our agrarian economy. White equaled might for us and when the colors of our nation became more colorful, we are the Americans who feared for our destiny.

    When Joe Biden and I celebrated putting a man on the moon, we are the Americans who refused to guarantee health care for everyone. While he and I celebrated rugged individualism, bringing ourselves up by our bootstraps, we forgot some people didn’t have boots. More recently, we looked past the atrocities of Guantanamo Bay, brown children separated from their families living in cages at our borders, black children denied access to quality education which placed them at higher risk for quality jobs, poor people of all races who live today in food insecurity also known as hunger. Gun violence, police brutality toward people of color, denial of climate change, homelessness – the list goes on. We are all of these Americans.

    But Mr. Trump and his white nationalist friends are losers. He lost the presidency, he lost the Senate, and he lost the House of Representatives for his Trumpty Party. His attempt at overthrowing our democracy failed. His white nationalist friends are scattering to the winds as quickly as the planes can fly them home. The reality show is over for now.

    I believe Joe Biden and I can listen and learn to be better Americans. I think Kamala Harris will help raise the consciousness of what the next generation of Americans can be. That thought gives me hope for my granddaughter’s future.

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    Stay safe, stay sane and please stay tuned.

  • families first


    No justice, no peace. No Donald, no Mike. Just Joe and Kamala.

    Four years ago I was overjoyed when the first woman of a major political party was nominated to be President of the United States. From Seneca to Selma to Shirley Chisholm to Stonewall, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of the beloved community has been slowly bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice and equality for all. This week with the  Democratic Party’s nomination of a woman of color to become Vice President of the United States  I am once again optimistic for people of good will in America to prevail in November, to reverse the current administration’s attempts to bend that arc in a different direction.

    “She taught us to put family first—the family you’re born into and the family you choose,” said Senator Kamala Harris about her mother in her acceptance speech for the vice presidency this week at the Democratic National Convention.

    In 1946 I was born into a Texas family that was part of a generation later identified by historians as the Baby Boom generation (1946 – 1964). WWII ended, the young soldier boys returned home to marry their teenage girlfriends who were waiting for them and then boom, here came the babies. Millions of us born into families who now had amazing educational opportunities through the miracle of the GI Bill to do what their parents couldn’t have done. My father took advantage of the veterans’ benefits to enroll in college while he also worked to support his little family of me and my mom. He was the first and only person in his family to earn a college degree, a degree that enabled him to become a teacher, coach and then superintendent at the same small rural school he attended as a child.

    While daddy was teaching and coaching, he encouraged my mother to make the half-hour commute from our home to Sam Houston Teachers College in Huntsville five days a week so that she could finish her college degree she started at Baylor University during the war. I was in the fourth grade when my mother enrolled and in the sixth grade when she graduated. She came to teach music part-time the next year when I was in the seventh grade, and I have to say it was a nightmare being in my mother’s class while going to a school where my father was superintendent.

    But I survived…and in my home with two parents who were educators there was never a discussion about going to college when I finished high school. No. The discussions were about which college I would attend and how education opened doors of endless opportunities. My father once told me the whole earth was my territory – that I could be anything I wanted to be if I worked hard and believed in myself.

    For seven years after graduating from the University of Texas in 1967 I explored different parts of my territory while I worked in several jobs as a CPA in the early 1970s from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest  to the southeastern Atlantic Coast state of South Carolina. Every position I had the story was the same: I always was paid less for equal work. I was in a nontraditional occupation for a woman in those days and felt frustrated – even angry – at the unfairness of a system that ruled the kingdom of numbers.

    I was with my father in his hospital room in Houston in 1974 following his surgery for colon cancer, but he was talking to me even then about my career and the reality of my territory. Why don’t you be your own boss? Why don’t you set up your own business if you don’t like how you’re being treated? That is exactly what I did for the next 40 years. I found my place in my territory, but my father wasn’t with me on the journey. He died from cancer in 1976 at 51 years of age. He was my mentor, my friend and a wonderful example of public service in an era that valued educators.

    In 1958 at nineteen years of age Kamala Harris’s mother left India with the blessing of her family to come to America to discover a cure for cancer. She married Kamala’s father who had immigrated from Jamaica to study economics at the University of California Berkeley where he met her mother, and Kamala was born in Oakland in 1964 – the last year of the Baby Boomer demographic cohort – into a family that literally included the whole earth as their territory at a moment in history when the Civil Rights movement was at an inflection point. As Kamala’s parents pushed her in a stroller while they marched for equality in the streets of Berkeley they gave her the foundation for a passionate belief in civic responsibility, but neither one could have known that stroller would roll her all the way to Washington, D.C.

    I am grateful for Kamala’s family, for the family I was born into, for the family I have been allowed to choose, for the opportunity to explore a territory my father could not have envisioned and for the potential of passing a better democracy to my granddaughter who may begin her life with a Black woman of Indian ancestry as the Vice President of the United States.

    Stay safe, stay sane, stay tuned and vote in November.

  • who won the debate last night? don’t ask Pretty and me


    Pretty and I actually watched the Dems debate last night together all the way to the end of the three hours plus a few minutes over (which was significant because Pretty typically gets her debate news from Twitter so I struggled along by myself on the first three and since I struggled by myself, I set a personal limit of two hours… then I stuck a fork in either them or me).

    As we listened and watched last night, we talked about the candidates to begin to make our own short list out of  the dozen on the stage to a manageable group of four or five.  That number was arbitrary on our part, although some of the political pundits ostensibly favored the smaller number for the November (gasp! another one so soon?) debate.

    Throughout the evening I gave in to my selfish leanings toward the candidates who promised me the largest increase in my monthly income.  For those of us who live on fixed incomes, that’s a major concern. Andrew Yang was the clear winner on that score with his continued MATH (Make America Think Harder) promise of $1,000 per month to every citizen, but I have to admit even I have begun to question the concept of the VAT – value added tax – since it’s passed along to the poorest consumers who may need the extra $1,000 just to keep up with the large increases in the costs of food, gas,  shelter, automobiles, computers, etc. which is short for Everything The Consumer needs.

    Pretty, who has never been a member of the Yang Gang, vetoed him again last night.

    Senator Kamala Harris who was my first choice for the nominee before any of the debates, cuts Yang’s promise of $1,000 per month to $500 per month – her solution advocates a $6,000 earned income credit for everyone who needs it. Oh well, maybe not everyone who needs it, but I feel sure I would qualify under any plan she proposes. Pretty and I both like Senator Harris, but last night we decided to make her Attorney General to rule over and redo a US Justice Department that has confused the interests of the American people and the Constitution of the United States with the interests of Individual Number One whose position becomes more precarious as the days go by.

    As the evening wore on, I agreed to let Julian Castro go back to Texas with Beto O’Rourke. I had hoped for a better showing from my Texas guys, but sadly, I finally agreed with Pretty that neither one of them was really presidential material right now. Goodbye, Texas. Perhaps a new Cabinet position for Southern BorderDisasters with Beto and Julian serving as co-chairs with a mandate to please, God, close those detention camps and help the people in them to breathe free air again. Give them a home where they safely belong.

    Tom Steyer, I have supported your campaign to remove Individual One since 2016, but Pretty says no so off you go. Regretfully I say thanks for your service but no thanks for being the president. Possibly Secretary of the Interior or Treasury Secretary since you are a bona fide billionaire.

    Speaking of thanks for your service, let me add my gratitude to the two veterans who are still in the running – two veterans with a very different attitude toward foreign affairs: Representative Tulsi Gabbard and Mayor Pete Buttigieg. This is how Pretty and I know we are out of step with the mainstream. Many in the media and at home in their living rooms evidently thought Mayor Pete had a very strong debate performance. My cousin Melissa, for example, who I can count on for honesty told me today that she is now in the Buttigieg camp after his winning ways over the field last night. She remains moveable, however.

    Pretty and I both love Mayor Pete but we see him as a President in the Future, not in 2020. We’re keeping him on our short list, however. I reluctantly say goodbye to Rep Gabbard because whenever she asked if she would make a great Commander in Chief of the armed forces, I answered yes. Pretty vetoed her in general and wouldn’t even go along with me when I wanted to make her Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs. Adios, Tulsi.

    Hm. That leaves us with Senators Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren and ex VP Joe Biden. This is a tough group to say good bye to on so many levels. I have appreciated Amy Klobuchar since her questioning of the Supreme Court nominees – I think she’s wicked smart plus when I saw her making her announcement outdoors during a snowstorm, I have to say I was impressed. Pretty doesn’t share my enthusiasm, but I think Amy might be a dark horse. She’s won every race she’s run before, she said. Leave her on the stage, Pretty.

    The frontrunners according to the polls (that are  questionable on their reliability) – Sanders, Biden, Warren – are all in their seventies which makes them as old as I am and I, like former President Jimmy Carter, know for sure I don’t need to be President at my age so I doubt any of this group should be either but what the heck, Pretty and I decided to join the Warren bandwagon for now; however, we are, like my cousin Melissa, moveable. We added Senator Booker to our ticket for VP for various reason that include we’ve liked him for a long time. He’s younger, more energetic and understands the wounds that divide our nation. Bring it on,  VP Cory.

    Finally, did anyone other than me hear Elizabeth Warren say she supports a $200 per month raise for Social Security recipients? What’s not to like about that?

    Stay tuned.

    Totally unrelated picture – but what a look from 

    Grandbaby Ella who is two weeks old  this week 

    I’d love to know what she saw?

     

     

     

  • Gettysburg – looking for common ground


    Whatever you do, don’t discuss elephants or donkeys in the newly formed group Politics, Facts & Civility in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; the group was formed by local citizens of that same town made famous by an American civil war battle in July, 1863 and a speech made by president Abraham Lincoln four months after the battle in November of that year. The group PF&C was formed to bring together Republicans and Democrats in the small town to try to find common ground in a friendly atmosphere – to try to tamp down the rancor,  partisan rhetoric and bitterness in their home town that was a microcosm of the ugliness and downright meanness taking over the political discourse across the country. Family members divided, neighbors pitted against neighbors, and these people wanted to seek a new way forward. The group was small with ten members at a recent meeting, but the hope was for finding more ways in which we were alike than we were unalike, to borrow Maya Angelou’s words. Bravo.

    “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, a testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war… The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here…” Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November, 1863

    The world noted for a news cycle what was said by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in her tortured testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. The world noted for several news cycles Judge Kavanaugh’s tearful dramatic denials which conjured images of him for me of his being seated next to Clarence Thomas for the Supremes’ official portrait. The world noted briefly the unhinged outburst of Senator Lindsay Graham who I implored on his Senate voice mail this week to please ask the media to refrain from continuing to say Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina — yes, even that blatant rudeness and disrespect  will not be remembered by the world (except perhaps by the person who inspired him); but we, the people, will never be able to forget what was done in the United States Senate during the first week of October, 2018.  The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was a lifetime appointment with generational implications.

    We continue to be involved in a great civil war testing whether our democracy can long endure, don’t we? New divisions, and old ones unresolved…new wounds, and old ones framed in new language continue to test our commitment to each other as citizens of a nation dedicated to beliefs in government of the people, by the people and for the people. Our new civil war is as uncivil as the first one was, and our convictions in the guardians of our democracy through its legislative, executive and judicial branches of government hang by threads as thin as the ones in my favorite pair of pajamas.

    The Kavanaugh confirmation process was described by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley and his sidekick Orrin Hatch as being dysfunctional to the Beyond Thunder Dome power. While American citizens gathered outside the committee room in the halls of Congress and around the capitol grounds to protest the Kavanaugh confirmation — even had the audacity to confront individual senators in the elevators and in their offices — I found rays of sunshine amid the darkness of the dysfunction. My new heroes as champions of democracy during the hearings were Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Kamala Harris of California for their eloquence in expressing their positions, their calm demeanor while questioning Kavanaugh and their polite refusal to be led down the rabbit hole of disrespect.

    Bravo again to the Politics, Facts & Civility group in Gettysburg. My hope is that your membership grows and expands to include citizens in the towns near you… until the movement becomes a wave washing across the entire state of Pennsylvania which then spills over state boundaries all the way to South Carolina.

    Pretty tells me all the time we need to start with our own neighbors who haven’t spoken to us since we’ve been here now for 18 months. My attitude toward them has been mostly uncivil, too, as I tend to believe they vote Republican and disrespect the gays. But I know for sure we have common ground in keeping our yards maintained so maybe that’s a place to begin. Gosh, it sure has been a warm October so far, hasn’t it?

    Stay tuned.