A Turning Point

It's not 1968, or 2008, or 2016. But this is a similarly decisive moment for our nation, and the world.

The same person (Shepard Fairey) who created Barack Obama’s “Hope” poster made a similar poster for Harris, with a similarly inspiring message.

With the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago this week, there is a lot of talk in the press and on social media about parallels with an earlier Democratic convention held in that city, in 1968. For me, the comparison is personal, as I date the dawning of my political consciousness to that summer of 1968.

Some posters from 1968.

Mind you, I was only nine years old.  But my mother was a delegate – pledged to Eugene McCarthy – on a slate of reformist Democrats from Queens, New York. While in Chicago, she and other delegates who were horrified at the brutal treatment of antiwar protestors by the Chicago police decided to join some of those protestors in the streets.

My mother was arrested, and I was left to ponder what that meant. Didn’t only people who broke the law get arrested?

When she got home (having skipped out on her bail bond, I learned many years later), Mom explained to me, in age-appropriate language, that sometimes a law might be unjust. In that case, breaking the law could be the right thing to do.

Fliers made by antiwar protestors in Chicago in 1968.

That revelation was positively mind-blowing to my young adolescent psyche. And it helped set me on a path that included going to a historically progressive undergraduate college, becoming an ardent feminist and political activist, attending an experimental law school focused on training public interest lawyers, spending several years living and traveling around the world, devoting a 30-year legal career to representing children and immigrants, executive producing a documentary about lawyers defending the rights of asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, and eventually moving to Mexico and joining the Board of a nonprofit that provides financial support to a local shelter for migrants.

This is the original “Hope” poster that did, indeed, give hope to so many of us.

And yet the life I have led turns out to have been at odds with where the political winds are blowing, both in my country of birth and in much of the world. As we stand on the brink of an election that could definitively push the United States over the edge into a Christian nationalist oligarchy, I am grateful to President Joe Biden for stepping aside and supporting Kamala Harris in seeking the presidency. I am feeling hopeful about the future of our country for the first time since 2008, when Barack Obama was elected. And yet it was the fact of a Black man moving into the White House that ended up fueling the rise of Donald Trump and the misogynistic, xenophobic, racist people who support him.

A civil rights march on Market Street in San Francisco in 1963.

Before my family moved to New York City, we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where both of my parents were born and raised. My mother took my brother and me with her on civil rights marches, and I also remember riding in the car to Berkeley when my mother was dropping off articles she had written for an alternative, antiwar newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. My younger brother claims to remember playing with Kamala Harris in a playground in Oakland when we lived there. His memory may be apocryphal, but I like to believe that our paths really did cross with Kamala Harris’s once upon a time.

Is it possible these two Bay Area mothers and their children crossed paths in the 1960s? Perhaps at a civil rights march, or in an Oakland playground?

Harris also could have chosen a more traditional path, but she opted to attend the nation’s leading historically Black university, Howard University. She returned to the Bay Area for law school. And then she devoted her life to public service. Her candidacy for President of the United States gives me hope.

The election isn’t won yet! One week before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton held a decisive lead over Donald Trump. We must get out the Democratic vote!

But we can’t get complacent. Let’s all do whatever we can to get out the vote! We need to act as if our lives depend on the outcome of the presidential election – because in a very real way, they do.