Many of you may recall Ashley Baia. Some may not, so it's important to revisit her story to remind folks the stakes in this election. I thought of Ashley's story when I read some thoughts on the election eloquently delivered by a contemporary and neighbor of mine from Chicago who, for a myriad of reasons, I've never met but would someday like to. His name is Shashak Ben Levi. Some thoughts about Ashley and Shahshak after the break.
Ashley Baia's story was the touching finale of then Candidate Obama's "A More Perfect Union" speech on race delivered in Philadelphia in March 2008. As Candidate Obama stated, Ashley was speaking at a roundtable to a bunch of fellow Obama volunteers about her reasons for joining the campaign, a mother challenged by cancer, then financial calamity, and her scrimping and saving by eating mustard and relish sandwiches to help her family climb out of their deep hole. She said that she was doing her bit for other kids who were in the same position she was as a nine year old with the world crashing down on her.
When it came time for the quiet, elderly African American man sitting at the table to state his reasons for volunteering, he simply said, "I'm here because of Ashley." In doing so he cut to the absolute core of why we need to continue to strongly and aggressively support President Obama and GOTV. Barack Obama is a uniter not a divider. He is progress, not the flawed past.
If you haven't yet done it, please read the entire speech from 2008 which ends with Ashley's story at the link below. My summary does it little justice. Ashley went on after the campaign to work for the Administration.
http://www.npr.org/...
Ashley's story came back to me thanks to Steve Bogira, a reporter at the Chicago Reader, who let me know what my fellow Chicagoan, Shahshak Ben Levi thinks about the 2012 Presidential election. Shahshak is 56 years old, lives a tough life compared to many, and doesn't strike me as having an idealistic outlook on life. He seems a gritty, determined realist shaped and informed by his experience. And he's a pretty sharp observer in my view.
First his thoughts on 2008. He said some in the African-Ameican community were afraid for Obama's life and some were afraid that Obama wasn't anything more than a token candidate (Shahshak expressed the latter thoughts using different words than I've chosen).
"And then you had the overwhelming amount who was just rah, rah, rah that we had a black person who could actually end up president," Levi says. He himself "got caught up in the excitement" on occasion. "But at other times you just looked at the sheer reality. Whether he win or he don't win, is that actually gonna change my life one bit? I was unemployed the day before I went to vote, I was unemployed the day that I voted, I was unemployed the day after. So what dramatical difference did it make for me personally? None."
Whoever got the nod in 2008 was faced with challenges on day one that no President in United States History has ever faced. Challenges with the complexity and brute force that led me more than once to think that Obama's election could potentially end up doing more harm than good because the failure to successfully navigate the financial crisis and two wars was not only an "option", it was the "base case". Then we'd hear the "I told ya so's" and other nonsense from the folks who drove us into the ditch. But the depression that we could easily have been in now didn't happen. The war is over in Iraq and ending in Afghanistan. So when I hear the snarky questions from my co-workers in the financial sector and others, "How do you think Obama's done? What grade would you give him?", my answer is "Superb. A+". It is hard for many who aren't intimately involved with the financial sector and many who are to appreciate the magnitude of the crisis or the reasons why a quick economic recovery wasn't even a remote possibility. Ever. A President and his Administration can't snap their fingers and magically make policy and laws happen. It takes a lot of unappreciated and unglamorous trench warfare to move the needle even a little bit. Shahshak Ben Levi knows that.
"The majority of us knew that before he can do anything, he's got to deal with eight years of [President George W.] Bush," Levi says. "There was economical devastation, housing devastation. What's the likelihood that he's gonna turn everything around in four years after what this man did, and the two wars he done started? It's gonna take you easily your first three years to get a grip on what's going on. So I understand that there were things he needed to do before he could turn his attention to us. But I also see that it was never about us anyway."
I think the one thing he gets wrong is the last sentence. It is about him. A second Obama term will make him change his mind. Help GOTV and please follow the link below to read more of Shahshak's thoughts on Romney, housing, jobs, and the election in the Chicago Reader.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/...
And I'm still here because of Ashley, Shahshak, my family, my neighbors, friends, country, and even those fearful, misguided souls who think a mercenary like Romney somehow has answers. We're all in this mess together and we get out of it together...or not at all.