“Did You Ever Think You’d See That?”

3/2/2020

Pete Buttigieg and Chasten Buttigieg

We sat in front of the tube Sunday night and made that exclamation, watching a politician kiss his husband and then deliver a gracious and hopeful speech.

The love in the room was tangible, following months of campaigning by Mayor Pete in far corners of the United States, where he was treated with respect and affection by wide swaths of the population.

In the narrow sense, this was not a triumph, since Buttigieg had just been ignored/rejected by voters in South Carolina, who had other agendas, quite understandable. But Buttigieg knew he had taken his youth and hope and skill to the American public and received votes, delegates, and promise of a future.

So, yes, this scene was not something we had thought we would see in a national election, any time soon.

In a way, it reminded me of the hope of turning, dare I admit it, 21 in the election year of 1960, and seeing a candidate I thought represented youth and idealism, John F. Kennedy, beating Richard M. Nixon.

For anybody believing in equal opportunity, there was pride in that religious barricade coming down, but much more it was the hope of another generation coming along, that would sort things out, or so we hoped.

More to the point, Buttigieg’s speech, clearly without prompters or notes, celebrating values like honesty and equality and facts, reminded us of a speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, by a senator, of color.

My wife caught it live, and told me about it, and said Barack Obama would be president, and soon, because he could express the hope and ideals of the nation.

Four years later, we saw an appealing family, husband and wife and two little girls, walk onto a stage in Grant Park, Chicago, to acknowledge being elected president.
“Did you ever think you’d see that?”

I can only speak for myself, but the magical sight reflected to my upbringing, the highly “progressive” political values of my family – the adoration for Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, the records by Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson in our house, and the discussion group of working class people in Queens, intentionally maintained at 50-50, black and white, that sometimes met in my family’s living room.

How often do you see family ideals expressed on worldwide television from a jammed lakeside park in Chicago? For all the birther crap being spread about the Obamas, this was a family victory.

Now it is a gay couple, Pete and Chasten, married, kissing in front of the world, celebrating the reality that Mayor Pete had been accepted – chosen in primaries and caucuses – particularly by older folks, in a time when younger people are much more comfortable with gender diversity.

And then Mayor Pete gave a speech that reminded us of Barack Obama in 2004.
Nobody knows what will play out in the coming days and months.
I won’t even go into the glaring and dangerous failures of the current president.

I only know that Mayor Pete kissed his husband, and gave a great speech, and that made us feel better, if only for the moment.
“Did you ever think you’d see that?”

Grant Park, Chicago, 2008

Gen Xer

3/2/2020 12:10:26 pm

I generally respect you as a writer, a thinker and voice of your generation.

But...i find there is a shallowness to this that reminds me why change is so damn slow in this country. When a liberal, old, white, cisgender, straight man says "Did you ever think we'd see that?" , it strikes two chords for me. The first is that Mayor Pete is where he is BECAUSE he is white, BECAUSE he is not poor and BECAUSE he is not effeminate. He is the gourmet vanilla ice cream of gayness and therefore palatable to you and the boomers shaking their head with a smile. Statistically, I doubt the boomers donated to his campaign or did more than chuckle at his stump speeches bc if they'd supported him, he wouldn't have dropped out.

The second is that the article suggests a gay president is akin to seeing a black president: something that inspired disbelief and head shaking instead of tweaking our expectations to DEMAND blackness and gayness in all forms of representation. I mean, all the black candidates had to drop out bc boomers were just "ok with it" instead of full on ALL IN YES THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

I don't expect you to morph into a different person at your age and I still believe you are a "good guy" not a "bad guy". It's just that this reminds me that white America is satisfied with the pace of the progress of "the other" (whether that's race, orientation, class or gender) because they are the default in power. It feels good to say publicly "Aw. Isn't it cool there was a gay guy running". Your voice could amplify THE BLACK AND GAY CANDIDATES DROPPED OUT AND WOMEN ARE PROBABLY NEXT but most boomers stop short of that fight. They shrug it off to the next generation because hey, "we've come this far by some miracle of the imagination so don't push it". Why don't boomers do more for the "other" candidates? It's not a mystery. It's well documented that challenging the status quo would uproot supremacy and discrimination faster. But they are aged, dying, and tired. So chuckling at the good old days and congratulating themselves on not being Archie Bunker in 2020 will have to do.

Okay.

bruce

3/2/2020 05:09:20 pm

gen xer

your response is a little high on condescension.

the world wasn't always as it is today.

you might find this hard to believe but people might just say the same thing about you in 40-50 years.

i'm sure you've heard of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.

i'm a 'boomer' and, you might not believe this, but i say 'whoda thunk....' when i watch aussie rules football live from australia.

different season, different day, different hemisphere 'whoda thunk'...

i was seven when sputnik (look it up) shot into space; now voyager 1 is beyond our solar system, 'whoda thunk....'

the paternal side of my family is now seven generations in the new world. from irish only and added people from england, italy, germany, romania, india (asian), cameroon and japan.

'whoda thunk'....

live and learn...

George Vecsey

3/2/2020 03:39:36 pm

Dear Gen Xer: Thank you for the comments, many in line with my thoughts/politics. But I do have some objections:
1 My little blog was a brief glimpse at one event Sunday eve -- man kissing man, in the spotlight, end of a campaign run. I cannot equate black history with gay history. Pete and Chasten have moved "the cause" ahead by being themselves, just as Jackie Robinson and Obama were centrist in many ways, Every step matters. I was not awed by his campaign. But his speech was lovely, and worthy of praise.
2. I think Obama was/is so special that he set a high standard, There is no black lane in a presidential primary. I was sorry to see Booker go so fast. My wife and I both think Stacey Abrams would be a great running mate for the (white) candidate.
3. "at your age." Really? You must have seen me trying to call up Netflix or calibrate my iPhone or shrug at current pop music. Guilty. But I think age is as negative a stereotype as race or gender.
4. Not being Archie Bunker is damn faint praise. We lived in Queens, true. I write often about my parents' "activity" in the newspaper guild in the late 30s -- my heroes. I grew up thinking like Bernie Sanders talks. That's pretty apparent on this site., I'll be a Bro if he is the candidate. But you know that. He's going to need some old people if he runs. Thanks so much for the very real compliment of your reply. Please be back. GV

Bruce

3/3/2020 12:02:24 pm

george( brunanpi@hotmail.com )3/2/2020 04:54:40 pm
george,

good response especially #3.

the highest political position a gay politician had reached so far in the great white north is kathleen wynne who was premier of ontario for 5 1/2 years.

the province has almost 40% of the country's population including the country's capital plus toronto the provincial and financial capital.

bruce

Randolph

3/6/2020 06:53:50 pm

George,
“Magical sight”..... yes you have it George.
In a world where it is so much easier to be negative, critical and full of hate, you find ways to remind us that we have an obligation to take care of all humans, not just the ones that look just like us.
Thank you once again for your hard work and for keeping us on point.
RF

PS. I often come across people who would benefit from my wife’s wisdom. Many years ago, when I came down the steps at 5 AM, I found a little note pinned on the refrigerator. It said, “ Remember, It is never too late to be nice.”

Ed Martin

3/6/2020 11:38:18 pm

I did not see the moment, but people I know and love, love people of the same sex. As the current meme says in answer to the theoretical question -“Why are they kissing.” “They love each other.”

My vision of Mayor Pete was not his love life, butt as a Rhodes scholar, fluent in multiple languages, eight, I think, speaking with foreign leaders, etc. rather than our current incumbent being ignored and
laughed at. I hope he will fill such a role in the next administration.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

“Did You Ever Think You’d See That?”

Categories

Buy the Book