Back in August, reading my daily edition of the Boston Globe, I saw an article by David Paul Kuhn under the headline, "Obama's problem with white male voters".  I cannot say I read it completely or even particularly closely, but my impression of what David Paul was saying is that Obama really had a problem with old white men, who tended to favor John McCain over Obama.  I immediately got an idea and decided to have a button custom made that read "Old White Men for Obama", thinking it might help make it okay for old white men to get behind Obama.  In other words, I'd start a movement.

 

I went to Obama's web site, selected some art work, found AffordableButtons.com on the web, and placed an order for ten buttons.  They arrived about a week later.  I gave out one or two to friends willing to wear them and offered them to anyone who would take, and wear, one.  I did not have a lot of takers, mostly because men, of any age say past 40, are too vain to wear them.  The most common remark I would get after offering someone a button was, "I'm not old."  That was not the point, and I always wanted to say, "No, but you are not 21 anymore either."  Most of the time, though, I did not say anything.

 

I've had some strange reactions to the button.  While I was in a drugstore, one young black man, about to wait on me, pointed at it, and asked "What's that?" with a look of concern, if not fear, in his eyes.  I said, "That's a button.  I'm an old white man, and it means I support Barack Obama for president."  "What about Sarah Palin?" he asked (this was shortly after John McCain had picked her as his running mate), "Everybody likes her."  "I like lots of people," I said, "but that doesn't mean I think they are qualified to be the vice president of the United States."  He relaxed, and I was happy to see it.  He seemed to think John McCain had just trumped Barack Obama, and Obama was going to lose the election.

 

I keep the button on my bag, which I carry back and forth from work every day, as I take public transportation to my job in Boston.  First the train to Harvard Square, then the bus to Symphony Hall, then another train to work.  One day, going up the escalator out of the Harvard Square T stop, a woman behind me said, "Where did you get that button?  I love it.  I want to get one for my husband to wear."  I explained to her that I had had it custom made and reached into my bag for an extra one, handing it to her.  "Can I pay you for it?"  "No," I said, "Make a donation to Obama's campaign.  This is mine."  She walked off happily.

 

Creating and wearing the button has, of course, made me more aware of the buttons other people wear.  And it was not until yesterday, I swear, that I saw anyone wearing a button with any political message.  I saw a woman on the train, a couple of seats down from me, with an Obama button on her lapel.  A first.  The sheer lack of buttons, not to mention signs in yards or windows (a few here and there) and/or bumper stickers (again, a few here and there, mostly for Obama, although I did see one sign recently in a window for McCain/Palin), makes me think there is a stealth campaign for president of the United States going on in the country. 

 

Looking around a crowded train or bus, you'd never know one of the most important elections in this history of this country is about to take place.  No one seems to want to show their cards, as if there is some danger in doing so.  Perhaps it is just another sign of how cowed we, as a nation, have become since 9/11, when we forgot we were a free, fearless people who ought to be able to trust our own government to do the right thing.  Watching it do the wrong thing for eight long tortured years has certainly taken its toll.  We'll be a long time undoing all the damage that has been done to the world and our own peace of mind, if the lack of buttons is any measure of what is happening on the streets.

Talking with a friend today, a man named Russell Gilfoy, about the upcomong election for President, Russell said there was only one choice since John McCain "pulled a palin".  He said John had added a new word to the language.  Instead of saying someone was "grasping at straws", just say he was "pulling a palin".  Who knows?  He may be right.  A "palin" may be just the word we need to describe unwise, intemperate, and/or foolish choices or actions. 

Trying to watch TPM videos on my Firefox browser, for some reason unbeknownst to me, became impossible in the last few days, so I downloaded the latest version of the Opera browser, installed it, and launched it. It opened with a bunch of tabs I'd been browsing in months ago, when I was trying out Opera. One of those tabs was a web site I'd forgotten about. It was Barbara Ehrenreich's blog.  

Of the many people who blog, and who I'd always read faithfully, was this woman, someone I began to appreciate after I'd read Nickle & Dimed (to death). She is not Molly Ivins, but like Molly, she writes with a kind of furious, funny outrage about the world in which we live. She reminds one of, in her own daring way, of what we've put up with, become, despaired of changing. In a blog about the 160th birthday of the Communist Manifesto (you forgot, did you? To put this on your calendar?) she writes:

"All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

"Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion: The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production," and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the last several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions, and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the 8-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom."

Immiseration is not going to become part of anyone's every day vocabulary, but it is good to be reminded that there is a word that encompasses a lot of what is wrong in this nation today, where getting sick is not just an uncomfortable bodily state of affairs but also a gateway to poverty and that homeless hell we have all been taught to fear more than life itself (every think about how the homeless do it? Get up and put one foot in front of another every single day instead of simply jumping off a local bridge and letting their bodies float home to mother ocean?).

Barbara thinks about those things, and I'm happy to know she is still out there and still finding amusing and interesting ways to write about them.