AOC Only Gets 60 Seconds At Democratic Convention To Deliver Pre-Recorded Message Rachel Sandler Forbes Staff
“I only have a minute. Sixty seconds in it. Forced upon me, I did not choose it, But I know that I must use it. Give account if I abuse it. Suffer, if I lose it. Only a tiny little minute, But eternity is in it.” Dr. Benjamin E. Mays (and recited by Elijah Cummings) Tweet by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC US House candidate, NY-14US Representative,NY-14 (BX & Queens). In a modern, moral, & wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live. % People-Funded, no lobbyist. She/her Bronx + Queens, NYC ocasiocortez.com
Replying to @AOC You’ve got this. Remember all those poems we recited together in 2nd grade? It was prep for this moment. You’ve got this. Tweet by mjacobs @mjacobs324 Veteran elementary teacher. Uncertain about our future but inspired by former student @AOC and hopeful for Biden/Harris Joined June 2016
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOCReplying to @mjacobs324 Ms. Jacobs! Is that you?! Yes, I do remember the poems we recited in second grade! You prepared me perfectly for this moment. Thank you for teaching me, encouraging my growth, and believing in me as a child.
I’ve fought alongside Senator @KamalaHarris for direct cash payments during the pandemic and for clean water as a human right. Now let’s defeat Trump and make those policies a reality, Rashida Tlaib.
[Kamala Harris] is responsive to activist and movement pressure to make climate a top priority.” Evan Weber, political director of the Sunrise Movement, applauding the partnership between Harris and AOC on Climate Legislation.
Congratulations to @KamalaHarris, who will make history as our next Vice President. She understands what it takes to stand up for working people, fight for health care for all, and take down the most corrupt administration in history. Let’s get to work and win. Congratulatory Tweet by Bernie Sanders.
Senator Kamala Harris is not my first choice for Biden’s Vice President but I think she is a good choice. She is smart, ambitious, and almost gorgeous. Most importantly, she doesn’t have a glass jaw and she should be able to easily take what ever Trump & Company are going to dish out (for the same reason as Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, Ayanna Pressley, and AOC are so tough; they are all smart, very agile, women of color and because of that they all grew up having to fight the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” {and President Trump & Company can certainly be described as outrageous fortune}).
As an sort of aside, people of color, especially women are almost always subtly judged to a higher standard than men, for example when Lyndon Johnson won over Barry Goldwater with 61% it was rightly reported as an “historic landslide”. When AOC beat a Wall Street and Chamber of Commerce supported competitor in this primary, with 74.6% percent of the vote, it was described as “surviving a well funded primary challenge”. End aside.
Harris is somewhat of a protégé of Willie Brown, who, himself, is an amazing politician, having been born in the small jerkwater town of Mineola in East Texas, he ended up being arguably the most powerful person in Californian politics before he retired to become mayor of San Francisco. They dated in 1994-95 when she was an Assistant DA of Alameda County; he was 60 and she was 29. Willie Brown, I imagine, had a lot to teach Harris and Harris is proving to be an excellent student.
Harris is described as somewhat of an centrist but I do think she is to the left of Biden in both climate and racial issues still, that is hard to tell because both Biden and Harris are moving left with the Progressive tide. However, according to The Daily Beast, since January 2019, congressional records show that Harris has signed on to 18 bills Sanders introduced, while Sanders has similarly added his name on 20 pieces of legislation put forth by Harris.
These are unusual times and everything I read says that pandemics usually lead to major changes so it should be an interesting time as well. Change does feels like it is in the air and that is thrilling but it is good to remember that “May you live in an interesting time” is a Chinese curse.
I did not want to join the crowds at crowded Lake Tahoe. Mike Moore had passed on a place recommendation, The Sierra Valley Preserve, from a photographer friend, Deborah O’Grady, who seems to have a similar esthetic to my photography. We decided to give it a try. This is the headwaters of the Feather River and, while it was great to be alone in a beautiful landscape, The Preserve promises to be much better in the Spring when there will be more water and wildlife. Still, the quiet was very welcome and the area came with the timely bonus of having been “discovered” by a black explorer, Jim Beckwourth, in 1850.
Two days before our walk, Rashida Tlaib won her primary by a landslide. According to the New York Times, she was the most vulnerable of The Squad so it was nice to see her win by 30 points. The same day, Justice Democrats backed Cory Bush, an activist from Ferguson Missouri, beat long time office holder, William Clay in her primary, and Marie Newman beat an old time anti-abortion Democrat. Newman ran on Medicare-for-all, a $15 minimum wage, and the Green New Deal as well as getting rid of ICE. Here, walking in a wilderness preserve in what is undoubtable Trump Territory, the sun is shinning and it seems very much like the Progressives are on the rise.
We saw a few Trump signs but the one that tickled us the most was the No More Bullshit on the sign above. It seems like the most unlikely slogan imaginable for a guy who is, after all, a professional bullshitter and it didn’t detract from our joy over the Progressive wavelet.
“I know, it’s nuts up there.” Claudia Heath agreeing with Michele that the Tahoe area is crowded.
Michele and I are at the Heath family cabin in Squaw Valley – soon to be “the place formally known as Squaw Valley”, I guess – and it is packed. The whole Tahoe basin is packed; like Strasberg in July packed. The Truckee River is stuffed with shore to shore groups of rafts and it makes me wonder how virus safe it is. Sure, they are outside and the clusters of people are probably pods of people that probably already know each other and already feel safe together but California had 4,380 new Covid-19 cases yesterday with 35 deaths and this can’t be helping.
We decide our best bet in taking a lonely walk is at the Donner Camp Picnic Area by Alder Creek.
I have been here before and going back during this time of Black Lives Matter protests reminded me of a post I wrote six years ago. I’ve reposted it here with some minor changes:
As I left Truckee, I passed by Alder Creek, one of the two sites where the Donner Party was stuck over the winter of 1846-47. Tamzene Donner and her husband, George, died here as well as George’s brother, Jacob, and his wife, Elizabeth. Still, all five of Tamzene and George’s children lived as did three of Jacob and Elizabeth’s seven kids. In addition, there was one single woman who lived. But, out of the seven single men who were with the party as teamsters and animal handlers, only two lived.
Two of the children who lived were only three years old. The five teamsters who died ranged in age from 23 to 30, the two who lived were both 16. The only person over 16, who lived, was Dorothea Wolfinger, the single women (who had been widowed on the trail). Clearly, this was not survival of the fittest. Rather, this was a case of the fittest sacrificing for the least fit. If it had been any other way, the survivors would have been considered beasts. But I don’t think that is the reason they saved the children, I think that they considered themselves as part of a large family. Family might not be the right word; maybe Community would be better.
Going into nearby Sierra Valley, it struck me that this was a community also.
It is a community that is spread out, but – in my imagination, at least – a community that would not let its three-year old children starve to death.
As I drove through the Sierra Valley, passing ranches, separated by miles of seemingly nothingness, I kept mulling over the idea of Community and how it affects its member’s actions. When Romney was running for president, he seemed particularly hard-hearted and out of touch, but people who knew him thought that he was generous to a fault. However, his generosity was to people that he knew or were in the same church, in other words, in his Community. When I think back on the Conservatives I know and have known, they are all generous. Indeed, they are often more generous than many of the Liberals I know but, they are only generous to members of what they consider to be their community. Liberals, the Progressive wing at least, tend to consider their Community the entirety of Humankind making it more diverse and larger than Conservatives so that their Community includes homeless Guatemalan children trying to get back to their parents as well as Palestinians fighting the Israeli takeover of their land (although Progressives are not so diverse that they would want to give money to the Westboro Baptist Church).
I entered Sierra Valley from Truckee, going through Sierraville and as I left it at the eastern end of the valley, I saw a train loaded with Armored Cars. They fascinated me, they seemed so out-of-place and, in a very strange way, so lovingly conceived. They were brutal with exquisite detailing, the kind of that can only happen when something is built with, close to, an unlimited budget.
It also struck me that anybody inside that armored car – looking out through the bulletproof windows – was completely separated from whomever was outside. They are in a different community. Soldiers, riding in those behemoths, in Iraq or Afghanistan, are saying “We are not you, we are separate, and we can do anything we want”. Cops riding in those mobile forts on city streets are saying the same thing, not only to the citizens outside, but to themselves and so do cops behind face shields encased in helmets and bulletproof vests.
One reason the police are so militarized, it turns out, is thatthe Armored Cars, M16 assault rifles, bulletproof vests, Kevlar helmets, et al, were pretty much free through a Department of Homeland Security program to fund military equipment to police departments after 9/11 – so they are hard to turn down. But, again, they are actually bad for everybody concerned. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail; this equipment gets used. The police, looking through the windows of an armored car or military grade visor under a Kevlar helmet, are no longer part of the community, they have become an occupying army. They say things like “Bring it, you fucking animals!“
That’s the problem, the militarization of the police is not good for anybody except the people actually selling the military equipment. Armored Cars don’t help deter crime, they don’t help catch criminals, Armored Cars don’t help with crowd control, they don’t even help in riot control (although, I guess, one could argue that they would help in a mass zombie attack).
“Yeah, about that; this is today, today is yesterday, and tomorrow is also today. It is one of those Infinite time loop situations you might have heard about.” Nyles explaining the movie’s premise to Sarah.
We saw Palm Springs, the movie, the other night and then, two days later, we saw it again (and then parts of it a third time). It is a perfect movie for our Groundhog Day-esque life under the dreaded Covid.
Years ago, as our beloved cat, Spike, was dying, he spent every day laying around, seeming, just waiting to die. I kept thinking Am I doing the same thing? Just waiting to die? Three years later, Michele’s mom died after a long, slow, slide, into Alzheimer’s during which she had no idea of where she was or when it was, and that same feeling came back as What is the purpose of this? Am I just filling time, waiting to die? That, I think, is the central question in Palm Springs. The easiest way to describe Palm Springs is to call it an updated redo of Groundhog Day – using “redo” in a very loose manner – and seeing it twice is a perfect metaphor for our daily sameness. But that’s not why we saw it again and again, we saw it again and again because it is a fun summer movie and we liked it that much.
The movie stars two actors, Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg, who have both been around for a while but I didn’t know. They are great fun to watch, especially especially Milioti, who starts out as a sort of shrill one horse pony saying “what the fuck” over and over again, but blossoms as the movie goes on. Although I am not a Bill Murray fan, I am a big fan of Andie MacDowell and the two of them were OK together, but Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg as two cynical thirties-something cynics are joyous together. The movie takes place during one of those movie weddings that are familiar not because we’ve been to them in real life but because because we’ve seen them in the movies so many times. May I suggest you go one more time, I am sure you will like it. (And let me know what you think.)
