The young man talked another 40 minutes. The bus crawled through rush hour and the security perimeter at the United Center, where Harris would make her speech. There was no bathroom or water on the bus, and no exiting it.
No matter how tight your friendships, you cannot predict where you will find a burst of empathy and help.
Robinson Jeffers thought even our angst was self-centered. “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;/ We must unhumanize our views a little.”
Despite political rhetoric slung to get elected, no party can take care of all people and all problems at once, and resources and time are limited. This was tacitly acknowledged by the DNC when they tried to quash the Poverty Council.
Go look for soulmates in Paris, as Martha Gellhorn did. Loosen lifelong inhibitions in Tahiti. Retire in Mexico.
The tension was there for anyone to see, as when the chair of the DNC Rural Council, Kylie Oversen, told a TV station in her home state of North Dakota that “a lot of rural Democrats get overlooked, as they are in flyover states and red states.”
I can hardly put into words how weird (since that is the Democrats’ own word of the month) it was to see dozens of international figures, including Harris and her husband, the Walzes, the Clintons, the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, Lil Jon, Common, and Stevie Wonder, all in short order. For most of the time, however, I sat there feeling either dead inside or professionally Zen, in service to hoping to see what was really going on apart from marketing tricks.
Veterans hold a trove of experience for the country and, if the speakers this day are to be believed, a relatively sure path to leadership and personal sacrifice. But it should be pointed out that the talk at the meeting was 100 percent unidirectional, from the politicians to the attendees. No questions or other input were permitted.
My experience with the DNC’s event has been not only long walks and great expense, but closed media offices, people who think they know but do not know, absent or last-minute email information that ends up limiting reporting, and being denied access to meetings on the basis of limited seating, where in reality there are hundreds of empty chairs.
Conventions are celebrations of future power not yet won, so there must be a show commensurate with the spoils. The DNC is being held in the two biggest buildings in Chicago, which not coincidentally celebrate the highest powers in our land: business, in the shape of McCormick Place, more commonly used for enormous trade shows; and entertainment, represented by the United Center arena.