A couple of years ago, after a sudden sickness, the oldest son of someone I loved was diagnosed with leukemia. I remember standing with his mother as the doctors told her that her eight year old son had a disease that could end his life and he had to embark on a multi-year course of chemotherapy, with no guarantee of success. Her pain was unimaginable. I had to leave the room to find a quiet place to sob and cry. It was one of the lowest points of my life.
As we shepherded this courageous young man through the terrible effects of his disease and treatment, we had a lot of opportunity to sit and sob and feel the pain. But on the many, many days that we sat in his hospital room, or the oncology clinic waiting room, I could not help but notice the other kids, some much younger, who were also towing IV poles, and suffering the side effects of the poisonous medicines they were being treated with. Nor could I hold back the tears when we once shared a room with a young seventeen year old high school student, laying in the next bed who was in the final stages of cancer that had spread to his very bones, attentively attended by a loving father. Over the course of time, I met many parents and kids who were fighting life threatening diseases and suffering the pain of sickness and treatment.
Now the primary campaign is over, but for some it leaves a residue of bitterness and anger. These folk are filling the air with cries of pain and accusations of sexism. And the pain they feel while real and deep, is clouding judgment and threatening the very thing they seek to preserve – the forward movement of women in all aspects of our society. The rage has blinded reason and therein lies the seeds of self destruction and the separation from members of their natural coalition.
And the major source of their rage is their experience of sexism during the campaign. How unfair, how painful, they declaim. But they are so lost in the myopia of their pain that they have yet to raise their heads and look around them. If they did they might have noticed, as I did, that there was plenty of pain and disrespect to go around. As Washinton Post columnist Eugene Robinson noted this morning…
This is a passage from an e-mail I received in April from an Obama volunteer in Pennsylvania: "We've been called 'N-lovers,' Obama's been called the 'Anti-Christ,' our signs have been burned in the streets during a parade, our volunteers have been harassed physically, or with racial slurs -- it's been unreal."
Or one NJ newspaper reported on even in the campaign they loved and supported…
Rep. Rob Andrews, who supported Hillary Clinton throughout the primary season, disclosed he received a phone call shortly before the April 22 Pennsylvania primary from a top member of Clinton's organization and that the caller explicitly discussed a strategy of winning over Jewish voters by exploiting tensions between Jews and African-Americans.
"There have been signals coming out of the Clinton campaign that have racial overtones that indeed disturb me," Andrews said at his campaign headquarters in Cherry Hill Tuesday night after he lost his bid for the U.S. Senate nomination. "Frankly, I had a private conversation with a high-ranking person in the campaign ... that used a racial line of argument that I found very disconcerting. It was extremely disconcerting given the rank of this person. It was very disturbing."
The point here is not that their candidate didn’t suffer from sexism, she did – it is that she is not alone in having to deal with the pain and indignity of unfair and ugly treatment.
If you look up from your anger, you will see that there are others pulling those IV poles around and dealing with the ravages of discriminatory treatment. And if you can recognize that one simple fact, maybe, just maybe, you will come to appreciate that your fight in not with Obama, or even the Democratic Party. Your fight is with the purveyors of hate and discrimination. Maybe, just maybe, you can come to understand that there is no such thing as “reverse discrimination”, there is only discrimination and whoever the recipient the pain is the same. Maybe, just maybe, you will come to understand that among the sufferers, an embrace goes farther than a scolding.
I am not your enemy! I am your ally. I will man the lines and fight the fight with you, beside you. If I need educating, educate me, don’t curse me. If I need sensitivity, sensitize me, don’t excoriate me. And if you are in pain… look around… you ain’t the only one!
