African American

Let me start off by saying I am white as hell. Not only am I white, I'm a native Southerner. Not only Southern but Mississippi-Louisiana Southern, raised there in the last half of the last century when things were, shall we say, cataclysmic. Why I was always a liberal I do not know. I'm the only one in the family. But the other half of that insane dynamic is that you do not have the bubble from which you proclaim what would be amazing and ideal and wonderful for just every damn body because, well, aren't we all the same and aren't we all just like me?

No, we are not all the same. And some of us have fought one another and loved one another and been stuck with one another and had to work things out in ways that leave everybody beat up and hurting, and trying to figure out what we have done to one another and what we can bear doing in the future.

Frankly I was impressed that President Obama, who seems to have had a foot in so many worlds that he couldn't immerse in just one, could stand all the things we all projected onto him and stay sane. The man is remarkable as hell. But he's got all the constraints of having to actually FIGHT the fights that others can believe they'd surely do more purely or nobly or with more of exactly what they profess to hate, the blinders of ideology. You know, those people who have not had to live intimately with people they disagree with, and sometimes hate. And the alternative isn't NO ideology, as the idealists seem to believe. It's pragmatism. It's recognizing that you might hate a whole lot of things that people say and do but you have to live with those people unless you're willing to kill them or negate their rights, and you have to learn to get along in ways that advance everyone a few steps rather than grabbing them by the balls and being just sure their hearts and minds will follow. Cute phrase, don't work.

So, Hillary. Hillary is a pragmatist like I'm a pragmatist and a liberal like I'm a liberal. The crazy kicker is that I love those family members whose ways of thinking and acting have never been like my own, and I don't want to subjugate them any more than I want to subjugate the people they DO want to. In a way it's more liberal. Liberal isn't just "us." It's everyone. It's having good will and hopeful intentions toward people who make you nuts and recognizing that even when you have to take a firm stand and say "Oh HELL no" to some of the things they want to do, doing it by force without consideration makes you a dictator in the name of liberalism.