Of course I didn’t do it on my own (there were literally hundreds of volunteers and many paid campaign staff members), but I did what I could to contribute, and yesterday Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States.

I’m profoundly grateful for the opportunity to work on this campaign (and I thank my employer that made it possible). I learned a lot. I witnessed how improbable things can become reality with organization, determination, and passion (yes, we CAN and we DID). I met many wonderful people, who worked on this campaign as “their life depended on it.” I also learn quite a few things about myself.

Incidentally, yesterday I cast my first vote as an American citizen (I was voter number 64 at my precinct).

I’m too exhausted and sleep deprived to tell you more, but you can look at some pictures if you like.

Last weekend, I went to a two-day training for “Deputy field organizers” (this is what I will be doing in the next month). Of all the things I watched and read about this campaign, a video they showed us during the training stuck with me the most. And what I mean is, I can’t stop thinking about it.

The video was shot at Obama’s campaign headquarter in Chicago the day Barack Obama learned he would be the democratic presidential candidate. Senator Obama wanted to thank his volunteers and talk about the work ahead of them.

You would expect him to be super-excited and cheering, but he wasn’t. He looked tired, with dark circles under his eyes and very serious. He thanked his people for their amazing hard work and for “lifting him,” in all his limitations and imperfections, to the place where he now stood.

But he also pointed out that the hard fight had just started. “If we had lost the primaries,” he said, “it would have been OK.” Another democratic candidate would have taken over and continued to support the values they all so much cared about. “But we won, and now there is no going back. Now, we cannot afford to lose.”

For most of the video, Barack is seen from the back, as we were standing behind him. We could still see a slice of his smile, so endearing and yet somewhat sad. A smile that has seen too much avoidable suffering, in a country that has the potential of being the best place on Earth.

I found Obama’s display of vulnerability much more motivating that all the celebratory DNC extravaganza. Barack Obama’s sense of responsibility for the people who are the easy victims of History’s mistakes ad bad decisions and his insistence that the only guarantee of a fair government is not a perfect leader, but popular participation in the democratic process is what draws me towards him so powerfully. Much more strongly that any single stance he took, his value system and his vision for America makes me feel so passionately about him.

During the first McCain-Obama debate I looked at Senator Obama as he was listening to his opponent and taking notes. He had the same smile, his head lowered and slightly tilted. Obama was thinking of what to say and how to say it; he needed to be careful to strike the right balance of strength and respect.

It’s a tight tight balance, slim razor’s blade between being perceived as forceful, knowledgeable, and assertive and being perceived as arrogant and disrespectful. His victory or defeat depends on his tightrope walker’s ability to strike just the right chord. Because he is a black man with a scary name and, despite his charm, he has no margin for error.

Barack Obama is too smart not to have full awareness of how close he is to winning and how close to losing. He has the burden to do exactly the right thing not only for his own sake, but for the impact that this election will have on millions of people. And he has to do it while the entire world is watching, in a country that has not been very tolerant of dreamers. Now, that’s terrifying.

This morning I stumbled on this quote from Theodore Roosevelt, that seems the right way to end this reflection on greatness and imperfection.

It’s not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or when the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worth cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

I know that many of you are passionate about this elections as I am, and want to see Barack Obama elected in November with all your heart. (if you are reading this post and you are planning to vote for McCain, that’s OK. But please, please, verify the information you take for granted, and vote for him because you are convinced he and Sarah Palin are the right choice for America, rather than for the comfortable lies and inventions you hear in the TV ads.)

Dear friends, I read all your twitters and your posts on Facebook. I’m grateful for them. I’ve learned a good deal from what you have posted and I appreciate you spreading the world. It feels good to have people around me who believe in a more compassionate and committed America and in the chance to return to America’s profoundly democratic values.

But both you and I know that we are preaching to the choir. Most—if not all—of our friends and Twitter followers already think like us and know a lot about these elections. They don’t need to be convinced, they don’t need to learn the facts, they don’t need to be warned about the dangers of electing John McCain and Sarah Palin, or to learn about the amazing opportunity to rethink this Country once again. We are wasting our wit and persuasion power with people that don’t need them.

There are only 49 days left to November 4th. Look at this electoral map from the New York Times. Obama’s margin is slim, and depending on how the toss-up states vote, McCain can still win by a broad margin (see map below). The situation is still very very fragile. How do you feel about having Sarah Palin as our future President?

We need to take action now. Obama’s message is one of activism, responsibility, and bottom-up influence. The hope Obama talks about is not an excuse to stay home and keep things as they are. It’s a powerful motivation to change what we think is wrong or not working. We need to get out and talk to the world who doesn’t think like us. We need to meet the people who are still undecided, or not yet registered to vote, or fearful, or misinformed.

Please do something. You can donate money, but we both know that is not enough. This election is about changing minds and hearts, one at the time. Find your field office and call them to learn how you can help. Find events close to you. Make phone calls, register people to vote, talk to your neighbors, spread the message. Use your remarkable dialectic, knowledge, and wit to connect with people who are still not sure who they should vote for or if they should vote.

Let’s get out of our homes, away from our computers and mobile devices, and practice what we all believe in: that change starts with us and requires our action.

Thank you,

Antonella

Because now, my dear friends, I can vote. Yes, I can. And so should you.

I’m sitting with my mother in her kitchen in Rome, at the white folding table she bought many years ago (in the world of my parents, I notice, things last much longer; they are so much more permanent than mine). I’ve always liked this tiled room, all white and aqua and filled with light (the Roman light: open, merciless, and with a weightless quality I’ve not found anywhere else.)

She is wearing a white nightgown, a long burgundy robe, and a shawl of the same color. “She is always cold,” tells me Elvira. She also tells me that my mother doesn’t want to take baths. She used to take her clothes off, before they changed her medications.

I know she still recognizes me: she lets me sit close to her and talk to her. Occasionally, she does look in my eyes. Then she says: “Andiamo,” let’s go. I take her hand, which is cold, and we start walking in a circle through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the hallway that goes by her bathroom and her bedroom, then the kitchen again. We go around and around at a slow, careful pace that reminds me of walking meditation. It is walking meditation: I try to be present. I try to feel her. What is left of her, I notice myself thinking.

***

My mother and I were never close. The first of my many ill-fated love relationships, the timing wasn’t right and we never clicked with each other. I was born 10 months to the day after my mother and my father were married. My mother took the pain to explain, several times, that since the first night they slept together, she realized that marrying my father had been a mistake. If it weren’t for me, she told me, she would have left him then.

“Blame the child” is a traditional game in my family. My grandmother blamed my mother for the death of her husband, my mother’s father, who was killed in Albania in 1939 when my mom was five. “If I didn’t have you,” my grandmother used to say, “I would have gone to Albania with Giovanni, and he would still be alive; or we would both be dead,” which evidently my grandmother thought a better and more heroic fate than finding herself alone with a five-year-old in a country ravaged by war, bomb raids, scarce food, and uncertainty.

(My mother’s karmic seed of suffering: that she might be the reason why the person she had loved more than anybody in her life was killed. I know she fought this thought with all the fury of her rational self. I also know that deep inside, the seed of unbearable doubt grew in her soul, a weed that could not be eradicated).

***

I was a colicky child, I’m told. I just screamed and screamed, desperately, for hours at hand. Colicky babies cry with a high-pitch sound that pierces the parents’ ears and souls. They create consternation and mayhem in the healthiest of families. It must have been almost unbearable for my mother, who already felt the most inadequate and unskilled of mothers.

After reading in the newspaper of a man who threw his baby out of a window because of her crying, my father decided he needed to do something. He put me in a dark room, locked the door, hid the key from my mother, and waited. I cried and cried and cried. I cried for hours, perhaps days. Then I stopped. And, the legend goes, that was the end of it.

(As merciless as it seems, my father’s desperate attempt at stopping my crying was more insightful than I ever gave him credit for. Colicky babies, experts say, are oversensitive and get in cycles of over-stimulation that cannot be broken from the outside. The only way to calm them is to teach them to sooth and pacify themselves. And yes, they are at high risk for physical abuse.)

Stopping my crying didn’t stop my mother’s depression. One of my oldest memories is of myself standing in the middle of my mother’s bedroom. I’m a few feet from the bed where my mother lies, her back at me. The room smells of dust and stale air. All I can see is the back of my mother’s beige sweater and her dark hair on the pillow. I can still feel the sense of paralysis in my body. I’m stuck there, unable to get closer and unable to leave. I’m bored, sad, angry, and tired; but I can also feel the slightest sense of hope that she would turn and smile or tell me she loves me and she wants me to come close and hug her.

(My karmic seeds of suffering: that I am unwanted or unwelcomed; that I might possess an intrinsic unlikable, faulty quality that causes others to push me away. That both staying in an unsatisfying relationship and leaving it are impossible alternatives.)

***

Another memory, many years later. My sister, my mother and I are lying on the big bed in the same bedroom, on a sunny Sunday morning. My mother is telling us about her memory of another sunny morning, forty-five years earlier.

It’s a warm and breezy spring day. The windows are open and the curtains move gently in the wind. Her parents bedroom is filled with sun, two suitcases open on the bed. My grandmother sings while she picks a dress, a pair of shoes, a bathing suit for the trip. It’s the first vacation in a long time, just the three of them. My mother runs in and out the room screaming with joy and excitement.

It’s the first time my mother describes this memory to us. She is telling us about the last moment of pure happiness in her life; she can still see it as vividly as when it happened. Then she tells us what happened next.

The door bell rang. My grandmother opened the door. A soldier stood outside with a note. My grandfather took the note and started reading. Suddenly the scene changes to a slow-motion black and white. We regret to inform you … There would be no vacation. My grandfather Giovanni would have to repack his suitcase for a very different trip.

Italy had just invaded Albania. It was Friday, April 7, 1939, a month before my mother’s fifth birthday. My grandfather left the following day for Albania. It was the last time my mother and my grandmother saw him alive. He died few days later, the first Italian casualty of the war in Albania. The Second World War was about to start.

This, I realize, was the turning point. The exact moment when everything crashed and crumbled and life was never the same. The earthquake whose reverberating aftershock shaped the lives of at least three generation of women in my family and can still be felt to this day.

(My mother’s karmic seed of suffering: dreaming happy moments is at the root of disruption; anything you want really hard will be taken away from you in the cruelest of ways.)

***

“Do want to walk some more or do you want to stop? Are you tired?” I ask my mother.
“Andiamo,” she says without looking at me.

Another tour of the apartment. The kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the hallway, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the hallway, the kitchen… Slowly walking our karmic circles over and over again. I’m holding her hand, still cold but trusting, as I steer her away from furnitures and walls.

I look at my mother and I realize that all the memories she didn’t tell me about, all the memories I didn’t listen to are gone forever. All is left is this moment, in which she and I walk in circles, hand in hand, in a medium size apartment in Rome, the capital of a country with a painful past. In a few days, I will be thousands of miles away from this moment and this place. Right now, I’m here.

[New York, January 2008 - Photos by SMD]

On June 5, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot, I was 7 years old and living in Italy. I remember that the news made me very sad. Something about him had touched me deeply, as it had touched millions of Americans who saw in RFK the personification of the hope for a better world for everybody: the blacks, the poor, the immigrants, the minimum-wage workers, and the young people fighting to stop the Vietnam war. Just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the America that desperately needed change was mourning again. It was not just the loss of a man, as extraordinary as RFK was; it was the attempted murder of the belief that progress, peace, equality, and human dignity are possible here and now.

That June of forty years ago, Paul Fusco captured the mourning of the Country: a million people standing by the tracks as RFK’s body made its 8-hour last trip from New York to Washington DC. (video; more about the death of RFK and what he meant for this country in The End of an American Dream: The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy).

It’s astounding and perhaps sad that Robert F. Kennedy’s message is still so relevant and urgent. His speeches are about fundamental human values and problems that need to be solved today as much as they were 40 years ago. He talks about community, war, the environment; poverty, violence, the need for compassion, and what it means to be human.

Politics, many people feel, are dirty. Politics are boring, something to delegate to others. But everything important in our lives, all the things that touch us very personally–our families, our relationships, our jobs, our health and the health of those we love, our retirement, our death, and even our identity and our dignity–are strongly influenced or completely dependent on political decisions. Saying “I don’t care about politics” it’s like saying “I’m OK with delegating decisions about all it’s important in my life to others I don’t even know.”

Sure, power is a dangerous thing. Power corrupts. Politicians are not always good role models. They are human, imperfect, limited as everybody else. But this is exactly why it’s important for people like me and you to be involved in politics, to pay attention to what’s going on, to put in place grass-root checks and balances, to be passionate about influencing our present and our future. Delegating politics to others because we are too good for it is easy; it’s also the laziest, most coward, and most dangerous thing to do.

You can think of politics just as the exercise of power. Or you can think of politics as the opportunity to make the world just a little bit more fair and compassionate.

Yesterday, in her impressive concession speech, Hillary Clinton exhorted us not to look back in regret, but forward with determination. She was talking to her supporter about her campaign, but perhaps she was also talking about our hopes to make the place we call home a little bit better each time.

When you hear people say, or think to yourself, “if only” or “what if,” I say: please, don’t go there. Every moment wasted looking back keeps us from moving forward.

Life is too short, time is too precious, and the stakes are too high to dwell on what might have been. We have to work together for what still can be.

Robert F. Kennedy’s speeches on the web

• Robert F. Kennedy announces the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in Indianapolis, IN - April 4, 1968 [ Video | Transcripts ]

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

• On The Mindless Menace of Violence, City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio - April 5, 1968 [ Video | Transcripts ]

But when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and to be mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, alien men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in a common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great, to let this fear flourish any longer in this land of ours.

• RFK about the true wealth of America [ video |
• Robert F. Kennedy last speech at the Hotel Ambassador, June 4-5 1968 [ Part 1 | Part 2 ]
• Ted Kennedy’s heartbreaking Eulogy at RFK’s funeral [video | Transcripts ]

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”

Roberto Saviano, author of the best selling book Gomorrah, spoke last Thursday at the Festival of International Literature in NYC. Gomorrah, a chilling account of the Camorra’s deep connections with the “legal” Italian economy, sold more one million copy in Italy and has been translated in 33 languages.

Alexander Stille, professor at Columbia University and author of Excellent Cadavers, an analysis of the Sicilian Mafia, says about Gomorrah:

What the book does so well is to remind people, as if it needed reminding, that a third of the country is essentially condemned to a state of permanent underdevelopment because of the persistent, and in many ways increasing, dominance of organized crime.

Roberto Saviano is 29 years old and has received repeated threats by the Camorra. He has no regular home and lives under police protection.

the first time we met, I was very angry at you. I had just finished reading the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which I had received as a Christmas gift. I’m a slow reader in English, but a mysterious force pushed me to go through the 607 pages of the Vintage International paperback edition like a maniac, turning page after page as if a gang of rabid dogs were chasing me, making me forget about my family, my work, and the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. And here I find myself, on the last page, out of breath, exhausted, sweat on my forehead and eyebrows. I’m puzzled. I look for the missing pages. Where are the answers to all my questions? What about of all those lose ends that I hoped to see neatly tied up?

“Who do you think you are, Mr. Murakami?” I cry. “What am I supposed to do now? Chase you in Tokyo to ask you what happened?” (I’m not the only one to feel this way, Mr. Murakami) This is it, I tell myself. The end. No more Murakami. Ever.

A couple of years later, my sister read Dance Dance Dance, and fell in love with your books. She even created a website for you. Then one day, I walked in a bookstore, I saw Dance Dance Dance, and I bought a copy. It was winter; a cold, dark, rainy, and unforgiving New York winter day. I found myself reading the book and sipping hot black tea in a coffee shop in the West Village. The handsome young man sitting at the next tiny table noticed the book and said: “I read all Murakami’s books. Dance Dance Dance was the last one. It’s different from the others, almost hopeful.”

I had my laptop with me and I showed him the site that my sister had created for you. He smiled. “It’s fate,” he said. “You had to read this book.”

“People fall hopelessly in love with you, Mr. Murakami,” I thought. They don’t just read your books, they spend hours and hours with you. There is something in the atmosphere you conjure in your books that captures us and keeps us prisoners. There is something in your characters that we want to keep with us. We love their company.

The truth is, we love your company. When we are reading your books you take care of us. You cook for us and make sure we are never hungry or thirsty. You create soundtracks for us to listens. You clean up and prepare our space. And you surround us with an irresistible sense of longing—the sweetest, saddest feeling of all, the feeling that most closely resemble devastating love.

I’ve just finished reading Kafka on the Shore and I’m experiencing the Murakami’s after-effect: a languid, slightly sad feeling that follows me everywhere. I can’t read any other book, because I’m still trapped in the Murakami experience. Beauty, nature, art, cats, people with half shadows, and the pleasure of reading. You held my hand and brought me in your world, a world that I would have never visited without you. Your world is sometimes frightening and unsettling, but you reassured me: “I’m with you, I’m not going to leave you alone. Trust me, follow me, and I’ll take care of you. You won’t regret the experience.”

There are some authors we just want to spent time with. We forgive them for their shortcomings, we let them get away with things we wouldn’t bear in others. There is something about the quality of their presence we crave for.

This is what I feel for you, Mr. Murakami. You have your faults. You create characters you don’t love enough and abandon them (but the ones you love, you love deeply). You start stories and plots, then forget about them. You drag your stories too long.

But, really, it doesn’t matter. Reading your books is like listening to music. Sometimes it’s not about the lyrics and it’s not about the melody; it’s about the mood that it triggers in us. We want to stop reading anything else, experiencing anything else, to hold on to that feeling. Because we feel that in all our loneliness and separateness, we are all inextricably connected.

I had to think really hard to pick my favorite historical figure. I don’t think I can name my favorite ice-cream flavor, let alone a favorite historical figure. I thought about William James, because when he was at Harvard he was a buddy of Charles Pierce, which is the historical figure chosen by Nick.

But–sorry Bill–it ought to be a woman. A crowd of bad-behaved women came to mind:

• Emmeline Pankhurst (”Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.”)
• Rosa Parks (”When they stood up and I stayed where I was, he asked me if I was going to stand and I told him that ‘no, I wasn’t,’ and he told me if I did not stand up he was going to have me arrested. And I told him to go on and have me arrested.”)
• Anaïs Nin (”I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy.”)
• Josephine Baker (”I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”), and
• Rachel Carson (”The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”)

I wonder why I thought of them. I suspect that it’s because women need to be good to the point of sanctitude or quite bad to become historically famous. And bad girls tend to be more interesting.

So I picked the baddest woman on the block, Mary Jane West, know to the world as Mae West. I’m pretty sure she counts as an historical figure. She was born two centuries ago–exactly on August 17, 1893. And everybody who is still famous after so many years deserves her place in History, wouldn’t you say? [or shall I say Herstory?].

1. If you think that Mae West got famous just because she was sexy, thing again. She became famous because she wrote her own material, both in Broadway and in Hollywood. Between 1926 and 1931, she wrote six plays that were produced on Broadway (Sex, The Drag, Wicked Age, Diamond Lil, The Pleasure Man, and The Constant Sinner) and she rewrote many of the scenes in her early movies, until censure got in the way.
2. After 375 shows, her play Sex was shut down because it was “calculated to excite in the spectator impure imagination” and Mae West was arrested for “corrupting the morals of youth.” She spent 10 days in prison on Roosevelt Island and became famous. Mae West wrote about prostitution (Sex, 1926), homosexuality (The Drag, 1927), castration (The pleasure men, 1928), and interracial relationships (The Constant sinner, 1931), and she had to deal with censure and police many more times. For example, her play “The Drag” was closed after only 2 preview performances and the entire cast was carted off, some in full drag, in a police van.
3. When she starred in her first Hollywood movie, Night after Night, Mae West was already 40 years old.
4. She is the only actress to have her name featured in the Webster’s Dictionary. A Mae West is “an unflatable life jacket, originally issued to pilots during World War II.”
5. Mae West is famous for her double-entendres, so much so she once said “If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.” Among the most famous:
   • When I’m good I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.
   • I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.
   • I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
   • Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
   • Love thy neighbor - and if he happens to be tall, debonair and devastating, it will be that much easier.

   In a 1994 message to the Berkshire Hataway Shareholders, Warren Buffett quoted Mae West: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”

And so we remember you, Mae. Way too much of a good thing.

My turn to tag.
The rules of the meme:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. List 5 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3. Tag 5 more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4. Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.

And I hereby tag:

• Andrew Hinton at Inkblurt
• Troy Worman at Orbit Now!
• Karl Martino at Paradox1x
• Tony Green at Mere Cat.
• Erik Marshall at A Memorable Fancy.