Meet Tananarive Due
Volunteering for the Obama campaign I’ve made many friends from diverse backgrounds, no few of them eloquent writers who have careers as journalists. Among those was Linda Hansen, who also regularly posts at the Huffington Post. Here’s one of those “degrees of separation” stories, from here in the mid-west to both coasts:Linda connects us
Over the course of Campaign 2008 Tananarive Due has also become a friend of Linda’s. She is a writer, and a gifted one; her eloquence, her compassion, her clear-eyed sense of social justice were forged in her family’s long struggle for civil rights. Her home is now in Southern California, but her roots are in what the rest of us, including Linda, think of as the Deep South. Linda emailed (is that really a verb?) this morning to point me at Tananarive’s blog posting as she and her four year old son, Jason, were preparing to fly home to be with her family on Tuesday night. She included a link to Tananarive’s final published thoughts about this election and what it means to so many Americans. Real Americans–which, as Linda pointed out to me, “is not a title solely reserved for the McCain/Palin GOP.”
August 28th connects us.
August 28th, 2008, defies my ability to describe. I spent hours and hours at Invesco Field in Denver, talking, taking pictures, and capturing video streams to share with the world. It’s also a significant anniversary, so it behooves you to read Tananarive’s thoughts from that day, too.
Volunteering connects us
I will not wake on November 5th thinking I should have done more to insure that Barack Obama is our next president. I have door-knocked, phone banked, badgered friends and family to donate (and donated myself), written to newspapers coast to coast, marched in parades, dropped food for other volunteers, handed out buttons, bumper-stickers, and yard signs, gone to rallies, watched debates - and blogged. Activism connects us. Extroversion connects us. Writing connects us. On election day, voting connects us. But I’ve never written anything as profound or important as that Tananarive’s just shared.
Obama connects us
What we do – how we participate – varies greatly. None of us think Barack Obama is the answer to all our problems, or that he’s somehow more than human, or perfect. We do believe it’s time to give a man of his vision and intellect a term in the Oval Office. We don’t believe he’s “the one.” He does happen to be the right man at the right time – he is, to borrow a prophetic phrase, “that one.”
The past and the future connect us
If you want to understand why we do this, why Linda, and Dawn, and Ash, and Zennie, and Katie, and Carl, and Emily, and Neil, and Donna Marie, and Matthea, and Anjuli, and Felicity, and Shawnee, and David, and Don, and Mary Lewis, and more others than I can reasonably list here, and I work for one man’s success with no expectation of any direct personal gain – it’s in Tananarive’s words.
