See Me Squeegee

Today, I am an American.

Sure, I was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Michigan, and now live in California.  Okay, I’ve been to over 40 states and about ten national parks, I’ve gone to the polls for five presidential elections and I’ve worn the red, white, and blue at two different Olympics.  But on Friday I truly became an American:

There was a school shooting / gun massacre 15 blocks from my apartment.

Can’t get any more American than that.

This post isn’t about me, it’s about us.  Yeah, this particular shooting happened in my neighborhood but if you live in America long enough it’ll happen to you, too.  And the saddest thing?  It’ll actually feel pretty normal.

There was a gun massacre fifteen blocks from my apartment on Friday, in Santa Monica, California.  I was at work, twelve miles away sitting near a few fellow Santa Monicans when the news broke.  And I’m embarrassed by my reaction.  If I’m repeating this phrase too many times it’s because it’s still echoing in my mind: there was a gun massacre fifteen blocks from where I live.  And when I got the news, my reaction was:

(at the time) Only 5-6 people known to be injured? That’s not too bad.

And it gets worse.  Let me take you through the collective reaction I observed in a room of people located exactly twelve miles from the shooting and among whom several live within a mile of it.

1) Did you hear there was a shooting at Santa Monica College?  Wow, that’s crazy… (everyone heads to Huffington Post or the LA Times for more info)

2) Well, only 5-6 people known to be injured…that’s not too bad.  Glad it wasn’t worse.

3) Hey, wait – I heard on NPR this morning that President Obama is in town…do we know for sure he’s okay?  (Quickly we confirmed that he was miles away from the incident)

4) Wow – that’s right.  Obama’s in town. Traffic was going to be horrible anyway, but with this shooting it’s going to be awful.  How are you going to get home?

Yep, that’s the reaction we have to gun massacres these days.  A little concern, a little relief that less than 10 people were killed, and then the real panic begins, at least here in greater Los Angeles – how is this going to affect traffic?!  (We’re eerily like that SNL skit “The Californians” and all those spoof news breaks they did on Arrested Development.  “Mass murder in Santa Monica – what that means for your commute coming up at six!”)

And can you blame us?  In just the last twelve months we’ve had the Aurora theater, Newtown, unprecedented gang violence throughout Chicago, the Boston Marathon and its shootout aftermath, and now this. I don’t bring up the above “stages of hearing your neighborhood got shot up” because I’m proud of it or to make fun of it.  I bring it up because two days later I’m still in shock about how little shock I was in when I got the news.  I swim at Santa Monica College; I have my own parking permit there as a Santa Monica  resident who uses the pool.  On the radio they interviewed people who work at the oil change place I go to; on the news I saw the tire shop where I got a new set on the Dodge last year.  I drove right past the crime scene today going from a haircut to Trader Joe’s.  There was a mass murder in my neighborhood and my reaction was essentially “wake me up if the death count rises to double digits.”  Several innocent victims lost their lives along a stretch of road that I travel regularly, and within minutes I had entered into a discussion of how that would affect traffic for the rest of the day.

But what can you do?  We’re numb.  When Columbine happened I was a junior in college and sat in disbelief watching CNN, so much so that I showed up late and disoriented for a final exam that day.  I read all the stories, watched the interviews and vigils on TV, mourned with the rest of the country and stamped that day in my memory forever.  In my lifetime that was the second tragedy that I’ll never forget.  There was the Challenger explosion.  There was Columbine.  Then we had 9/11.  And then?  Shoot, I can’t name them all.  Was there a Jonesboro?  Or maybe Jonestown?  There was Virginia Tech, Aurora, Newtown…  And there have been a bunch of others.  Santa Monica will probably be forgotten soon like some of the other “small” massacres of the past 15 years.  How could it not be?  It’s been six months since dozens of elementary school kids were killed in cold blood and we haven’t done anything to fix it.  Congress can’t get enough votes together to even hold a vote.  Wayne LaPierre will make a statement tomorrow about how “if everyone on that Big Blue Bus that the gunman scattered bullets upon had had their own gun, maybe this wouldn’t have happened” or “if community colleges spent less money on laptops and more money on arming their teachers with guns we’d be smarter and safer” or whatever garbage the Koch Brothers stick in Little Wayne’s teleprompter.

And we’ll forget all about Santa Monica College.  Shoot, as I’m writing this two days after the shooting, this incident isn’t even the top headline at latimes.com.  We’ll forget about this like we forgot about the others – do yourself a favor and read this article about Newtown six months later…the world has forgotten but these families are living hell day by day – having felt emboldened and united to change America’s ludicrous ways too many times and having been stymied by LaPierres, Hestons, Cantors and Boehners.

Leading up to the Newtown shooting – and picking up just as soon as we’ve mostly forgotten, I’m sure –  there was a bill passing through the legislature in Michigan, where I grew up,  that would have allowed concealed weapons in places like sports arenas and, yes, movie theaters.  Like Aurora.  Because, you know, the second amendment is more important than the sixth commandment.  And even stranger, the second amendment is evidently more important than the first – every elementary school student knows that the first amendment right to free speech doesn’t cover “yelling fire in a crowded theater,” yet if 20 elementary school kids hadn’t died at Sandy Hook Elementary, Rick Snyder would have made it exponentially more likely for someone to open fire in a crowded theater.

That’s America.

We’re the only developed country on the planet that does this.  And while we use taxpayer-funded guns to spread democracy across the world we don’t listen to our own tenets of majority rule.  Most of America – and, screw it, all of intelligent America…my apologies to the members of Bachman/Palin Overdrive – favors stricter regulation on high-capacity magazines, bans on automatic weapons, background checks and the elimination of the gun show caveat.  Yet the NRA’s influence and the Tea Party’s reluctance to do anything cooperative with a black man have filibustered our outcry and our grief to the point where there was a gun massacre in my neighborhood and I shrugged my shoulders because the death toll wasn’t big enough to get worked up about.

I’m an American.  You can tell because there was a gun massacre in my neighborhood.  And if you live in America long enough you’ll be able to say the same thing. Unless we continue to fight to do something about it.

Wayne LaPierre and Charlton Heston like to say that we can take their guns “when we pry them from their cold dead hands.” I’m in, fellas. And this week you know exactly where to find me – just head for the chalk-body outlines and walk a dozen blocks toward the beach.

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I’m an endurance athlete.  My mind wanders while I swim/bike/run and I have time to fully digest my thoughts, dreams, and opinions.  Today was one of those days – on the heels of the political conventions, with tax / deficit / fiscal policy ringing in my ears, my mind drifted toward my own story with the current state of American finances.  In case this speaks to you, I offer it here.

I was born a few miles away from Joe Biden, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (you probably know Scranton, its neighbor, from “The Office”.)  I was born a few days after my 25-year old father lost his job.  I was born to a 25-year old mother who had given up her job as a bank teller to move to where my father  could begin his career.  I mention their ages because I’m currently almost a decade older than they were when they had me, and I worry about taking care of myself, let alone a family.

I spent my first few days on this planet in an incubator, having been born a few weeks earlier than planned.  While my father searched for work a few states away, I gave my mother a pretty hard time, proving allergic to most types of baby formula she tried to feed me.  I endured a few surgeries and long hospital stays before I turned two.  I can personally and vividly remember points in my life at which I had experienced more surgeries than birthdays.

For all of that, I grew up middle class and had all kinds of educational and recreational opportunities.  I was fortunate to go to college on my parents’ dime.  I spent my first few years after college chasing my childhood dreams, working for my favorite football team (the University of Michigan), basketball team (Detroit Pistons, where I “won” a world championship ring), and sporting event (the Olympics).  After that I earned a masters degree and started a career in education.  And as part of that whole experience, I’ve even earned enough money in a year – more than once – to be on the Tea Party side of tax policy, cut off from tax benefits because the government “punished success”.

When I was a kid, my parents called me Alex P. Keaton for my conservative political views.  I’ve voted Republican in my past.  And with what I’d have called good reason – I worked hard, got good grades and test scores, went to good schools, and felt that I “built that”.  I watched my parents “build that”, from unemployment on the day of my birth to a middle class lifestyle.

But as proud as I am of some of the things I’ve done; as much as I adore my parents and appreciate the life they gave me, my brother, and my sister; as many instances of hard work as I can point to where one of us truly earned our way in this world, I know that Barack Obama is right.  We didn’t build that alone.  Here’s how it went down:

Like I said, I had a bunch of surgeries as a kid.  I remember being maybe 8 or so and working with an operating room nurse who was having trouble with the gas version of the anesthesia.  I calmly told her that I actually preferred the IV – by that point in my life I wasn’t scared of needles.  But here’s the thing – even while I was spending some quality weeks of my toddler life in hospitals and on operating tables, my parents were able to save for my college education and for my family’s future.  You see, we had health insurance that was negotiated by unions. Without that, things may have been grim, but even though my family lived white-collar lifestyles from the day I can remember, the UAW negotiated my health plan.  I owe my lifelong health to union benefits.

If you call anyone well-educated, I’d fit the definition.  I could read by age three; in kindergarten I’d bring newspaper clippings to show-and-tell.  I spent my whole educational career on honor rolls and I have two degrees from a university that QS – an international educational consultancy – ranks in the top 20 in the world.  But I didn’t “build that” alone – I’ve never attended a private school.  My parents moved from a lousy school district to a very good school district a couple months before I started kindergarten – I still remember…our lawn was a mess and other parts of the house were in disrepair as we moved into the lemon of the block, but as an adult I understand why we needed to get to a better district – and I attended public K-12, a public university for my undergrad degree, and a public university for my masters degree.  Government-sponsored education is all I’ve ever known, and it’s all I’ve ever needed.

In fact, my whole family is public school.  My parents went to Catholic schools from grade school through college (and grad school for my dad), and my brother and sister each did stints in Catholic school.  But we all went to public high school and feel better for the experience.  And between the three of us the count is currently four degrees from the University of Michigan and one from Michigan State, with my sister working on a masters of her own in Illinois and my father, now, using a government grant to get his masters from Michigan and become a public school teacher.

Now, it depends on your definition of success, but here’s the count for my family – my parents are comfortably retired, my brother runs a student achievement program at a public high school and is held in high regard in his district, my sister has been promoted a few times in the last two years in her advertising role, and I run the educational arm of a test prep company.  And we did it all based on public education – my brother and I both used federally-subsidized loans to go to grad school; he even used Obama-based unemployment funding to jump-start his prerequisite study before school began, which allowed him to start/finish school a year earlier.  So…I’m proud of what we’ve each built, but I know we didn’t build it alone.

Like I’ve said, my brother used federal unemployment benefits to redefine his path in the world, and it’s made a huge difference.  He also recently took advantage of programs to allow for hassle-free foreclosure, as he walked away  from a drowning-underwater mortgage to move closer to his job as a public school program leader and put more time into his career (his commute has gone down from around an hour to maybe ten minutes, and he’s investing all that extra time into his students).

Similarly, my parents had a healthy amount of their retirement dependent upon the auto industry (we landed in Detroit shortly after I was born).  And without Obama’s – not Romney’s, even though he grew up a few miles from me – bailout of the auto industry much of that would have been lost.

And here’s my point – it’s probably arrogant to say that we’ve lived the American Dream, but shoot…if there’s such a thing as the American Dream, I’d have to think it includes a nicely-kept home with a pool; three kids who all graduate from college, pursue higher education, and support themselves comfortably; family vacations and good health (most of us are going to Washington for the Marine Corps Marathon a few weeks before election day); and the promise of a comfortable retirement.  So, yeah, I think we’ve lived the American Dream.  And it wasn’t without hard work – especially as an adult I revere the things my parents did to build such an incredible life for us.

But they didn’t “build that” alone.  When I look at the federal programs – socialism if you want to call it that – that we’ve used, I’m struck by this.  Public schools, union healthcare, subsidized student loans, governmentally-intervened pension benefits, mortgage relief…  The government has provided my family with plenty of opportunities to thrive, and we’ve capitalized.  But unlike when I was 18, I’m not willing to wake up on second base and assume I hit a double.  I know that circumstances were good for me and my family, so as proud as I am of what my parents and siblings have accomplished, I’m just as grateful for the circumstances that put us all in positions to do so.

When I was in high school and college, I held very conservative political views. I did my homework and got good grades; why should anyone else get a free pass from the government because they didn’t work as hard?  I applied to the University of Michigan (and was accepted) during the school’s duration at the center of the affirmative action debate, and I always wondered why people who were less qualified than my high school friends would somehow be granted an advantage in admissions.  I worried that the intervention of government would strip me of what I had rightfully earned.  I “built that” – why should someone else be given it?

It wasn’t until I taught high school in an adjacent school district to the one I attended that I saw the stark difference and realized the advantages I had been given.  It wasn’t until I had left the comfort of the middle class and interacted with people from all walks of life – from different backgrounds, cultures, states, and countries – that I realized that the circumstances under which I built what I built were vastly different from those of many others.

And it wasn’t until recent political events and mantras declared a “war on class” that I really stopped to think about the ways that the government set me and my family up for success and opportunity.  Statistically, I might fall with the Republicans.  Excepting for the fact that my freakishly-healthy parents will probably outlive me, inheritance/estate taxes will take a big chunk away from me.  My income is at least top half, so “redistribution” can’t help me (at least at current).  And I don’t plan on getting gay-married, having an abortion, or being female and wanting equal pay.

But to me it comes down to this – Barack Obama’s book is “The Audacity of Hope”, but the Republican economic philosophy to me stinks of “The Audacity of Pride”.  Those who have the audacity to think that they earned what they earned alone; that they thrived in spite of government and not in some part because of it; that they’re entitled to the rewards of “the free market” (which, in the US, requires government intervention in the form of the FDA, the legal system, the transportation system, etc.) without the costs of creating an effective market…those people exercise selective vision.

If you were to look at me or my family, you’d immediately see “middle class” and probably “upper middle class”.  You might think that we’re far past the point of needing government assistance, but we’re also far from the audacity to think that we’ve done without it or will never need it again.  The middle class exists – I exist – because of union programs and government programs designed to invest in American people.  I want that to continue.  I’m voting for Barack Obama.

Paul Ryan is a liar.

I actually defended him, somewhat, in the wake of the RNC – he never actually lied about that GM plant closing in Wisconsin.  While fact-checkers may have classified his comments as “misleading” (that plant was closed before Obama took office, and the plan to close it was made well before the election), he was deft enough as a lawyer/politician to phrase it such that his comments were 100% true.  If the American people want to blame Obama for the plant closing, well, they can choose what to believe, but Ryan did not lie.

Oh, but he did…in a way that cuts closer to my heart than a slam at  Obama does (and we all know that hurts me).

Paul Ryan claims to have run a sub-3-hour marathon – he said as much, with surprising specificity, in a recent interview.  Even worse, given my PR of 3:10, Paul Ryan says he ran a faster marathon than me, and a faster marathon than George W. Bush (who has a 3:44…but I remember him doing something closer to 3:30).  But in fact, Ryan lied.  Ryan’s time is actually worse than Sarah Palin’s.  She was 3:59.  He was 4:01, according to Runner’s World.  P.R. lied about his PR.

Now, one could argue that this story will blow up out of proportion and detract attention from the real issues and that Ryan was trying to be affable on the radio and may have misspoken.  But that’s bull.  A few reasons, some personal and some not:

-Ryan’s brother is a Boston qualifier, and Ryan is a self-described workout junkie.  He knows marathon times, at least somewhat, and knows what that kind of thing means to competitive runners.  No excuses.

-Ryan also knows that he’s under public scrutiny – the same kind of scrutiny that he gleefully exploits with Barack Obama’s misplaced pronoun “that”.  Can’t have it both ways, Paul.

-Sub-3 is a huge deal.  Above the Olympic Trials cutoff and below the Boston qualifying times, that’s the milestone for elite.  Ryan can’t just claim to have that standard and be over an hour off.  That’s like claiming to have run around a 4-minute mile in high school, or to have been a state champion.  If Ryan were off by 10 minutes in the 3:45-3:55 range, whatever.  But he picked a big milestone.

-Not only that, but he just missed a milestone in the 4-hour mark in his actual race.  He wasn’t “just under” anything – he was just over another hourly milestone.  So he can’t even claim that.

So what does this mean?  Paul Ryan is a jerk in the John Edwards mold.  He thinks he can strut around and impress people with his P90x workouts, fake-marathon times, folksy charm and handsome-for-a-politician looks, and we’ll just eat it up.  I don’t want to play the “if he’s lying about this who knows what else he’s lying about” card, so I’ll hold back on that.  But let’s call it what it is – Paul Ryan is a devious character.  If Politifact is to be believed, his political speeches are deliberately misleading – almost worse than lying, in fact, because he obviously pored over the details to make sure that he spoke exactly the truth but not a word more colorfully to shed any light on what an appropriate understanding of the truth would entail.  And now this – a blatant, specific lie to make himself look good, and a half-assed attempt to cover it up.

Paul Ryan’s greatest sin in my eyes?  He lied to say that he was better than me.  Rosie Ruiz Ryan, faking marathon excellence for limited glory.  If he can cut taxes as quickly as he cuts hours off his race time, he may be onto something.  But from now on, I don’t believe him for a minute…or for the 62 minutes he’s probably lying about.

So we’ve heard Mitt Romney’s comments from Friday:

“No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate.  They know right where I was born and raised”.  Or something to that extent (I could be off a word, but that’s essentially it).  And, naturally, we’ve heard the fallout – MSNBC, HuffPo, BIll Maher, etc. all branding Romney a racist birther.  But here’s where this weekend’s uproar doesn’t even come close to last weekend’s Todd Akin nonsense:

1) It’s hard to be racist when you’re essentially quoting rapper Big Sean (“I give her that D, cause that’s where I was born and raised in…”).

2) In taking that quote out of context, the Democratic media are doing the same exact thing that Fox News did to Obama with “you didn’t build that”.  Romney’s entire statement, in context, makes his joke much more benign.  “I was born at…”, “Ann was born at…”.  He was talking about the fact that Michigan is where he’s born.  And trying to be affable at the same time.  And here’s why THAT should be so easy to understand:

Michigan is a huge opportunity for Romney.  For a few reasons.  It has 16 electoral votes – it’s a big state electorally and it has gone Democratic every election since  Clinton.  It’s arguably his home state, and if you look back at Gore’s greatest mistake (if you acknowledge that he did, in fact, lose) it’s that he couldn’t carry Tennessee.  And Michigan is in play, whereas in 2008 it was as blue as the Great Lakes that surround it.

Here’s why Romney’s comments weren’t dumb or racist, but in fact SMART:

Michigan is a hometown-pride state

I’m from Michigan, and one thing I know as a Michigander is that we love our own.  We listen to more Bob Seger, Eminem, Aretha Franklin, and Kid Rock per capita than any other area of the world.  Ohio, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania can claim to have stadiums almost as big as Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor…but none of those states also sells out an 80,000+ seat stadium an hour away on those same Saturdays.  Michigan people love being from Michigan.  Just look at our car commercials, which run nationally but essentially focus on the theme of Michigan pride.

We’re also not huge fans of outsiders unless they earn our trust.  We still laugh at Matt Millen and Marty Mornhinweg, who in addition to being purely awful at managing a football team rode into town on Harleys talking about how they’d shake things up.  We hated them immediately…especially when Millen continued to live in Pennsylvania and commute.  We ran Rich Rodriguez out of town in large part because “he wasn’t a Michigan Man” – and we’d have done the same to Ohioan Bo Schembechler had he not won us over by beating the Buckeyes and embracing Michigan tradition immediately.  We’re still bitter over the Daimler merger and the arrogance of those Germans.

Mitt Romney has a chance to capitalize on his Michigan roots, but he also has to balance that against being an outsider.  He hasn’t lived in Michigan for 40+ years, but he has a chance to win independents if they identify with him as one of our own.  So what does he go to?  He was born there and went to school there (albeit at Cranbrook, a rich private school most famous for being mocked in a battle rap in 8 Mile).  But then he left, identified more with Massachusetts and Utah and Wall Street, and even publicly stated that the government should let the Detroit automakers fail.

Romney’s only commonality with Michiganders is that he was born there, so if he’s trying to rally some homeboyish spirit, you can’t blame him for going to his and his wife’s roots like that.  He doesn’t understand Michigan – one of his primary campaign ads about “I’m from Michigan” actually showed a family photo of he and his relatives at the New York World’s Fair.  So he has to play up the – ANOTHER – birther angle. His own.

And I’ll tell you this – I won’t vote for Romney and I disagree with a lot of his policies, but even though I know it’s phony and calculated for electoral votes, this Obama-donating registered Democrat likes Romney more for his appeal to his home state.  I’m a sucker for that…I’m about to watch the left-leaning The Newsroom on HBO and I promise that I’ll think about the fact that Jeff Daniels is from Michigan a minimum five times.

So Romney used a Michigan-based event to talk about his Michigan-based birth.  That doesn’t make him racist, especially because…

Romney’s biggest achilles heel in the swing states among independent voters just might be that he can’t connect with normal people.  He tries to connect with the NASCAR-fanatical GOP base by saying that “I don’t follow NASCAR as closely as the most ardent (Harvard word!) fans, but I do have some close friends who own NASCAR teams”.  He uses Ivy League vocabulary and 1%er identification when he’s talking to the people already in his camp.  Polls put him well behind Obama in likability, and for many in the middle that’s what the election comes down to if neither candidate separates well on his vision for the future.

So again back to his comment – Romney is having trouble connecting with people.  And what do people who struggle to connect do?  They identify a friendly face, and make a joke.  “Birth certificates” are funny politically.  Obama himself has joked about it (hilariously so in his White House Correspondents standup routine).  So he took that as an opportunity to connect with friendly faces from his home state.

It reminds me of my buddy Brent from college (loyal readers – you’ll learn more about him).  One night on our way to a party we ran into a group of girls who were visiting campus and had lost their host friends.  So we got to be their hosts, and Brent was thrilled.  Within an hour, I came across him, hammered, talking to one of the girls and trying to find common ground.  He was leaning with most of his body weight against her, spilling a drink, and noting that she was from Farmington Hills and he was from Bloomfield Hills.  So he started talking about streets they must have in common, saying – and this is fully true – “do you know 11 Mile Road? Yeah, me too.  What about 12 Mile Road…”.  He was hopelessly trying to find common ground with another Michigander…and that’s just what Mitt Romney did.

Listen, there are plenty of things not to like about Romney, and with my newfound pulpit-to-the-world I’ll probably discuss many of theme here.  But this comment isn’t one of them.

The fact that the left is up in arms about this comment bothers me.  Anyone with a brain and a pulse can agree that Fox News is awful, and that if it had a bastion of actual journalism going on there it would be the greatest insult to journalistic integrity since before the printing press.  But don’t stoop to their level.  I like Barack Obama because I see him as a uniter, even if that stance has gotten him in trouble politically.  I like him because I love his integrity and his passion for doing what’s right.  This episode?  It’s straight out of the Karl Rove playbook.

If you want to blast Romney’s comments, blast him for the fact that even on friendly turf he came of clumsy trying to connect.  Blast him for the fact that in a state that loves its own, he’s still considered an outsider along the lines of Madonna.  But his comments weren’t racist or off-base.  I disagree with the man as a political candidate, but as a guy trying to make friends in his home state of Michigan, I ain’t got nothing against Mitt’s visit to the mitten.