Walk a Mile in My Shoes, Walk a Mile in Their Shoes posted 10/29/2008 9:50:44 PM | 12 kudos what's this?     report abuse tagged: politics, history, future

observed50

As I sat watching Obama’s 30 minute ad tonight, I was deeply aware of hundreds of conversations I’ve been involved in during this election containing the kinds of anger and vitriol we see here in the blogs. Conversations of people, many of whom, if they were watching that 30 minute ad tonight, would see it and interpret it as they have all other communication from his campaign.

I kept wondering about how do people see this guy such that they don't see what he brings that historically has been so deeply absent from US politics in our lifetime? How do they only see the things they fear, hate or dislike, and not what is unique and substantive? Why is a truly transformational voice constantly having to speak above the white noise (and I mean ‘white’) regarding all these things of character? What brings such divergence in perception and evaluation?

And I have to wonder, in part, what role is played by how much we’re actually able to ‘walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?’

This is the first time in my adult life I am willingly choosing to vote for a major party candidate (versus holding my nose for Kerry to stop Bush) for president because it is the first time someone spoke to the world I live and breathe, a world of social change.

For the first time in my life, someone speaks as if this nation REALLY does have a responsibility to ALL OF ITS CITIZENS, and not just those making the most. MLK Jr moved me that way. Some other activist leadership has touched on it. But Obama’s voice is for me, the first time a voice spoke from the place of suffering of so many for whom the suffering is real and systemic and demanding to be addressed, not something to be manipulated and forgotten.

i.e., the suffering he addresses aren't sufferin because 'those' people are too lazy to lift themselves by their bootstraps. It’s about addressing the experiential place for which many had no bootstraps, couldn’t get bootstraps, or simply didn’t even have boots. Structural, systemic, American.

He speaks to that suffering while in our cities, 50% of our kids aren’t graduating from high school, and a chunk of America wants to spend a ton of time talking about the 2% of Americans that make more than $250,000/yr. A nation is throwing away its children, and consequently, the urban future, and what is normally important in American politics, is to talk about what must we do to help the rich trickle down their wealth on all of us to help us maybe someday, maybe not, make a little more, do a little more, We treat these dropout kids like they’re trash (they could stay in school if they wanted to, or better yet, give em vouchers!), and worship Joe the Plumber because he spoke to no one’s fear about socialism until we put lipstick on a pig to look like socialism…

I’ve taught in schools without textbooks, chalk or library materials for my classes, and that wasn’t because they were hippy communes. They were urban public schools, and those kids were to compete against the kids in the suburbs with the highest expenditure per student per capita in the US. Compete…for what?

I’ve helped farm workers hospital workers and graduate student teaching assistants organize for better working conditions and wages. I’ve walked picket lines with brewery workers, electrical workers and farmworkers. I’ve helped register and educate voters in several states. I’ve lived in the urban core, and taught their kids at the high school and university level. I’ve ridden shotgun with police on hot urban nights, just to understand what is the structure of the inner urban experience and their interface with police. I’ve worked with gangs. I’ve worked with the Muslim community to help them build community resources that mirrored what other religious groups have…summer camps. I’ve partied, studied, danced and broken bread with former Black Panther Party members who worked the breakfast lines in Chicago to feed kids from the projects that were going to school hungry without Panther breakfasts.

Couldn’t walk a mile in their shoes…but tried to walk a mile beside them.



I can’t be black, and my poverty at any moment is a matter of choices made from risk taking or sacrifice made for others...in other words…poverty of choice. I have social mobility guaranteed by lots of education, along with the right gender, race and height.

But I’ve stopped to listen, and work, with folks in other shoes. I know I can’t really walk in their shoes, because I cannot be a woman, an African or Latino American, or structurally poor. I can’t be uneducated, because I passed that a long time ago. But I can listen, and listen to the point where what I hear is transformative of my own perceptions, evaluations and resultant intentions. I don't simply see my interests...I get a glimpse of theirs too.

The top of America, they don’t have need for all my education and skills. They’ll make it fine without me. But for a large chunk of America, and a much larger chunk of the world that America influences so directly and profoundly, those folks need my education and skills to be focused on working to solve the vast social problems that give us such high drop out rates and so many uninsured domestically, while globally, we’re faced with over 2 billion people making less than $2/dy. That 2% of America above, they don’t need my support for their trickling capacity. The bottom of the pyramid needs my support, my skills, my education to help dismantle the oppressive weight of the pyramid, and all the shit that actually trickles down on them, not for them.

I am so profoundly awed and moved that in my lifetime, after such a long burning frustration with my country and its vapid, corrupt and decayed politics, domestic and global, someone speaks into the world about which I most care. I am ecstatic that they speak about that which I most want to make more possible, that people dispossessed can walk with me and feel like they belong there and are recognized as having something important to contribute.

This is not about a person, but a voice. It is not about promises, but possibility. It is not about what I expect a leader to do, but what he will make possible for me, you…us…to do. It is not about what he thinks he can do…it’s what so many Americans again feel like they can do…

They can see the America they first thought possible as young children in grade school learning “We hold these truths to be self-evident”. They can see the America their grade school faces reflected with awe when they recited, “…It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced… to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.”

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