![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhI was born in Maine, and I try to make the best of being an American. That means trying to make the country better, and trying not to be a dick generally about this country or other countries. I’m the kind who stays and fights.
I’m not sure that all this heightened awareness about all the deal trading that went into HCR is a good thing for everyone to know in such detail. Not that it should be hidden, but it shouldn’t be the lead story, whatever Pelosi did to get the bill passed. Those who are dismayed by what went on should go read the second half of the Dallek LBJ biography and see how many arms he had to twist to get the Civil Rights Act passed in ‘64, a bill that still had so many problems that it’s been constantly amended, and the Voting Rights Act had to be passed the next year. We’re taught in schools that it was the wonderful conclusion of the civil rights movement, but it was far from that for so many reasons. In fact, the passage of the Civil Rights Act caused such a schism in the Democratic party that the entire white Southern power structure switched to the Republican party and got Nixon into the white house in ‘68, which is why Obama was the first non-southern Democratic president since JFK. On the other hand, tons of lawsuits are filed based on that flawed act, and I doubt we could have gotten the ADA if not for the Civil Rights Act.
Or even better, look back at how social security was passed, because it was a fucking mess, and it’s still far from a perfect system (as any of us who have parents or grandparents who depend on it can attest). But it’s better than it was before, when the elderly were the poorest group in the nation, hit hard by the depression.
Yes, there’s a lot of compromise that completely sucks (like the reproductive freedom stuff), but compromise lived with often leads to more progress. I remember the initial fight over gays in the military in 1993; Clinton spent almost all of his political capital and got almost nowhere. DADT, as much as we hate it now, was the best he could do at the time and it was better than the witch hunts that had been going on before that. I don’t think we could have gotten the military—the military! which fought tooth and nail to keep even DADT from happening, you don’t even know—to the place it is now without the intermediate step of DADT. Its time is past, for sure, but maybe we needed it as a placeholder while the culture did 18 years of work on homophobia.
As for the comparisons to other countries, I guess I’ll say this. You know how nowadays in Sweden etc they’re having all these debates about extending benefits to immigrants, basically to non-Swedes? Well, the US has always been in that place. Look at the difference in the progressive movements in England/Germany vs. the US in 1880-1915 and you’ll see that over and over again, the problem in America is that those workers didn’t look like us, weren’t Americans, weren’t us—they were strange and foreign and had weird names and were Catholics or Jews and we weren’t really sure we wanted them to stay. And that isn’t even counting the Negroes.
Remember: change is hard. It’s always hard. It’s slow and painful, and it’s never enough, never where we should be. But I look back and god, how far we’ve come, how much has happened since those early Clinton years, when we thought we could get gays serving openly in the military and a true national healthcare reform, and we couldn’t. So I’m going to be happy about it, because it’s been my entire adult life in coming.
I’m not sure that all this heightened awareness about all the deal trading that went into HCR is a good thing for everyone to know in such detail. Not that it should be hidden, but it shouldn’t be the lead story, whatever Pelosi did to get the bill passed. Those who are dismayed by what went on should go read the second half of the Dallek LBJ biography and see how many arms he had to twist to get the Civil Rights Act passed in ‘64, a bill that still had so many problems that it’s been constantly amended, and the Voting Rights Act had to be passed the next year. We’re taught in schools that it was the wonderful conclusion of the civil rights movement, but it was far from that for so many reasons. In fact, the passage of the Civil Rights Act caused such a schism in the Democratic party that the entire white Southern power structure switched to the Republican party and got Nixon into the white house in ‘68, which is why Obama was the first non-southern Democratic president since JFK. On the other hand, tons of lawsuits are filed based on that flawed act, and I doubt we could have gotten the ADA if not for the Civil Rights Act.
Or even better, look back at how social security was passed, because it was a fucking mess, and it’s still far from a perfect system (as any of us who have parents or grandparents who depend on it can attest). But it’s better than it was before, when the elderly were the poorest group in the nation, hit hard by the depression.
Yes, there’s a lot of compromise that completely sucks (like the reproductive freedom stuff), but compromise lived with often leads to more progress. I remember the initial fight over gays in the military in 1993; Clinton spent almost all of his political capital and got almost nowhere. DADT, as much as we hate it now, was the best he could do at the time and it was better than the witch hunts that had been going on before that. I don’t think we could have gotten the military—the military! which fought tooth and nail to keep even DADT from happening, you don’t even know—to the place it is now without the intermediate step of DADT. Its time is past, for sure, but maybe we needed it as a placeholder while the culture did 18 years of work on homophobia.
As for the comparisons to other countries, I guess I’ll say this. You know how nowadays in Sweden etc they’re having all these debates about extending benefits to immigrants, basically to non-Swedes? Well, the US has always been in that place. Look at the difference in the progressive movements in England/Germany vs. the US in 1880-1915 and you’ll see that over and over again, the problem in America is that those workers didn’t look like us, weren’t Americans, weren’t us—they were strange and foreign and had weird names and were Catholics or Jews and we weren’t really sure we wanted them to stay. And that isn’t even counting the Negroes.
Remember: change is hard. It’s always hard. It’s slow and painful, and it’s never enough, never where we should be. But I look back and god, how far we’ve come, how much has happened since those early Clinton years, when we thought we could get gays serving openly in the military and a true national healthcare reform, and we couldn’t. So I’m going to be happy about it, because it’s been my entire adult life in coming.
