Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
This weekend we are traveling in upstate New York and, as we say in these United States, the leaves are starting to turn. The air has a crackle to it and we are happily putting on sweaters and jackets. This part of the world – the Finger Lakes region – is beautiful at any time, but right now its beauty seems more supple and peaceful than ever. Looking out from any height, the long, low, rolling hills are patched here and there with red and yellow, and we couldn’t be happier.
Just sayin’.
This is a picture of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who worked for more than 50 years, with great and stubborn dignity and a powerful intellect, for civil rights – most of all, for women’s right to vote.
She was born in 1806, only 30 years after the Declaration of Independence. She never lived to cast a vote. When she died, in 1902, she had been working for female suffrage for more than 50 years.
Voting is one of the great currents of American history. It took many years – indeed, most of the time the United States has been a country – to ensure that the vote could not be forbidden to American citizens on the basis of their sex or their race. These were great victories for humanity – part of the reason the United States is the world’s great hope. I remember my parents, who were immigrants, proudly going to the polls. They never missed one election, even the most miserable primaries, ever. Where they came from, the right to vote was not protected, nor was the secret ballot. They cherished their voting rights. They believed that voting was the most important right, and that all other rights emerge from it.
I remember them reminding me, often, that in many countries, people risk their lives to cast a vote. It amazed them that in America, people would skip voting if it rained. Voting rights, to them, were human rights.
There is a disturbing flip side to the outcome of the great American struggles to win the vote. We have answered the great questions – who would have the right to vote, who would be denied it – in a wrongheaded way: there is no federal right to vote. The Constitution says what cannot be done: it prohibits certain forms of voting discrimination, and the Voting Rights Acts prohibit others, but that’s it. The Constitution never says “Yes, you, American citizen, you have the inalienable right to vote.” Thus, every state sets its own policy. That’s why there is such a messy checkerboard of voting practices from state to state. Each state can do what it wants.
And in this ugly era, what some states are trying to do is cut back on who can vote. Deny the right to vote.
Which brings me to my questions to you:
Are you registered to vote?
Are you sure?
Even if you have voted in previous elections, even if you have lived in the same place for years, it’s a good idea to check. This site lets you do that. It covers most US jurisdictions and also lets you know what you need to do if you are not yet registered – what ID to bring, what your state says about early voting and absentee voting.
It’s really useful. This site is how I found out – surprise! – that our polling place had changed. Apparently, some people are finding out – way worse surprise! – that their registration has somehow evaporated.
Take a second. Go look now.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
This week we’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago Teachers Union strike. Today, instead of putting up a picture of a striking schoolteacher, I thought I would illustrate this post with another kind of picture that also is about who we are and want to be.
This photo was taken this month in Griffin Court in the Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute on the final day of the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective. In the foreground is Thomas Schütte’s Vater Staate. These people you see standing along the wall were in line to see the Lichtenstein show.
Vater Staate, like many of Schütte’s earlier works, is rooted in the harsh reality of life under a totalitarian regime. Elegantly robed and more than 12 feet tall, Father State dominates even this massive space, looking ahead with a calm, bland gaze: enormous, powerful, and utterly indifferent to the many below.
Here is the thing about this photo. The line for the show, by noon, reached from the show’s entry point at the south end of the museum, through a long hallway, down a flight of stairs, through a doorway, across McClintock Court, through the doors into the Modern Wing, and well into Griffin Court, the central feature of the Modern Wing, almost to the Millennium Park entrance – a line pretty close to a city block in length. Hundreds, many hundreds, who had come in hopes of seeing and learning about one of the great artists of the 20th century, whose work plays with the touchstones of our everyday experience. Their willingness, their patience speaking to their curiosity, but also to an openness to great achievement, and a delight in its example.
This is the greatness of democracy and the highest form of it: that excellence is within the reach of all, and that all can aspire to it. These days, I often fear we have collectively forgotten how hard it was to make this world, in which the baseline is the desire to learn and know, to achieve and appreciate achievement.
Which brings me back to the Chicago teachers, who have collectively decided that sound, decent learning, given free to all, is a good thing, essential to our democracy, and not something to be dismantled in favor of a profit center.
Finally, one more thing to note about Vater Staate, which is not clear from this photo: a bit of hope. Vater Staate dominates the room. But his hands are caught up inside his robe. His arms are bound by it. His own trappings, knotted tight, are the architecture of his defeat. A thing to keep in mind, in the days to come.
This is an experimental electric car, painted to conceal its manufacturer. If you are a very, very early adapter, you may already be driving a forerunner of this electric car.
One of the interesting things about this car is that it is not tiny. You don’t look at it and think of bouncing it down the street with the flat of your hand. It’s bigger than my Civic; looks roomy and comfy in there. It has four doors. It has a trunk. Another interesting thing about it is that, despite the attempt to conceal the manufacturer, this is a Ford. The pointy black and white paint job, which must have been big fun for someone to apply, did not conceal the characteristic oval Ford emblem on the front of the hood. A little Internet snooping suggested this may be the 2013 Ford Fusion Energi, Ford’s coming contender in the plug-in electric market.
Where did I see it? Just parked casually among a bunch of other cars, on a lot by Detroit’s Eastern Market, one day this summer. Just hanging out with the other cars like it was nothing.
Every time I push the panic button, this shows up.
There are a lot of sad things about my home town, and eventually I will talk about those too. But there are also a lot of beautiful things. One is this view of the Renaissance Center, GM’s headquarters, right in downtown Detroit, with these American flags arrayed before it and snapping in the breeze on a bright summer day. Not shown, but much in evidence on that day: a festival that had packed downtown with happy visitors and tourists.
Right now Detroit is at a fascinating junction: decades-long catastrophic neglect and corruption meeting brand-new loving attention from Type A newcomers.
It is a place that used to be the Murder City. It also used to be one of the great American places to live, with bustling commerce, excellent public schools and a high employment rate. It still is a place that is part of the American ruins porn tour for globetrotting hipsters – I wish I had a dollar for every smug video on YouTube of tragic neighborhoods in Detroit. A place, by the way, where the venerable United States Patent and Trademark Office opened its first ever satellite office – speaking to the dramatic rise in Detroit-area startups and entrepreneurship.
9591 Iris is not going to just look at Detroit. I will be looking at, and thinking about, my home town, but also the city where I live now, and the world where I live now, which itself is at a fascinating junction. I think of myself as a native Detroiter and a resident of the Great Lakes and a resident of the world. I’ve lived in many places, but this is where I come from.
9591iris 