Left Coast Voices

"I would hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo. If an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight." Richard Wright, American Hunger

Archive for the tag “POTUS”

To Our ‘Gay’ President

Dear President Obama,

I have to admit you are full of surprises. As I am sure you are aware from your daily perusal of our humble blog, I am critically supportive of you. I worked for your election, cried when Jon Stewart called the election for Obama as part of The Daily Show and Colbert Report’s special live coverage of Indecision 2008, keeping the live show going a few more minutes in order to announce your/our victory, and praised your Obamacare, even if it was far from perfect.

I didn’t expect you to be so deadly cool and take out bin Laden like you did, when many hawks would be squawking at their roosts deciding if to or not.

Still, you will excuse me if I don’t jump up and down on your decision to support gay marriage, or the tribulations that have followed. You see, Mr. President, you simply did the right thing. That’s it.

I appreciate you having the guts to do it in an election year, but the President should do the right thing. You are the President of everyone – the blacks, the Jews, the Hispanics, the whites, the card-carrying NRA members, the religious and the secular. And you are the President of the gay community. You did the right thing.

So to thank you, here is a song that was brought out when it was difficult to come out as gay in Britain, sung by a singer who is not (I think) gay. But Billy Bragg wanted to be a representative of all progressive people and so he challenged us all with this song.

By the way Mr. President, I chose this version because it features the late Kristy MacColl who tragically died 12 years ago.

Thank you for reading this, sir. Always a pleasure. Here’s to another four years.
Alon

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Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com/ and on Twitter (@alonshalevsf).

The Audacity of Leadership

I once ripped the audio version of The Audacity of Hope by one Barack Obama (the publicity campaigns that some authors will go to ensure book sales!). I have never bothered erasing it. At the gym, armed with my iPod shuffle,  I might be pounding the treadmill to the beat of Alanis Morissette one moment and then the next focusing on President Obama’s rich voice. Beyond inspiring messages, a chapter of his book can take up several minutes of exercise time – a serious consideration to help shed the pounds.

Now I really got into his Presidential election and I suspect I wasn’t the only one since a few people voted for him. Yesterday, while listening to his book I heard something like: we need to create a new political model that goes beyond the bi-partisanship and with focused cooperation will bring more effective legislation (these are my words, I know you said it better, Mr. President).


I want to share that, while I am still a big supporter, I have become frustrated with the Democrats (when they held the house and senate), playing too nice to the Republicans. I think this has been an influence of the President, but has yielded little reciprocation – in fact we saw the birth of the Tea Party and the rise of some very scary characters.

While getting down on POTUS, I then saw this bumper sticker today and it made me rethink.

Maybe it is not so audacious to still hope…

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Alon Shalev is the author of The Accidental Activist (now available on Kindle) and A Gardener’s Tale. He is the Executive Director of the San Francisco Hillel Foundation, a non-profit that provides spiritual and social justice opportunities to Jewish students in the Bay Area. More on Alon Shalev at http://www.alonshalev.com/and on Twitter (#alonshalevsf).

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