Paging George Bailey

We saw Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” last night.

In honor of the movie’s 70^th anniversary, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences hosted a sell-out crowd at a $5-per-ticket screening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. There is no better deal in movie-going America.

Heartened in this difficult political season by the film’s message – that people like George Bailey, who choose to devote their lives to helping others, can win out over the greedy, venal Mr. Potters of the universe – we headed back to the parking garage with our daughter and son-in-law to begin the drive home.

Only to discover a nasty paint scrape on the driver’s side rear bumper of our car, and a business-card note stuck in the driver’s door window. It wasn’t from the driver who’d hit our car, but from a Good Samaritan who’d witnessed the accident and captured photos on his phone of the offending driver’s license plate and the damage to his minivan.

Which, our Angel Clarence of the evening reported, the guy had spent ten minutes trying to buff out before moving to another parking space – presumably so we wouldn’t see the damage on his vehicle if we returned to our car before he did.

I spent the rest of the night torn between feelings of anger at the selfish coward who’d hit and run, and gratitude for the willingness of a stranger to take action – even as scenes from Capra’s masterpiece swirled in my head.

We talked to our witness today. He’s sending along the photos and said he’d be happy to talk to our insurance company about what he saw. I’m grateful that he cares enough to get involved – and grateful that the visual evidence he has given us may help us recoup the cost of repairing our car.

But I’m still furious at someone who could watch THAT movie and not feel compelled to do the right thing. How could he watch George Bailey give up his own dreams to take care of his neighbors, while actively shirking responsibility for his own actions? How could he drive off and leave someone else holding the financial bag for the wrong that he had done?

I probably won’t get to ask him that question. Hopefully, our insurance company will identify him through the license plate photo and deal directly with him and his insurer on our behalf.

But if I did have the chance, I’d challenge his ill will. And tell him to watch the movie again – and again and again – until he has finally learned its lesson.

Headlines: ten days out

It's been ten tumultuous days since the 2016 presidential campaign came to an unexpected, shocking end. Tumultuous, and deeply distressing for the majority of Americans.

The level of distress is palpable whenever you talk to someone who believed that America would keep making progress toward equal opportunity, civility, decency and tolerance by electing a competent, qualified, experienced and compassionate successor to President Barack Obama -- and kept believing it right up until the night of Nov. 8, when a minority of voters won the Electoral College war and elected a racist, sexist, misogynistic, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, thrice-married cheat and womanizer, and tax-avoiding, vendor- and employee-stiffing, multiple-bankruptcies business fraud.

So it's no surprise that the day's headlines read as they do today.

In my hometown L.A. Times:
- From the world stage, a message for Trump: 'We cannot stand alone'
- L.A. lays out its Trump battle plan
- 'White pride' awakened: Election brings movement out of the shadows
- President-elect's tough talk sparks optimism in Iran (that its hard-line anti-U.S. candidates will win in Iran's May elections)
- Hearing echoes of a dark period in U.S. (Japanese Americans on calls to register Muslim Americans)
- Trump's victory puts net neutrality rules in jeopardy

In today's New York Times:
- Donald Trump's Plan to Purge the Nation (there aren't 3 million unauthorized immigrant criminals to deport - only the first flaw in his strategy)
- 1942 All Over Again? (on registering Muslim Americans)
- Silicon Valley Helped Create Trump, and That's Bad for It
- 'Is it Safe?' Foreign Students Consider College in Donald Trump's U.S.
- A 12-Step Program for Responding to President-elect Trump
- Donald Trump's Son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Tests Legal Path to White House Job (intent to put family on staff raising nepotism and blind trust questions)
- The Right Way to Resist Trump

In today's Washington Post:
- Trump pick for national security adviser brings experience and controversy
- Trump's embrace of Bannon sparks divisions, angst among Jewish groups
- Trump poised to learn the Pottery Barn rule of governing
- Republicans have heart disease, Democrats have a gushing head wound
- 'Who knows if Trump is even aware that he has a Secretary of Transportation?'

And in the Nov. 18 online issue of New Yorker Today:
- Jeff Sessions, Trump's True Believer: Turns bigotry into political action
- Obama Reckons With a Trump Presidency
- The Gathering Storm (will anti-Trump protests spark pro-Trump counter-demonstrations?)
- Giuliani, Drained With the Swamp?
- The Undocumented Ask: 'What Now?'
- A Rapper's Bold Anti-Trump Message

It's a safe bet that media outlets all across the country are posting similar headlines or on-screen crawls -- even in "red" states -- since the American media seems finally (but much too belatedly) to have come to its collective senses about the many devastatingly serious risks that a Trump presidency presents.

Seems to me that our media is now reflecting a new reality: the only way you can NOT be distressed about the pending presidency of this man is to be either deaf, dumb, blind, brain-dead, illiterate, on crack, an unabashed member of a right-wing hate group, economically selfish, stubbornly Republican-or-bust, or just blindly obedient to an irrational, unqualified, say-anything-to-win authoritarian whose mouth and hat both promised to make everything great again.

Yeah, sure they will.

The end of friendship in the time of Trump

Thinking back, it probably dwindled down to obligation years ago.

But it wasn’t clear that the college friendship I used to describe as “you know, the kind where you can not see each other for three years and you get together and it’s like you were having coffee just yesterday” had really ended until now – in the days following our 2016 presidential election.

Yeah, there were signs along the way. The gradual transition she’d made, from 1970s feminist and the first person I knew to subscribe to Ms. Magazine, to the carefully proper wife of a high-powered law firm name partner in Sacramento. The shock I’d felt when she’d admitted a few years after George W. Bush’s re-election that she’d voted for him – explaining it away by saying she’d been driven to the decision by her fear of terrorism, which he’d eagerly fed and she’d willingly bought into.

I’d remained just as political, and just as vocal, as I’d been back in college, when we both were poli sci majors at UCLA, opposed to the Vietnam War and sympathetic to liberal causes. I’d written regularly about the political activities my husband and I were involved in, whether in personal letters to her or in the annual update I’d tuck into our holiday cards. And once Facebook became a thing, I’d post regularly on the issues driving my activism.

The last time I saw her, it struck me today, was the weekend in 1999 when John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane went down on a flight to Martha’s Vineyard. I’d taken a Friday off from work and headed up north to see her. We spent two days in the wine country, lunching at vineyard restaurants, checking out artists’ studios and curio shops. It felt to me like just the latest visit with a lifelong friend – but as it turns out, it was the last one.

Since then, she’d responded less regularly to my letters and holiday greetings, and she hadn’t called in ages. Her Christmas cards arrived sporadically – although she sometimes would email in January or February to apologize that she’d been “so busy, the cards never got sent.” When her younger daughter came to L.A. to attend law school at UCLA in the early 2000s, I was sure we’d catch up during her visits here. But she never called. Never tried to grab coffee with me. I chalked it up to scheduling conflicts and travel times.

Long story short, my political opinions cannot have been a surprise to her. But hers sure were to me.

I was dumbfounded this spring when one of my dozens of political posts on Facebook actually elicited a response from her. It was short – and stunning. It said only, “Anyone but Hillary.”

I replied. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember saying I could understand if she was supporting Bernie, but not if she was voting for the GOP’s already anointed candidate, who had said so many offensive things – about women, minorities, immigrants, people with disabilities, the press, you name it. She couldn’t possibly be for him, could she?

She never admitted it outright – just replied that she couldn’t “vote Democrat” because she had become a “small government conservative.”

Yeah, but this election isn’t ABOUT “small vs. big government,” I replied. It’s about respect vs. hate.

She didn’t answer.

Active in Hillary’s campaign, I kept posting on Facebook. I tried occasionally to get her to engage by messaging privately. But nothing I said sparked a response. And then, two days after the election, on Veteran’s Day, she posted a photo of her dad in uniform and praised the Greatest Generation for its service.

That did it.

I replied, not privately, but publicly on her post. I said that people like my dad – a Jewish U.S. Army officer born in Russia and raised for the first five years of his life in Germany, who volunteered to serve and was sent to the German front, where he risked capture and earned the Bronze Star while helping to defeat the Nazis – would be appalled at the thought of Americans praising the troops who’d defeated Hitler’s fascism while simultaneously celebrating their success in electing America’s own 21^st Century fascist.

Her response: “Grow up and get over it.”

I ignored the condescending “grow up” slam. But get OVER it? Get over the fact that my own country has elected someone who sparks fear in Muslims and Jews, in blacks and Hispanics and Asians, in gays and the disabled, in reporters trying to do their jobs? Get over the fact that he spoke loudly and proudly about his intent to deport tens of millions of people and require Muslims to “register”? Get over the fact that one of his surrogates, who’d been a decidedly unpleasant contestant on “The Apprentice,” asserted proudly during the election that his critics would be forced to “bow down” to him when he won?

And then she called me “unhinged” for expressing those fears.

I’m sorry. It is not I who is “unhinged.” The crude, crass, ungrounded, unfocused, undisciplined, unprepared, uninformed, fame-seeking, celebrity-crazed, adulation-starved racist, sexist, misogynist, xenophobe who she helped elect to the presidency is the “unhinged” one.

As one whose religion has been “otherized” by his white supremacist campaign executive and threatened by the endorsements of David Duke and the KKK, I have every right to fear him. And to loathe her for ridiculing that fear.

I blame Donald Trump and the GOP for creating the America in which we now find ourselves. I blame them for creating the conditions in which people who once called themselves friends can no longer stomach the thought of each other.

But I blame her for her complacency and her moral and ethical blindness. I guess, when you’re safely Anglo and not a minority of any kind, when you’re fortunate enough to have married well and prospered handsomely, and you don’t have to worry about such petty details as keeping Medicare and Social Security going in your golden years, it’s easy to pooh-pooh someone else’s fear about losing it all – not just their economic security, but also their right to speak out, their religious freedom…heck their physical freedom if things were to go completely off the rails.

It must be nice not to worry about such things. But it isn’t nice not to care about those who do.

The Lesson

Well, that didn’t take long.

Less than a day after the U.S. presidential election, school kids across America were already being taught some horrifying lessons about the kind of America the election of Donald Trump has legitimized.

On Wednesday afternoon, a grandmother posted on Facebook that her grandson, whose dad is from Puerto Rico (part of America, it should be noted), was told by a classmate that he would have to leave since “you don’t have an American name.”

That same day, middle school kids in Michigan were caught on camera shouting “build the wall” to Hispanic schoolmates in the cafeteria.

And Thursday evening, L.A. television news reported on a substitute teacher who had told students at a middle school in L.A. that, if they were born here but their parents were undocumented immigrants, they’d be able to stay but their parents would have to leave and they’d be placed in foster care. He then added insult to injury by telling them he could report them because he had their names, addresses and phone numbers. “It’s all in the system,” he crowed, not realizing that one of the kids was recording his comments on a cellphone.

That substitute teacher was fired, but comments like his have now driven LAUSD leadership to offer counseling to any student in the district -- a majority of whom come from immigrant or minority families.

These are not the lessons our children should be learning from an American presidential election. They should be learning the lesson that my sister-in-law Judy learned from her mother many decades ago.

Living in what was then a deeply segregated Boston, Judy asked Mom why the African-American cleaning lady who worked for them had brown skin. Mom told her, “That’s just the way she was born.” Judy pressed her: “But why?” “Some people have lighter skin, and some people have darker skin.”

Seeing the still quizzical look on Judy’s face, Mom took her into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and removed two eggs, one brown and one white.

Holding them up, she asked Judy, “What’s the difference between these two eggs?”

“One is brown and one is white.”

Then Mom took a bowl from the cabinet and broke the two eggs into it. She showed the contents to Judy and asked again, “What’s the difference between these two eggs?”

In my book, that is the only lesson children in any school in any community anywhere in America should be learning today.

If only.

Needed: Partnership of Presidents to restore fabric of American democracy

I had to take a day off today from my get-out-the-vote efforts at the local Hillary Clinton campaign office. A long string of days spent volunteering in a sometimes too-hot, sometimes overly-air-conditioned space filled with people coughing and sneezing into phones and onto computer keyboards seems to have caught up with me, and I’m fighting off a cold with decongestants, vitamin C and lots of juice.

But more than needing the physical R&R, what I really needed was a break from the response Hillary’s volunteers now receive nearly every time we interact with a voter who’s decided to support Donald Trump.

I thought doing voter ID work was difficult back in spring 2008, when we California Democrats helped Barack Obama’s national campaign by calling voters in states where primaries were still taking place. My worst call that year occurred the day before Easter, while calling Pennsylvania voters. As soon as the first words were out of my mouth – “Hi, I’m Marcy, a volunteer for Barack Obama…” – the rural Pennsylvanian I’d dialed launched his invective: “I wouldn’t vote for that nappy-headed n----- if he were the only one running…” before slamming down the receiver.

Campaign volunteers are told to never call someone like that back. But, sensing that he’d let my follow-up call go to voice mail, I did – and left him a message that Barack would be in church the next day and would be praying for him, because I knew he would be appalled by such a hate-filled statement. I then opined that the voter’s own mother might be embarrassed to hear her son say such terrible things, before saying “Happy Easter” and hanging up.

The difference between 2008 and 2016 became clear to me over the past few days, when Trump supporters grew distinctly more unpleasant, hostile and crude as one day led into the next. While those who heatedly opposed Barack Obama’s candidacy back in 2008 would generally target their invective toward him, those who support Trump aren’t just unleashing their venom on Hillary: they’re also assailing those of us exercising our democratic rights by working to elect the candidate of our choice.

I can’t repeat the words I’ve been called. But if you think of the most disgusting things someone can call another human being, you know what I’ve been told. Even when texting voters an innocuous message from the local Democratic Party that encourages them to vote and gives them a link to the address of their local polling place, I’ve received text responses – from men and women alike – delivering sexist, racist, anti-Semitic or misogynistic slurs, or calling me moron, idiot, traitor or worse. One young woman informed me that “Dems suck the big one,” and a middle-aged man requested a photo of me in the nude. Those were two of the nicer replies.

And with the polls still close but remaining firmly in the “Hillary will win” camp, those responses seem to be getting worse by the nanosecond.

I can only imagine what my fellow volunteers started hearing this afternoon, after the announcement by FBI Director James Comey that his staff has determined there is nothing new to be found in the emails on Huma Abedin’s computer – a finding that put Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal” to rest once and for all. (Except in the mind of Donald Trump, who continued arguing on the campaign trail today that she is “guilty” nonetheless and the system “rigged,” to the rabid chants of “lock her up” from his supporters.)

No one deserves to be treated this way, just because we support one candidate and the person we’re talking to supports another. But, as one of my Twitter pals posted this afternoon, “The nation feels like they’ve been sexually assaulted by Trump.”

And the ill will seems to have spilled over into what used to be non-partisan venues. As a member of a UCLA football Facebook group, I read yesterday of the experience two of our group members – both Hispanic – had this season when they upgraded their seats and found themselves sitting in front of two older Anglo men. At the first home game, those men started interrogating the two Hispanics: where had they been born, where do they live now, where had their parents come from, when did they get here, before “testing” them by asking them – in Spanish – “where are you from?” The two Hispanic gentlemen contacted the UCLA ticket office after that game, asking to move their seats, to be told that the two older men had complained about them and had already been informed, no we are not going to move the two Hispanic gentlemen – we’ll be changing your seats instead.

That should never have happened in the first place. And I blame the GOP presidential candidate that it did. Yes, some people are bigots – and have been their entire lives – Trump didn’t create their bigotry. But he fed it, and legitimized it, and made bigots feel that they are entitled to act upon it. To put it simply: it’s been decades since I’ve seen people act on their bigotry, so eagerly and so publicly, as I have this year.

Donald Trump’s campaign has been terribly destructive: it has torn at the very fabric of the American family. If we’re going to restore the sense of community, and unity, that so many of us have felt in past years, we’re going to have to mend what Trump has torn apart.

I don’t know where we begin. But I’m starting to think it will have to come from politicians emeriti of both political parties – perhaps a partnership among former Presidents Carter, Bush the elder, Clinton, Bush the younger and the newly-former President Obama, with support from respected members of their administrations.

These leaders must find a way to tell GOP members of Congress that their eight-year-long pattern of “just saying no” to anything and everything proposed by a Democratic President must end.

They must be told that the very notion of obstructing a duly-elected President’s Supreme Court nominees for four or eight years, just because she’s a member of the opposing political party cannot be entertained in our democracy.

And they must be shamed into acknowledging the damage they are doing to the political process, and to the American people’s trust in our government, by focusing only on an unending series of sham investigations ginned up to bring down a political opponent, and an unending series of votes to overturn, rather than improve, a law simply because it was proposed by a Democratic president.

It is time for GOP members of Congress to start doing their jobs again: to be the LOYAL opposition, actively representing their constituents’ interests and political philosophy, while responsibly collaborating and compromising with their Democratic opponents to find middle-ground legislative solutions to problems that plague us all.

The obstruction must end.

So must the name calling, fear mongering, and hate spewing, all of which are utterly uncalled for, simply inappropriate, and absolutely un-American.

As Bill Clinton remarked after a protester shouted “You’re a rapist!” during a recent rally for his wife, “I’m tired of all this acid being poured down people’s throat. In the end, we all gotta get up in the morning. I want you to think about this, and talk to people like that fellow who screamed at me. If somebody says something hateful to you, tell them, ‘Unlike you, we actually want you to be part of our future.’ “

I’m confident that our former Presidents are up to the task – and willing to take it on.

Messrs. Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama: we await your response.