We just got back from meeting Amy Klobuchar at the Loews on Broadway. She is a dynamo, and joked about being the shortest one on the debate stage. Tonight she stood on a small podium, which barely made her visible to the audience but we hung on her every word. Her heart, her heart is as big as the state of Minnesota. Bob pushed forward after her speech and told her about our MN Vikings connection.
She looked at me and smiled, “My dad wrote many stories about your brother, Mike Lynn,” she said.
“It was the private jet that did him in,” I said.
And then she was off to another fan. I thought about her dad, a recovering alcoholic, old-fashioned newspaper man who saved his pennies in a tin can. I thought about my foster father, Daddy Jim, a transportation man at Picatinny Arsenal who saved his pennies in a Prince Albert tobacco can. We women, who had loving fathers, who knew the difference between right and wrong, we are the lucky ones.
“Sen. Amy Klobuchar is pitching herself to America as a teller of hard truths. She has charted a path to the White House that goes through (not around) certain hard-luck swaths of Middle America now known as Trump Country but which used to be Democrat Country, and which still is Klobuchar Country. Places like the 8th Congressional District in Northern Minnesota, which saw one of the biggest swings in the country, from President Barack Obama to President Trump, but which continued to support Amy, as well.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2019/05/07/feature/amy-klobuchars-complicated-relationship-with-her-father-has-defined-her-as-a-person-and-a-candidate/
Yesterday Bob and I returned to Nashville from a trip with friends to Montgomery, Alabama. We visited the Legacy Museum; From Enslavement to Mass Incarcerations; https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum
It taught us about lynchings, about how you might get lynched for staring at someone, about how they would advertise a lynching in the newspaper so thousands of people would show up, like a carnival. We saw a sign that warned “Negroes, Jews, and Dogs” were not allowed, and we saw the dirt.
Row upon row of large mason jars, filled with so many shades of brownish/red dirt – with the name of the African American and the place of their hanging. The Jim Crow South was a cruel substitute for freedom.
Afterwards, we drove to the Peace and Justice Memorial. We drove by the corner where Rosa Parks waited for the bus. We drove by the roundabout where Martin Luther King gathered his marchers for the bus boycott. https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/ A school bus let off groups of Black teenagers and we all walked amid the memorial as the sun appeared, streaming through countless hanging steel rectangles with the county, state and number of lynchings etched into every single one in this country. For every documented racial killing, there were ten more…
4,400 plus people lynched. Times Ten.
Tonight, our African American Uber driver told us about being stopped for no reason by the police, with his brother in the car and a dog sniffing all around the chassis. As we drove toward Rosa Parks Blvd, and I mentioned the lights were on in a school being renovated, he told us his mother was one of the first to integrate that Elliott School in our Germantown neighborhood. It’s now becoming an upscale condominium complex. http://elliottatgermantown.com/the-story/
I told our driver, James, he’d better vote like our lives depend on it.
I’ve been thinking Amy might be able to beat Trump because she’s got a steely, mid-western demeanor. She doesn’t suffer fools. She IS the decency check, the patriotic check. But I wonder who will win South Carolina? And can a 5’4″ senator forged in the Iron Range rise above the noise?
MountainMornings 