Democratic national Convention Philadelphia

Countering the DNC

The Democratic National Convention was happening here in Chicago — my city — and I sat frozen at my desk, staring at my computer. Earlier in my life, yeah, I’d have gone down to the United Center, linked arms with the sane and outraged, joined the cry: Stop funding genocide!

Instead, here I was, gawking at the event’s opening ceremony of day two: A pastor delivers a public prayer, at one point saying we should treat all humans “as sacred creations of the Almighty.” Huh? Is he serious? Does he really mean this? The word “sacredness” has been let loose, joined by “God.” Someone sings the national anthem. The delegates recite the good ol’ Pledge of Allegiance, their hands ceremoniously pressed against their hearts. Then “God Bless America” fills the hall.

The message I hear, quietly hovering behind the words, is this: Democrats are as patriotic as Republicans! Democrats are as religious as Republicans! We can put on a good show too — our clichés are fantastic.

Ceremony can matter, but when it’s basically just a curtain hiding reality … God help us all. I felt squeezed by fury and frustration. Oh, the platitudes of peace. I shut off my computer and decided, I’m gonna do it. Earlier I had received an email from the American Friends Service Committee, inviting me to an interfaith “Remember Gaza” vigil, happening that night at Montrose Harbor, a few miles from where I live. Suddenly I felt called to be there, at this “interfaith vigil to honor those who have been killed in the genocide in Gaza, to highlight the urgent need for a permanent ceasefire, and an end to U.S. weapons sales to Israel.”

The speakers would be Jewish, Muslim, Christian, as well as people who had lost loved ones in Gaza. And it would be taking place in the wake of the Biden administration’s latest approval of $20 billion in arms sales to Israel — you know, the reality the DNC event was hiding behind its curtain of faith and patriotism.

I had to do something besides sit and stew. Attending a vigil on Lake Michigan at least seemed doable. Would it “solve” anything? Uh … maybe not, but I had to make my opposition to my country’s policy physically apparent, or so I heard my conscience scream from some deep inner place. The tricky part about this is that I’m an old klutz, with achy legs and a disintegrating ability to retain balance. Simply heading off to a lakefront vigil ain’t what it used to be.

I brought my cane and drove to Montrose Harbor. Fortunately, I left an hour early, just in case I ran into unexpected difficulties, which happened immediately. I’d forgotten how complex the area was and wound up parking nowhere near the actual site of the vigil. The park area was full of people: several volleyball games going on, families enjoying themselves. Music was playing. But nothing looked like a vigil in the process of organizing itself. I started fearing that the event had been canceled. I asked the hostess at a lakefront restaurant if she knew where the vigil was and she had no idea what I was talking about. Uh-oh …

By then I had been hobbling around for a mile or so, which (I hate to say it) is a lot more walking than I normally do. I felt exhausted. Grudgingly, I decided to leave — and then I saw a woman holding a Palestinian flag, directing traffic. Big wow. This was it! “The vigil is about 500 yards from here,” she told me, “down a curving walkway.” I kept hobbling. A short while later, a caring couple who were heading to the vigil stopped their car and gave me a ride the rest of the way.

I had made it. Things were just about to start. There may have been as many as 200 people sitting along the concrete steps facing the beach. The sun was setting, the sky was a beautiful reddish blue, the dark waves swooshed into shore.

“Our souls are tired,” a speaker lamented, and another speaker reminded us that the ground we were sitting on, this very moment, had been Hopi, Ojibway, Potawatomi homeland … forcibly taken through genocide. “Think of the many untold stories of genocide that happened right here on this land.”

That set the tone — for the poetry and grief and mourning, mixed with the sunset and the waves.

One speaker declared: “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we call upon you to remember the people of Gaza! Our country has the power to be a leader of peace. We want to vote for candidates that are pro-peace. Please give us that choice.”

In a different context, such words might seem trivial, easily shrugged off. But in that moment, they seemed not only deeply felt but real — as real as the wind that swept across the beach and stirred the waves.

A day later — what? I know that such words amount to virtually nothing by themselves. They only resonate when they are spoken in a context of commitment, plans, and action, a la the civil rights movement. For now, as the DNC continues, I hear them not simply as a cry of hope but as an emerging certainty, the struggle for which will not stop.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work Soul Fragments.

PHILADELPHIA — Unsurprisingly, internal tensions are predominating at this week’s Democratic National Convention — held, ironically, in a city whose name translates from its Greek roots as “city of brotherly love.”
In that regard, the Democrats gathered here face a challenge somewhat similar to one the rival Republicans had to deal with at their own nominating convention last week in Cleveland. In a rough sense, both parties have nominees that a significant part of their membership have doubts about.

In the case of the GOP, that was Donald Trump, the shoot-from-the-lip billionaire and newly minted politician who continues to be anathema to right-of-center Republicans who favored Texas Senator Ted Cruz, as well as a continuing irritant to establishment Republicans in general.

Cruz eased Trump out of his predicament somewhat by making a prime-time convention speech that conspicuously avoided even a wink and a nod toward formally endorsing the nominee. The speech was generally regarded, even by many delegates thitherto loyal to Cruz, as so lacking in elementary class and protocol as to deflate whatever resistance might have been building up against Trump.

The issue in Philadelphia also concerns a case of two rival candidates — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose nomination for President was a given as the week began, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” whose challenge to Clinton’s inevitability seemed capable of succeeding at several points during their extended Democratic primary contest.

So close was that race, so late was Sanders’ concession to Clinton, that a WikiLeaks release of hacked emails showing what appeared to have been a concerted effort by DNC officials to slant the outcome toward Clinton threatened to cast asunder the party’s tenuous and newfound sense of unity.

Certainly it galvanized the doubts of disenchanted supporters of Sanders and his call for a political revolution, especially the youth brigades that had come to his support during the primary race in numbers huge and enthusiastic enough to recall the reformist fervor of the 1960s.

And those Sanders followers, along with partisans of Jill Stein of the Green Party, Black Lives Matter activists, and various other representatives of the political left, came together in Philadelphia to form a protest contingent so large and potentially unmanageable as to challenge local law enforcement (heavily augmented by police forces from elsewhere, as was the case in Cleveland).

On Monday, as delegates and other conventioneers inside the Wells Fargo expectantly awaited a prime time address by Sanders, thousands of protesters collected in a fenced-in park area, several miles long, adjacent to the arena, where they bore signs and shouted chants decidedly hostile to Clinton and the D.C. — the mildest of which was “Hell No, DNC, We Won’t Vote for Hillary!”

For all that, the Democratic establishment in Philadelphia, like the Republican establishment in Cleveland, caught a break. But, whereas the stroke of fortune fore GOP had come, as indicated, from the churlishness of the dissidents’ potential leader, Cruz, the deliverance from the Democrats was owing to the good will of Sanders, who acquiesced to Clinton’s victory with a strong statement of support for her in his convention speech, coupled with encouragement to his legions to fall in line.

The only potential mischief coming from Sanders was a statement from the dais congratulating his thousand-plus delegates on the convention floor and the glee he demonstrated in anticipating their votes for him during roll-call time on Tuesday night.

The strong Sanders feeling, and the unease of party members regarding the offending DNC emails released by WikiLeaks, could be observed in meetings of the Tennessee delegation, as well.

In a rousing address to the delegation’s Tuesday breakfast meeting at the Radisson Tower hotel in Valley Forge, one of that morning’s featured speakers, 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, minced no words.

Hailing the Sanders delegates in attendance, Cohen, a Clinton supporter, declared, “It was wrong, what the party did,” and said the responsible DNC members should be fired because “they crossed the line.”

But, said Cohen, “Bernie wants you to be for Hillary.”

The congressman also used the occasion to attack the administration of Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam for what he saw as adulterations to the mission and purpose of the state lottery, which Cohen is acknowledged to have been the father of, as a long-time state Senator prior to his election to Congress in 2006.

Cohen criticized Haslam for freezing the maximum amount of the Hope Scholarships subsidized by the lottery at $4,000 per annum, even as inflation has raised in-state tuition rates to levels far beyond that figure, while meanwhile draining off lottery funds to pay for the free community-college tuition grants under Haslam’s Tennessee Promise initiative.

Arguing that those changes had routed money from a scholarship program that was both need-based and merit-based toward a “needless- and meritless-based” pattern of community-college subsidies, Cohen said the Promise program was created “because Bill Haslam wanted to leave office saying he did something,” and he said flatly “Bill Haslam is a terrible Governor.”

Another Memphian making an impact at the convention and elsewhere is District 91 state Representative Raumesh Akbari, who was scheduled to receive on Wednesday the National Juvenile Justice Network’s 2016 Reformer Award for her leadership efforts in juvenile justice reform.

That award was to be part of the Network’s annual forum at the University of Memphis Law School. It was unclear whether Akbari would be able to receive the honor in person, since she began the week as a member of the Tennessee delegation in Philadelphia, where on Thursday, as she will be one of the featured speakers on the main convention stage — one of several chosen to represent her party’s diversity.