The Unclenching

Last week, on exiting the CVS — elated, because (remarkably) I had all my medications in hand after the usual stocking delays — I put on the car radio to hear Vice President Kamala Harris introducing her VP pick, Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota.

Harris was burnishing Walz’s progressive virtues and values. Walz, she acclaimed, had volunteered to be the high school faculty adviser for a new gay-straight alliance student group.

As a gay man, my body tensed, a defensive reaction honed by decades of experience that has grown more acute as culture and identity conflicts have scarred our country so much that, from sea to shining sea, we look like a trench-warfare battlefield.

But then I listened as Harris went on to highlight Walz’s attributes as a son of the Midwest. Farmer, hunter, fisherman, National Guardsman, GI bill student at a state college. A high school social studies teacher who coached the football team from mediocre to state champs. He was even A-rated by the NRA, until, after one too many mass shootings, he came out for moderate gun control.

I began unclenching as it dawned on me that Walz is the messenger we’ve been waiting for. He’s the county fair piglet-holding kind of guy whom I’ve never hung out with but recognize as an archetype. A man formed in the image of a heartland America that Norman Rockwell framed, and that my “Howdy Doody,” “Bonanza”-addicted childhood had absorbed until it became part of my brown-skinned, gay, America-loving core.

My parents were Democrats. FDR Democrats. Both finished their educations by the eighth grade, not unusual given their rural upbringings. They grew up with dirt under their nails and a love of soil.

Dad went from topping beets for an Italian farmer in Colorado to the Civil Conservation Corps, a New Deal program that he revered for the community it provided, to enlisting in the U.S. Army when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In the Pacific, he suffered near-fatal wounds that earned him a Purple Heart and life-long scars, both physical and mental.

My mother got married off at 17 to her widowed 43-year-old godfather, who was a justice of the peace. He was politically active. They held rallies. Puerto Rico’s FDR, Luis Muñoz Rivera, once gave a rousing speech from their porch. She joined the International Garment Workers Union when she arrived in New York after the war, where she crouched over sewing machines all day.

Even though we never actively discussed it, I always sensed that each of my parents saw government as a force for good. Why not? It had intervened to ease their lives. For my father, it was a regular paycheck and a sense of community during the Depression. For my mother, it was improved health and education brought to her island by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Later, it would be VA benefits that enabled us to get a house. My brother attended public schools all the way through to California’s extraordinary public university system. I went parochial and, ultimately, Ivy, because America was responding to the civil rights movement, reaching out to affirmatively rectify past wrongs.

But a lot of America wasn’t seeing things this way, especially the working-class community I grew up with. Ronald Reagan, our California governor, was espousing the virtues of small-mindedness, with a sunny disposition. Unions — and the workers they represented — became featherbedding villains, as did “welfare queens,” while entrepreneurs and unfettered capitalism were supposed to be our heroes. Gordon Gekko’s anthem of greed became chic, as did cynicism. Political correctness got wiped out by “anti-wokeness.”

America was left severed. As wealth concentrated at the top, largely the result of trickle-down economic policies, the despair of workers was siphoned off to bogeymen: immigrants, feminists and fairies. We were made into the white workers’ enemies. Even intellectuals — many of whom had been researching how to protect working Americans, and who were screaming from their Ivy mountaintops about the dangers of unfettered globalization — were demonized.

Until we all got MAGA’ed.

And now, Kamala Harris has had the foresight to bring in Walz, as Barack Obama did Joe Biden. Dark-skinned politicians are presumptively radical separatists and need white man beards to legitimize their moderate or pragmatist credentials.

Scranton Joe would go on to do his mightiest, and against all — and even more — odds, succeeded. He reset the framework and tamped down the uneven playing field while building a strong economy. Unfortunately, the sour post-COVID mood of the country, as well as inflation, declining but persistent, got in the way of us feeling the relief. That and 40 years of misrepresentation of what it means to be liberal, pro-union, and truly pro-freedom and pro-family.

This is where Walz, with his surgical and acerbic “folksiness,” comes in. He has, with the aid of the Democratic legislature of Minnesota, brought humanity and purpose back to politics. To paraphrase Walz, if it’s scary to feed schoolkids … to give a son a chance to take care of his dying mom … to provide a bright but economically challenged kid a whack at college or a trade … and all in a robust business environment, where the population is among the happiest in the nation — then be scared. Be damn scared, because this isn’t Communism, it’s caring.

As I listened to Harris and Walz and heard the roar of the audience in attendance, I began to unclench. My jaws gave up their grind. Even the edges of my mouth began to turn up into something resembling a smile.

Okay, okay, it lasted for about as long as it took me to get snagged by the Hamptons summer ritual of annoyance with someone illegally parked and blocking my way as I tried pulling out of the CVS.

Summer traffic notwithstanding, I can now see a way to recapture our core American values of civility and decency, even as we dissent from one another. Maybe, just maybe, we can relearn how to live in a thriving and equitable democracy.