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(FOR) David Holdt, (WHO IS A BRILLIANT GUY) Click on this

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Holdt in Nov96David Holdt is an under appreciated yet tremendously talented writer and thinker, and also one of the better teachers on the face of the planet.  He taught for over 30 years at the excellent progressive private school, Watkinson, in Hartford, CT - and his class there, Writer’s Workshop, has probably changed the lives of most of the students that attended during that tenure. He still teaches at the University of Hartford, right across campus from Watkinson, and now lives in Tolland, CT. He might have a functioning website soon, if I can talk him into it, or if he already has plans for one and I just haven’t heard yet. Either way, I will also try to talk him into some modest blogging, but that may take a while.

The above is my effort to encapsulate Mr. Holdt, having realized now that people indeed do google David Holdt, and in the top ten results an old post of mine comes up that was the end result of a struggle to communicate to David a google map indicating the best places to park for Red Sox games in my old neighborhood in Boston.

Now as much as I like to advertise that David Holdt and I are friends, or that I try to get him to go to Red Sox games as much as possible, or that I know where to park for such games, if I had a car, which I don’t - if my meager website mentions of his name are one of the only google representations of such a great person….then that situation needed to be remedied. So now that first paragraph will work its way into the top ten results hopefully. A trick, perhaps, but as Holdt always says about Wikipedia, if you read it on the internet, it has to be true. (citation needed) (actually one is not, David Holdt hates Wikipedia.) (citation definitely unneeded)

In addition, since you’re obviously interested enough in David Holdt to click thru to my somewhat-very-less-important-than-his-impact-on-the-world-website - you might as well watch the speech he gave at his retirement gala this past Saturday, which is also his YouTube debut!

 

and, if you’re really really feeling like indulging yourself, you can even read the speech I gave at that same gala. (Altho my feeling is it read better than in reads) (And since I handed in, one last time, my final edit [the edits in pen at the table as I waited to speak] I have tried to fix it again with a few minor changes, including the massive typo in the first words of the first sentence  which scrambled my brain at the already nervous beginning of my speech - until after a 5 second [unwittingly dramatic] pause, I got it right and began)

Expand this post below or download to read it… they both come complete with the cool hyperlinks a speech can’t have when you read it on paper. Unless you’re a robot.

(Continued)

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New Design

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Check it out…

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Hello - I’m over there

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

I’m spending most of my time at my newish very pro-Obama blog

www.andyeswecan.com

Come say Hi..

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reality check

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I wholly support the concept of having the first woman president of this country. For years I assumed AND hoped that Hillary Clinton would be that president. I think a woman has a 100% equal ability to govern as a man does, and in fact I DO believe that woman possess some innate qualities that could be of extra use in the White House - that men have some bullshit problems with ego and masculinity that can get in the way. (Although my mother has taken this logic too far on more than one occasion in pigeon holing men, including myself) But a woman is not a better candidate because she is a woman, for the same reason that a man isn’t either. And regardless of the fact that if I ever have a daughter I want her to open up that grade school book of presidents and confirm that she can become president too - and that I do not know when another truly viable woman candidate will become available to this country - that does not negate the realities of this race in my mind. That each candidate must be evaluated on their merits without prejudice. And without any question the candidate that can and will most transform our government and this country in not Hillary Clinton. And my problem increasingly is that the more I get a look at her, her perceptible motives, and her campaigning methods - the more I truly dislike her.

Further more, in response to the knee jerk activism that she seems to bring out in women who feel they will vote for her just because she is a woman, I can think of only one definition for such a reaction: sexism. And I have probably never been a victim of any real sexism in my life and realize that I perhaps should never even bring up the word - but frankly that is what this is. I find a viewpoint such as that inexcusably obtuse. And I will point the same criticism at any black voter that votes for Obama because he is also black, even understanding that our campaign may in fact depend on that very outcome. I will admit however that I do think that the first black president is historically more significant than the first woman president, if for no other reason than because slavery and the oppression and physical and intellectual violence against people of color has been the greatest flaw in the American experiment - but that alone will not make me vote for a black candidate by default either. If Barack Obama was some white dude named Bob Smith and had the same kind of ideas and inspirational spirit I have to believe I would also support him.

But my optimism is tempered, because I do not trust the rank and file in my party, I do not trust the baby boomers and the older women to make a choice that has looked into the future at the country my generation will inherit - the country we in fact want. And its not just the members - its the whole organization… The way I see it, the Democratic party, by candidate and by action (or inaction) has not been representing my interests in government for many many years. If rank and file members of my party continue to buy into the bullshit they are being sold, then I will probably have no choice but to leave them to their own end. I even found myself realizing last night, that if Bloomberg was to run I would volunteer for his campaign, not perhaps because I would end up voting for him, but because I want the opportunity to vote for him should this really be where the whole mess is going.

Over the past few weeks I have found myself more and more thinking that if Clinton wins the nomination, I will be finding myself reregistering as an independent. Watching very closely the way that they have run their campaign over this time has brought me to that conclusion, and the past bunch of days has served as an exclamation point. Her campaign’s cynicism, Rove like undercutting and identity politicking, and most of all the Bush like arrogance - have left me deeply troubled about the continuation of the current political bullshit in Washington under a second Clinton administration. I feel that Independents and even Republicans know this, so why can’t my own party realize it themselves?  And so I believe, at this point, that the first result on that path will be my disenfranchisement from my party - and who knows what I, and probably millions of others, will do then.

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reach for what you know is possible

Monday, January 14, 2008

I find myself in a rare state lately…

I would consider myself to be a champion of logic. My core belief structure is based in that all ideas have equal value until they are properly presented and dissected. But when discussing politics lately I find myself irrationally motivated… I find that I am so emotionally invested in one possible outcome, that my country can elect Barack Obama, that I have trouble even considering other outcomes. I feel some worth in that I can at least acknowledge this - and while it still troubles me - it at the same time emboldens me. In the past few weeks I have had the opportunity to surround myself with many like minded people, and I have discovered we all seem to have this affliction. The only similar irrationality I can find in my brief autobiography is probably related to love, and that is telling as well. All of us, this grand thing in common, all head over heels for this idea.

The term that originally seemed to define this candidacy was first “once in a generation”, eventually now “once in a lifetime”. And I have no real way of knowing if this is indeed true or not, having not been alive to believe in a Lincoln, FDR, RF or ML K. But that is what it feels like. That is what my gut tells me every time my heart rises and falls based on what appears to be happening in the race. Since the moment I fell in love with American History, I have been waiting for something to happen in my lifetime. Something important that my kids will read about and I will have been there myself, will have done something myself. And I have felt a fresh piece of the Berlin Wall in my fingers, I have paid true attention at the foot of the tangled ruins of ground zero, I have spoken out against the war before it was a war, but nothing has ever felt as crucial as this. To be a modern American, raised on the optimism of your high school textbooks but faced with the cynicism and ideological deadlock of the status quo, I think all of us yearn for something we can get behind. Americans want to believe in something greater than themselves, they want to be given a chance at playing their part in the textbooks of tomorrow and being on the right side of history. They just need a compelling reason, or figure from which to rally up.

Once week ago tomorrow, I sat at  results viewing party in North Conway, New Hampshire and watched in disbelief as our movement took its licks. And seeing tears in the eyes of people who share this belief is a polarizing event. You walk away ten times more resolved then you arrived. You want to put the whole thing on your bronze shoulders and carry it to fruition alone. But all you can do is work and work and most of all hope. And the riskiest part isn’t pouring your unbroken heart into it, it is allowing yourself to envision that enough people will also believe, just enough - to give what you are convinced is this gift to the American experiment. That change isn’t just a history lesson but a vibrant and impatient undercurrent to our shared experience.

So while I say, quite rationally, that my candidate is not just a rhetorical wonder, that he is in fact the future our country should be given the right to choose, that I have read his first book and finished every page in disbelief that we might actually get to have this real person as our president, a politician driven by principle and sincere civic duty and not by ego or greed or personal manifest destiny. I know these things are true. That this man would add another optimistic counterpoint in the chapters of our nation’s history. And I could cite or indeed publish essay after article to support this viewpoint, but I realize as well, that I am in fact now a Believer. And that my faith is impenetrable. Logic be damned and so be it. If this is once in a lifetime then we must make it count.

and Yes We Can.

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