Via Compete, this is based on traffic trends to the candidates' websites in October of 2008.
-- Danish Aziz
I understand that Thanksgiving is basically just a harvest festival with some feel good racial friendship themes attached, yet I'm loathe to participate in a Thanksgiving themed prompt as I feel like celebrating this day is throwing salt in the wounds of Native Americans. I'd ask a Native American how he/she feels about Thanksgiving, but for some reason these people are hard to find. Sure, America's a great place but that doesn't mean we need to gloss over our troubled history. Celebrating Thanksgiving the way we currently do would be like Jews in Israel eating "peace falafel" on Naqba Day. Having said all that, we live in the greatest country in the world, and as the child of immigrants I feel especially thankful for a great number of things afforded to me by simply having been born here.
My father came to the United States with a mechanical engineering degree and fluency in English, yet was forced to drive a cab to make enough money to bring my mother, brother, and sister over from Pakistan. He was able to save up enough money to start a small business, at which point he and my mother felt comfortable enough to have another child -- me. I'm thankful that I had the opportunity to be the only family member born in the United States, which I can only assume is the reason I am both the tallest and highest SAT-scoring Aziz.
I'm spending my Thanksgiving on the beautiful coast of Oregon where my parents run a small coffee shop in their semi-retirement. Having grown up in Iowa, small-town Oregon is strikingly familiar. These are the parts of America that seem to have been left behind despite the great economic advances seen in other parts of the country. Every other day or so, some soul will wander into my parents' shop and ask if we're hiring and I can't help but be reminded of those heart-wrenching scenes recounted in The Grapes of Wrath. The unemployment rate in Oregon is rapidly approaching eight percent and is on its way to nine percent in neighboring California. It's not just blue-collar and rural workers who are feeling the brunt. Recently a number of my friends were laid off from their jobs in San Francisco. These were all hard-working, well-educated young people who find themselves in the same situation as the laid off lumber industry workers in Oregon for example.
This will indeed be the "the worst recession in a generation," and I fear it could last longer than the two years some are saying it will take for our economy to start growing again. In times like these I'm just thankful that I and my family are all currently employed and that we now have people in charge of this country who will hopefully tackle this issue with the urgency that is required.
-- Danish Aziz
Looks like someone over at Salon is reading Whyroots. Michael Lind asks "If the conservative era is over, can liberals come out of their defensive crouch and call themselves liberals again, instead of progressives?" As a fiscal conservative and social liberal, I think the term "progressive" creates a bigger tent, but I can see why run of the mill lefties might be dying to be "out and proud" if you will.
-- Danish Aziz
That California, this bastion of tolerance, passed Proposition 8 was certainly a bummer. Ultimately though, we will look back at this embarrassment as merely a minor hurdle on the road towards the inevitable recognition of same-sex marriages across the civilized world (although I understand why the thousands of people being told their marriages no longer exist might think otherwise).
The gay marriage debate is no longer a debate about homosexuality but is now squarely a debate about the institution of marriage, and that debate in turn is about family policy. The suggestion that the redefinition of marriage to include same sex couples could lead to even further redefinitions is not unfounded. However, as long as any redefinitions draw more people into marriage, it's hard to understand why anyone would oppose them. From a policy standpoint, "married people are healthier, happier, more prosperous, and more secure. They have fewer problems with depression and crime, they lead longer lives—by every measure we can calculate, married people do better on average, and that's even after you account for the differences in the married and unmarried populations." It seems to me the more the merrier!
So besides gay marriage, what further iterations are anti-gay marriage people worried about? One legitimate concern that comes to mind is polygamy. The legalization of gay marriage could certainly pave the way for polygamous marriages, but when you consider the positive impact marriage has on people I don't see what's so horrifying about this prospect. As long as everyone involved is a consenting adult, I can't see how forcing them to choose non-marriage "lifestyle alternatives" is better for anyone. This is easy for me to say as a progressive young person living in San Francisco, but how could politicians in the "Real America" ever vote for anything that even remotely suggests that people living outside of the norm deserve the same rights afforded everyone else? The sad truth is that they probably couldn't, and that is why the solution rests not with new legislation but with the removal of old legislation. That is to say, take the power of recognizing marriages out of the hands of the state. Make marriage a contract between consenting adults (enforceable by law like any other contract) and "It would put gay [or polygamous] relationships on the same footing as straight ones, without implying official government sanction. No one's private life would have official government sanction—which is how it should be."
-- Danish Aziz
The label progressive, when taken literally, would ostensibly be self-applied by anyone concerned with politics. After all, who would stand in the way of progress? That being said, I think the question that begs to be answered when determining who or what is progressive is what do we deem to be progress?
It's a testament to the unifying power of George W. Bush that at this moment large swaths of people of various political stripes can agree on just what progress means. Progress now means upholding the constitution, progress now means respecting the civil liberties of American citizens, and progress now means balancing the budget. It's only slight exaggeration to say that these ideas are now considered radical. We find ourselves in the midst of an America where libertarians and leftists alike are howling at the ease with which our federal government doles out public cash to irresponsible corporations. In a way, progress means going back to what we had before eight years of corporatism, cronyism, and neo-conservatism almost bankrupted our country in every sense of the word.
So just how useful is the term progressive now that it's been "appropriated by just about every group out there?" In my view, while the utility of the label may be waning, the idea of progress is now more important than ever. That we have reached a consensus on the direction our nation has been headed is an important milestone. Clichés often become clichés because they hold kernels of truth. The idea that it's darkest before it's light has never been more aptly demonstrated than when our nation voted Barack Hussein Obama into the land's highest office, only two short years after our troops handed over Saddam Hussein to his ignoble fate at the hands of a Shia mob. We know that where we were headed was the wrong place, so where do we, as progressives, want to go now?
The answer to that question somewhat depends on what kind of progressive you consider yourself to be. Yet, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, it's hard to overstate just how transformative the period we're entering in is going to be. Like it or not, Barack Obama has been handed a mandate for change during a time when the very ground on which we stand is shifting. Whether President-elect Obama will use that mandate to enact a truly progressive agenda of reform or if he will pursue more self-serving Clintonesque triangulations remains to be seen, but that's where the "roots" come in.
The level of civic youth engagement hasn't ever been this high in our lifetimes, and the ability to participate has never been easier. It's up to us to set the course, and that's a huge part of why Whyroots chose to launch after the glamor of the election had already passed. A lot of people have been asking, "Now what?" The answer is clearly, "Now us."
-- Danish Aziz
My decision to join Whyroots was certainly not based on a lack of opinions available on the Web! While it seems that a lot of people are willing to write it, is anyone really reading it? According to a recent poll, only 19 percent of people ages 18 to 31, and 17 percent of those ages 32 to 43, regularly read a political blog. Are people just not interested in politics? That can hardly be the case when nearly 62% of eligible voters turned out to vote on November 4th. So what then could be turning people off I wondered.
As someone who's been interested in politics and the Internet for as far back as I can remember (Dukakis '88!), I stopped to consider why I wasn't that interested in reading "political blogs." I've come to the conclusion that politics on the Internet resembles a football game, with regional loyalties replaced by party affiliation and dogma. As someone who doesn't toe any party line, I often find myself being condescended to by authors preaching to their respective choirs who value affiliation over fact.
When Daniela approached me about writing for Whyroots, I was instantly attracted to the idea of fact-based and reasoned "progressive" activism anchored by a discussion between a diversity of opinions. As a self-described "socialist" who was brainwashed by my college's economics department, I knew I wanted to have my say as we set forth to define what exactly progressivism means. The fault lines of America's political landscape are rapidly shifting, and the opportunity to impact where they settle has never been greater. I have seen first hand over the past eight years the amount of destruction a small group of people can cause, but I've also seen the power of the Web in the hands of our generation, and I never again want to say "never again."
-- Danish Aziz
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