The New Oxford American Dictionary defines granularity as “the scale or level of detail present in a set of data or other phenomenon: the bill data doesn’t provide sufficient granularity to answer the questions.”
Call me nosy if you will, I have definitely not been minding my own business lately. And the term defined above could definitely apply to my interaction yesterday when I ventured out to shop after a few days of resting after more eye surgery (don’t ask). Perhaps it was my recent isolation or just my usual ability to strike up a conversation with anyone anywhere, but whatever the reason, I started chatting with a woman as we both surveyed the assortment of baby wipes available. At the surface level, I’m an old white woman and she was a much younger black woman. She was obviously pregnant (baby due next month I found out) and I was gushing about my new grand baby. In the course of the next few minutes, I got to see the ultrasound picture of her soon-to-arrive son, and she saw not only the grand baby but my extended family at Thanksgiving dinner. So with my biracial family bona fides established, I felt free to speak to her about current politics. I have become extremely concerned that black people would ever vote for the presumed Republican nominee if they knew at the very least his history of discrimination in housing in New York. The young woman was quite willing to share her thoughts and at one point said that people liked him “because he was the only one telling the truth” at which point I may have raised my voice in horror. She mentioned that she might sit home or vote for one of the third party progressives. I again jumped all over her to say that any third party vote was going to favor the dictator-to-be. I urged her to do some more research about the 30,000 lies during the prior term of the wannabe autocrat and to spread the word that democracy could be lost.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch (literally in the case of Justice O’Connor about whom I learned a great deal from the PBS American Experience documentary of her life), I began wondering whether I could reach out locally to the black churches to discuss the dire prospects for our country. Back in 1969 when I first moved to this town, I worked for a black minister who was leading the recently instituted Model Cities Program. I stayed with the program through the next two leaders, also black men, and made friends with a number of women of various ethnicities who worked there too. I have discussed the predicament we find ourselves in with one of these women with whom I have remained best friends all these years. The original minister still lives around the corner, but I have no idea what his church members believe. The young woman in the shop had mentioned that she had “found God” which could mean that she is an evangelical of some type; I don’t know enough about their beliefs to get into that topic. But perhaps the abortion issue is what has bound some black people to the cynical vote-scrounging Republican Party. Why on earth does it matter to anyone else what a woman does with her own body? I personally think it is reprehensible to have children you can’t afford to take care of properly, but the MMA avatar in the Senate seems to think having six children is a positive attribute. Is he staying home to change their diapers?
Anyway, I am obviously off on a rant. I need to chill as my boyfriend says so perhaps my recovery reading for the day will be about Minding My Own Business—fat chance!
Not a rant. Not at all. I enjoyed reading it.
Good for you. Speaking Truth is never ranting. The single issue voter, that votes against their own self interests and generally in doing such votes against the common good, all in the name of principle is showing their ignorance in how our political system works and the requirements of living in a democracy. When confronted with the fact, my experience has been they first respond with the classic deer in the headlights look and then dig a deeper hole explaining their position or with that “sit out this election” or third party protest vote logic. Third party protest vote only works with ranked choice voting, but the complexity of that would be way above the comprehension level of their pea brain.