Becoming

I just finished reading Michelle Obama's recent bestseller, Becoming. It's an overview of her life, divided into three parts: growing up and establishing herself as a Harvard-educated lawyer; getting together with Barack and the early years of his political career and their dedication to social change work; and finally, their eight years in the White House.

In no particular order, here is what touched me especially:

Feminism and Politics
I followed closely her account of the anguish she went through juggling three different personas: as the mother of Malia and Sasha, as an accomplished nonprofit administrator, and as the wife of a successful national politician. While Michelle enjoyed some unusual opportunities by virtue of her position as FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States), she also set aside her own career to support that of her husband, and to pick up the parenting slack necessarily resulting from how little Barack could be present as Dad given all the demands on the President's time.

Michelle not only did this with grace, but she did it at a time when women continue to struggle to be accepted as coequals on the world stage. Reading about all the balls she was keeping in the air, I was reminded of the first cover of Ms. magazine:



While this image (and this topic) was in Gloria Steinem's spotlight 47 years ago—and progress has been made—the struggle continues.

Administration and Implementation
As an experienced nonprofit administrator I have a personal relationship to the dance between program development and effective organizational guidance and oversight. While I readily acknowledge that this doesn't tend to be a very sexy topic (there aren't many who aspire to a career in nonprofit administration), it caught my attention that before Barack pushed all of his chips into the center of the table in 2007, both he and Michelle were sitting on a number of nonprofit boards in the Chicago area—and this on top of their having two young daughters and full-time jobs. I could hardly imagine how they did it. 

I recently turned down a request to consider serving on a nonprofit board because I didn't think I had the time to do it justice. I was already serving on one, and didn't think I had the bandwidth to stretch to two. What a wimp I am!

In my experience there is a tendency for nonprofit boards to be little more than a rubber stamp for a dynamic executive director, and that's not a good model. For the one board I'm on, I'm actively trying to strengthen the organization's understanding of what a strong and engaged board looks like, and that's about all of that that I can handle.

Hope Versus Nihilism
Becoming brought out the ache attendant to contrasting the optimism and decency of the Obamas with the self-serving boorishness of Trump. I had forgotten how good it felt when Barack won in 2008, and was saddened to realize how much I have become inured to the steady outflow of soul-diluting sewerage generated by our current President.

It did my heart good to be reminded that power and venality are not always conjoined.

The Ascendency of Social Media
Michelle points out that the iPhone first burst on the scene in June 2007, just three months after Barack had announced his candidacy for President. As we all know, the smart phone was an instant success, and Apple sold 3 million in 90 days. By the time the Obamas left the White House, Apple had sold three billion.

Social media exploded exponentially on their watch—to the point where today we have foreign policy being dictated via Trump's pre-dawn twittering thumbs. Scary, but that's the way of the world.

Trying to Re-Inaugurate Tempeh into Sandhill's Life

There's a guy I know named Ron Morris who grew up in Gorin, a wide spot in the road just one town up the line along the Santa Fe Railroad tracks from Rutledge. I first met Ron right after moving to Scotland County, about 35 years ago. He's a songwriter, guitar player, and general odd duck (he has a killer recipe for habañero wine that he's trying to market to a commercial winery—how odd is that?). In one of our first conversations, he looked us in the eye and said, with great solemnity, "You know, tornadoes are real to me." How do you respond to that? For decades afterwards, he was referred to in the community as Real-to-Me-Ron.

For years, he drove around in this tricked out Subaru he styled the Tricentennial Express (after his Bicentennial Bus blew a head gasket back in '76) which was uniquely styled with portions of the US Constitution hand-painted along the sides. Ron has always been a little different.

The reason Ron popped into my head is that I'm making tempeh today. In one of his songs about cultural commentary, he wrote the refrain, "a bean, a bean, a human bean" and I always found that kinda cute (being the word play connoisseur that I am). Since tempeh is essentially a cultured bean product for humans, it wasn't hard to connect the dots.

• • •

Today is the first time I've attempted a batch of tempeh since last summer, and it's an experiment to see if we can revive what had once been a thriving minor industry for Sandhill. The August batch yielded a promising 90% salable pieces and that encouraged me to attempt a more rigorous trial this winter (ostensibly when I have more time). Today is the start of that trial.

Our tempeh adventures began about 25 years ago when Craig Green (currently living at Shannon Farm) lived with us for a time and brought the idea (and the incubator) with him from California. Though Craig didn't stay with us long, the tempeh business did.

Over the years we gradually built it up from something we did occasionally for ourselves (to augment the non-meat protein options in our diet), into a steady business with $8000 in annual sales. We had no problem marketing all of our tempeh regionally as frozen 8-oz pieces, where our hand-crafted product would out-compete the industrial competition from Lightlife (Greenfield MA) and White Wave (Broomfield CO).

We had worked our way up to a regular routine of cranking out two batches of about 70 pieces each per week. If pressed, we could do three. While every piece wasn't salable, most were. It was a great example of applying the value-added principle to food production. Instead of selling soybeans—where an acre of 30 bushels of organic soybeans might gross $450, after turning it into tempeh those same 30 bushels would blossom into $9000. Of course, there was a lot of labor devoted to tempeh making, so this was not a get-rich-quick operation. Still, we were in control of the price of the finished product (which is not the case when you sell raw products) and we could produce the same dollars on one acre that a traditional farmer needed 20 acres to generate—which translates into needing less land to make a living from agriculture.

After two decades of steady market development, we hit a major glitch about three years ago, when an unknown contaminant started disrupting the quality of our finished product. Though we wracked our brains, tested our soybeans, changed our inoculant, consulted with William Shurtleff (author of The Book of Tempeh), and bleached & cleaned all of our equipment within an inch of its life, nothing solved the problem. We began to suspect that there was an air-borne yeast that was infecting every batch, interrupting the mold pattern enough to render most pieces unsalable. In frustration, we suspended operations two years ago.

Now, after that respite, I'm trying a few batches to see if things are better. Maybe that which mysteriously appeared, will have mysteriously departed. The worst we are out is two gallons of soybeans, and a day's worth of my time.

• • •

As a closing aside, I note that today is hump day for President Obama. That is, he's completed exactly as many days in office as there are remaining in his current term. Do you reckon he's tired of drinking from the fire hose yet?

Whenever I think about having too many balls in the air (which is something I pause to reflect on every so often), I take solace from the knowledge that there are some—Obama being an excellent example—who have it much harder than I do. It's a challenge to understand why anyone would seek out that pressure and that pace.

Yes We Can

Tuesday night (actually, early Wed) I watched Barack Obama first address the nation and the world as the President-Elect—to a wildly enthusiastic crowd in Grant Park, in unseasonably balmy Chicago. In the audience, the cameras showed Jesse Jackson crying. In Nova Scotia, so was I.

Finally, we have a chance to do it differently. Now it’s up to all of us to make something of the opportunity. They say being the President is tantamount to getting up every morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Well, it isn’t just Obama’s Herculean labor to muck out the Aegean stables of politics as usual; we all need to get a hand on that fire hose and figure out how to direct that stream of water usefully—lest we drown in a flood tide of teary regret and spilt milk.

We are on the cusp of hope, and I didn’t know how much I thirsted for it until I got so choked up as Obama remind me of my commitment to optimism. While I don’t really know whether we can or cannot, I know there is no advantage to thinking we can’t. I’ll have my oar in the water, pulling in concert with Obama, doing what I can to help build a world that works better for everyone.

• • •

Visiting my in-laws in Nova Scotia, for the first ever I watched a US presidential election from a foreign country. I never fully appreciated how arcane our politics are until I attempted to explain the meaning of what CNN was reporting to a group of intelligent, but mystified Canadians (whom we had invited over for the evening of Americana and to watch the returns—we served chicken wings, pizza, campaign trail mix, and apple pie).

No, it didn’t mean much that McCain carried South Carolina, or that Obama got Vermont; but Obama being declared the winner in Pennsylvania was a big deal.

In Canadian federal elections, they vote for the party (not the leader) and the party determines who will ascend to become the premier. Our Canadian friends liked our system of voting for the person—if only they could understand it.

Is each state’s allotment of electoral votes proportional to population? Answer: sort of. I explained that a state’s number of electoral votes equaled the sum of its Senators and Representatives, which is never lower than three. While the assignment of Representatives is proportional to population (one person, one vote), the assignment of Senators is independent of population: everyone gets exactly two (one state, two votes). I may as well have been explaining the mysteries of matrilineal descent in Swahili.

Finally, in near exasperation, I stated, “I can explain the US electoral system; I just can’t defend it.”

How could they project one candidate the winner as soon as the polls closed, before even one percent of the vote had been tallied? We waded into the arcane world of exit polls, statistical analysis, margins of error… and their eyes glazed over.

In the end, I realized how decades of US elections had trained me to know how to sort wheat from chaff when watching returns (on Tuesday the key markers were the presidential race in Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana; or the senate races in NH, TN, LA, MN, and OR). I was not surprised that Latinos were voting much more for Obama than they had for previous Democrats; I was surprised that race did not seem to be a factor (among those who reported in exit polls that race mattered to them; 55% voted for Obama; among those who reported it didn’t matter, 53% voted for Obama). It was, thankfully, a neap tide for the Bradley effect.

I knew the Presidential race was over when Obama carried Ohio, yet it mattered a great deal that Obama also won some southern states (Virginia, Florida, and finally, North Carolina), demonstrating strength in all regions. He was going to get a mandate to lead; not a house divided. When Republican analysts lamented the unfortunate timing of Wall Street’s recent free fall, it was the same old song (and time to get another beer).

But when John McCain gave his concession speech in Phoenix, I held my breath. How would he spin it? To his credit, John rose to the occasion and spoke graciously. He gave Obama credit and offered an olive branch (after watching some of the debates, it was far from obvious that he would make this choice). I exhaled. Give McCain credit, he went out with his head held high and he pointed the way to the bridge we'll need in the days ahead (resisting the impulse to dynamite the abutments on his way out the door). The people had indeed spoken, and in his final speech on center court, McCain responded as an American, not as a Republican.

I want the civility and optimism that emerged Tuesday to be nurtured into a future that’s like that every day. I am hopeful.