CNN Tea Party Debate Reflections

The CNN Tea Party Debate was the first of its kind. It definitely had its own flair and the audience was made up of a lot of Tea Party voters. What stood out in the debate?

My first reaction happened right at the beginning. No it wasn't during opening statements (that happened later), it was when they sung the National Anthem to begin the event. It appeared like a pretty lame political statement from the Tea Party. I am not against the National Anthem being sung at events by any means, I have just never seen it sung before a Presidential debate! Not a big deal really, but if you are going to do it at least make the most of it! I saw Romney, Huntsman, and Santorum singing along while everyone else stood there. Plus one for each of them.

The only thing that stood out to me during opening statements was when Perry used his line stating he would make Washington, DC as inconsequential in your life as possible. From a limited government zealot, that line is great. In reality, I am not so sure how great it is. How can Washington really be inconsequential? Washington writes the laws, collects our taxes, and protects the country. I am not sure I actually want them to be inconsequential in my life. What I want instead is a bigger voice!

Right out the gate questions were raised to Perry about his stance on social security. He seemed to back down and now says he wants to fix social security. No discussion on how he would do it and Romney hounded him on it. Perry didn't really bite.

At this point I started to notice the differences in the two frontrunner's body language. A side hobby of mine has been to learn about body language. This includes how it conveys information and how it can impact people's decision making on political candidates. When it comes to body language, Perry and Romney could not be more different! Romney was always looking at the person who was speaking on stage and seemed not only interested, but engaged in what was being said, even if it was something negative about him. In contrast, Perry would stare blankly at the audience and often avoid looking at anyone who would challenge his stances on issues. At one point, I even caught Perry staring into the rafters during a response by Romney!

To many, a candidate's body language does not matter, but history has shown that poor body language and even tone of voice can affect political outcomes. President Nixon is often cited as losing his bid against President Kennedy because he looked ill and nervous during the first televised national debate. President H.W. Bush may have lost his reelection bid to President Clinton after looking at his watch during a response by Clinton during one of their debates. Margaret Thatcher went through training to lower her voice because advisers thought she sounded too shrill. These things do matter. You just don't realize they do, which is why I find the whole topic fascinating.

Back to the debate, there was a lot of talk about privatization of social security accounts for younger people. That's a program I wish Bush would have gotten passed during his second term. I would definitely back it again! There was also a lot of talk about reforming the tax code, but many people don't have solid plans on how to do it except Romney, Huntsman, and Cain.

Another thing I noticed is that the crowd at this debate is definitely a Tea Party crowd. The applause lines have the sometimes unfortunate way of showing some of the Tea Party's true colors. There was a huge applause when Bachmann was asked if Bernake should be tried for treason as Perry had suggested in the past. Not for her answer, but for the idea that he should be tried for treason. In another question that stirred attention all over the media on the left, a couple of people yelled yes to answer a question posed to Paul on whether society should let a person without health insurance die because he cannot afford the care to keep him alive.

Towards the end of the debate, the questions on immigration and border control were brought up. Perry was hit hard on his stance to allow instate tuition for illegals, which also garnered several boos from the audience. Perry stood firm on his position and said it was a state's rights issue. Romney also clarified his position that he wants a fence on the border whereas Perry says a fence on the entire border isn't feasible.

Overall the debate was very feisty! So who won? I must say based on crowd response, it appeared that Rick Perry one-upped Mitt Romney this time around. Body language told a completely different story as Mitt Romney stood out as the most presidential. Of course, Perry is the new Tea Party candidate, so his win was to be expected. The question was could Bachmann come out and regain some of the support she has been losing to Perry. After watching the debate, I would have to say it appears the answer to that question is no. I would also say that it appears that everyone else 'lost' the debate. After round two, it's looking more and more like a two person race for the nomination.

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Reflections From New York, September 18th, 2001

"Daddy, please come," my daughter said on September 11th from New York City. Together, we watched the towers fall. Me, from the safety of my San Francisco home. She, from an office building in Rockefeller Plaza wondering if her friend survived.

In August, I had scheduled a trip to visit her on September 18th. Nationwide, the planes were grounded and I didn't know when the airports would reopen. But I knew I had get to New York. Mostly to give support to my daughter, but having grown up only one-hundred miles from New York City, I felt an affinity not only with the city, but also it's people and culture. Only a few days before my scheduled departure, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that on September 18th, the planes would start flying again.

As I waited to board my plane at the Oakland International Airport, I heard, "He's moving towards the gate!" It was a security guard frantically calling into her walkie-talkie as she tailed a well-dressed man of middle-eastern decent. Within a few minutes, three policemen appeared and trotted through the terminal trying to catch up with her. It was the beginning of ten days where the events I witnessed and was involved in generated emotions that are still as vivid today as when they originally occurred.

In New York, it began when I went into the subway at Lexington Avenue to get on The 6 Train to lower Manhattan. Walking down the stairs, I heard the refrains of Ava Maria played on an accordion as pristine pictures of the missing appeared on graffetied walls. The missing were always smiling, sometimes with friends, but mostly with children. "Have you seen him?" "Have you seen her?" the posters read. Throughout New York City they kept reappearing as did the tears of people who stopped to read or even glanced at them.

When I exited two blocks from were the Twin Towers once stood, I saw empty gray buildings beneath a blue sky, as earth generated clouds drifted up and vanished. The smells of devastation and death combined, easily passing through the clean white mask given to me by a tired policeman.

I saw people push to photograph images that were too horrible to forget of twisted steel skeletons guarding lifeless spaces. Spaces that once held the dreams of people whose families waited for news, but already knew.

From atop one building a Sousa march tune blared from speakers for the benefit of people who were too numb to listen or too grieved to care. And pamphleteers unashamedly thrust words of salvation and doom into hands willing to accept anything.

I watched reporters trying to tape the perfect interview, while thousands of cell phones described images that had no words, to people who listened, but I'm sure couldn't understand. And later that day, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the entrance to the Islamic art exhibit was closed.

In the city's parks, I saw babies play in a world that was newer than they, while pigeons took crumbs from trembling fingers, and emotionally bruised and battered New Yorkers pulled out damp cloths from Gucci suits and stained overalls.

At the half-priced tickets kiosk in Times Square, a steel drum played patriotic songs as an indescribable smell stopped conversations in mid-word, until it moved on, spreading throughout the boroughs.

That evening, my daughter and I walked past candles glowing in front of a fire station in which flags were readied to wrap comrades. Later, in a mostly empty restaurant we listened to glasses clink to missing friends, as we and other strangers who heard the toasts sobbed along with those offering them.

For six days I aimlessly wandered throughout a city that I had known in different times and realized it would never be the same. The memories I took back with me to San Francisco were more surreal than a Dali painting. It's been ten years, but they still slip through the walls of my consciousness, riding on innocent sounds and visions.

Stan Goldberg, Ph.D. is author of the international-award winning book, Lessons for the Living: Stories of Foregiveness, Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life. His next book on caregiving, Leaning Into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers, will be published by New World Library in March, 2012.

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I Am a Person Too: Reflections on a Hospital Stay

I was unprepared for an illness of "unknown origin." My neighbor took me to the emergency room and stayed with me for six hours. A nurse, too busy to sit and chat, sat and chatted anyway. A headache woke me at four in the morning, signaling another storm. I called my husband and said, "Please come." He came and stayed, put his cool hand on my forehead. I needed someone to be with me.

I needed a doctor who listened and asked good questions to help me say it better. I needed someone to acknowledge that I was scared. I did not want to die alone in the night in a hospital bed. When I saw people carrying on in the normalcy of the ordinary, workaday lives, I wanted to shout, "I have things to do, too!"

I wanted people to know who I had been -- a healthy, active woman -- before I was a flat-on-my-back, moderately hysterical patient.

This brought back memories of a friend during her hospital stay. Stretched out on a treatment table, her back to the door, she heard a doctor enter the room. He told her he was about to insert a drainage tube into her chest cavity. "Whoa! Wait a minute", my friend said. "I am Sue M, a wife and mother. I am working on my Ph.D. in public health. Who are you? Please come around so I can see your face. Tell me who you are." And he did.

Before my friend died, she had fought for her just due.

Once home, I struggle to make sense. I wander into my office, look at my books, and see at a glance that I have lost interest in most of them. If there is no answer to my illness maybe in my choices over which books I get rid of and which I keep there are answers to what the illness has meant to me.

As I heave books into boxes I wonder what the decades of studying, exploring unanswerables about God and human suffering was about. How did my search, riffling through pages of logical arguments, help in my hour of need? Still, my faith was challenged by loyalty to my agnostic parents and the predominant Western "seeing is believing" mindset. I needed good reasons for my faith. Yet, I no longer want these books. Eventually, five hundred books are packed up, ready to be carted off, to be donated to my alma mater.

In the hospital I realized that I am not as afraid to die as I thought but it kept coming to me: not now, not yet. Illness snatched me out of the middle of a serious exchange with my husband. We met as teenagers, have known each other fifty-eight years, are not done working things through, and the biggest obstacle to the intimacy I want is a pattern I have carried from little on up: withholding, the fear of the risk of engagement. In the hospital, I lived through a nightmare of unpreparedness. I had left home without saying all I wanted to say to the one I love. I wanted to go home again. I had things to say.

Books that contain the notion of a remote, distant God "out there" or "above it all" are gone, packed up and out the door. Writers who speak of the suffering God who enters into a relationship of passionate participation with the world remain on my shelves.

"How embarrassing for us to find that though we claim to have been created in the image of God we still claim that we can't see God." I keep Abraham Heschel's books.

In the hospital, I scoured the face of every person who walked into my room, hung on their every word, the woman who scrubbed the floor, those who drew blood, made my bed. I wanted to know who they were, where they lived, what tune they were humming. I blossomed into an irrepressible extrovert, pressed people into engagement. It mattered more than anything: I wanted the other to be fully present to me. I wanted to be a person, not solely a patient in a hospital bed.

In one of his books. C. S. Lewis takes up the problem of pain. In another, he writes of his own grief after the loss of his wife. I toss the first book and keep the second. I keep writers who bring spiritual realities into the everyday by way of their encounters with God and others and the painful and grace-filled particularities of their lives.

It did not matter how much time a doctor spent at my bedside. It could have been an hour or five minutes. I needed a doctor who was present and able to imagine what I was not saying. One physician said, "You're scared, aren't you?"

My husband heaved a book once. He found me curled up behind a book, grabbed it, hurled it across the room, and said, "I am sick of seeing you behind the covers of a book." Even after that, too often he found me behind the covers of a book. He must have given up. It might be another reason I shipped five hundred books out of here. I am ready to respond to Kenny's footsteps outside my office door as a signal that it is time to put the book down. It is time to step out of the shadows and to be fully present to him, to our children, to others. It is time to speak my heart and hear the other's heart.

Two months after my hospital stay, there is still no answer to what took me there. A part of me feels vulnerable. Mostly, feeling well again, I welcome each day, am glad I am able to say what wants to be said, glad for my husband's warm body next to mine, glad for the harsh winter that, though unwanted, readied us for the coming Spring.

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