My daughter: The commie
And public school teacher, political activist, mother & future of our society…
That’s my daughter…. and grandson!
And public school teacher, political activist, mother & future of our society…
I get to be proud, since I am Nathalie Hrizi’s father. That comes with the deal. But I get the sense that this particular daughter’s choices (not to raise her above my other daughter or my son in any way) represent the future of OUR society: American society as it graduates to become the lighthouse society of the world and sheds its last persona, as policeman and guardian of the world.
Nathalie, first. She turns 34 years old in 2014. Born just at the end of GenX and the beginning of the Millenial generations, she was the first of our three children. She graduated from college, making me proud. And she earned a teacher’s certificate at San Francisco State University.
Before that, somewhere between turning 16 and her first college experience she became an anarchist, making me neither proud, nor comfortable. She matriculated at University of Pugent Sound in Tacoma, WA. In her second year there, she decided to go see what the hoopla was about at the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference of 1999 in Seattle, a 45-minute drive from Tacoma. While she was in the crowd, the police let loose with what many considered to be unreasonable force — tear gas, rubber bullets, high pressure water guns — against a largely peaceful demonstration. The result: Nathalie lost whatever little faith she had in our government’s ability to manage a truly open democracy. She came back from Seattle radicalized and interested in being an organizer rather than an armchair revolutionary.
Since then, she has gone to her own version of political school, reading Marx and Lenin, traveling to other countries like Colombia to participate in political actions, and becoming a cofounder of a new(er) organization called the Party for Socialism and Liberation. She is a communist with a small c and a truly active activist. I realized a couple of years ago that, if there was a traffic disruption in downtown San Francisco, oftentimes as not Nathalie was on her bullhorn as part of a demonstration down Market Street. More recently, she has even taken on the electoral front, running for office. She ran for U.S. House of Representives seat in California’s District 12 against the perennially popular Democrat Jackie Speiers. She got 5,793 votes, but out-polled the Green and Libertarian choices. This year, she ran in the primary for nomination to be the Democratic candidate for California Insurance Commissioner. This time she polled 212,000 votes and got noticed.
By now, Nathalie has become a sophisticated political strategist and tactician. At the same time, she became a single mother and has done an outstanding job as a public-school teacher at a bi-lingual immersion school in the Mission district in San Francisco (recognized by administration, students, parents and peers, not just her father).
I have been struggling with my daughter’s choices. I’m politically conservative. And my daughter is a communist! She married an immigrant from Tunisia. They had a son whom my son-in-law, Mohamed, is raising as a Muslim, which Nathalie endorses and supports right up to not choosing herself to join any religion. I am proud, as I said, of my daughter but conflicted about how she got where she is. We don’t talk much about politics…
But I wonder… What if this kind of life mixture is actually the point, the way things will be done in the future? Not the college/job/marriage/career/divorce track that my generation bought into after World War 2.
Recently, I read a book that seems almost out of date (more MySpace than Facebook), but allowed me to tie my daughter’s and my worldview together. The book is Millenial Makeover, published in 2009. It’s ostensibly a review of the effect that the Millenial Generation (born 1982-2012) is beginning to have on outcomes in the U.S. political system. I learned from reading the book that political strategists already know that every 30-40 years, there is a “political re-alignment,” a process that has been going on since this country was founded. It is nearly independent of party or political outlook (although it affects the outcomes of political races) and is often driven by the emergence of a new generation.
As I read Millenial Makeover, I began to overlay it with my daughter’s activism and politics. While she is not technically a “millenial,” Nathalie is so smart that she is testing the boundaries of political thought for both the GenX and Millenial generations. What I have begun to see is that my “conservative” point of view is an anachronism. I have always justified my point of view as being based on the fundamental principles our country is based on: freedom of thought, ability to choose, minimal government role in our personal lives, fiscal conservatism, and so forth.
Nathalie ran for insurance commissioner on a platform of abolishing the insurance companies and providing free healthcare to everyone! What the ef?! This is a ridiculous proposal; you can’t abolish insurance companies, which exist to satisfy a need people have to reduce the risk of various parts of their lives. She obviously adopted this platform (I said to myself, and definitely not to her) to poke at the system, since she knew that she would not actually be elected. We joked about what she would do with her job if she was elected. Hihi! But she and her comrades put the effort in and she polled more than 200,000 votes, 5% of the electorate that voted. That was way above the expected 2% or so. Hmmm. Maybe there was something more going on here.
When I started reading Millenial Makeover, I began to see that Nathalie could represent the leading edge of a new politic, one that will likely represent a left-of-center point of view for a new generation. One that will represent a new political landscape, a landscape where my mixed-race, Muslim-raised grandson (who will be able to vote for the first time in the 2028 elections) will represent the center of the political landscape and the true representative of everything this country stands for: an open, inclusive society that balances the needs of an effective government (i.e. not so expensive that we can’t afford it) with the social principles that represent the best of humankind.
Unlike members of the Tea Party, who espouse conservative principles and are really just a bunch of insecure people afraid of change, my daughter, the commie, is living a life leaning into the future and likely represents the future of a country we all want to live in! Thank you, Nathalie!