The President's Ear

All last month I was jet-lagged from a vacation spent many time-zones away. Relaxed as I was in one place and sleepy as I’ve been in the other, I've now spent two full weeks moving like a turtle and I have to say: it’s not a bad way to move.We’re so quick to react these days, pulling out our cell phones the minute something happens - to take pictures, or tell our friends via the many electronic avenues now available that we’re no longer in the moment, no longer really ‘with’ the people we are with.Two examples from my own life:Bill Clinton came to my region early in his Presidency and when I heard he was due I dropped everything, grabbed as many of my kids as I could lay hands on and tore into the city where we found ourselves standing watching 30 feet from where he arrived.First he said hello to Ted Kennedy, then John Kerry and a lineup of local dignitaries. Then he headed straight for us, likely because we made such a dandy photo-op: a tiny teen female on crutches, a handsome African-American youth, and me, the weary-looking mom in one of those shiny puffed-out warm-up suits folks wore in the early 90s.He greeted our boy warmly and asked kind knee-surgery-related questions of our girl.  nd I’m sure he would have said something to me too if I had not had a camera so plastered to the front of my head that he couldn’t see my face.I do have a nice shot of his left ear.Then six years later, my good sense again failed me again just before George Bush announced his run for the White House. I met him at a Republican fund-raiser I was at under what I can only call special circumstances, since I am a Democrat, largely thanks to endless dinner-table rants by my mother on topics ranging from the good Woodrow Wilson to the sainted FDR to Emma Goldman, that friend of the working man. (How poor Dick Nixon got through 81 years of life with Mom’s  many hexes on him I’ll never know.)Anyway, there I was at this event. The future President gave his talk, then waded into the crowd to greet his many admirers “Go over!” urged David, way too shy to go over himself. “Get his autograph for the kids! What if he really becomes President? You’ll kick yourself if you don’t!” he said, and gave me a little push.The next thing I knew there I stood, right next to “W” who was saying something I didn’t agree with at all: He was saying he didn’t think children could be properly raised without a mother AND a father, a remark that I thought both dismissed and discounted a very large number of American families most of whom function just fine.I felt my face go red. “Do you mean you don’t think any other kind of family can do a good job raising a child?”“No I don’t!” His face went red too.“You don’t think two loving adults of the same gender, or of different generations, can do a good job bringing a child to adulthood?”“Maybe a good job but not AS GOOD a job!” he exclaimed and that’s where it ended:In an angry standoff, with no common ground achieved, all because I could not stop long enough to feel for the humanity of the person before me. All because I had once again left my turtle self behind.