When I was very small, my mother wrote in my autograph book, “Laugh and the world will laugh with you, weep and you weep alone.” So I have been casting about for something to brighten my day. It’s not easy to find but even in the darkest night a flower grows, or something like that.
This is a dark and disturbing world. Living in Jamaica, it was relatively simple for me to tell the good guys from the bad guys. But in America, where the political and social scene is so complex, things are not what they seem. Behind the truth we think we see are many layers of different truths – and sometimes no truths at all, just a pack of spin and lies.
But I think I can safely say Elizabeth Warren is one of the good guys.
I don’t know her personally, of course, but I’ve caught her on TV a time or two and she seems like a straight shooter. And apparently she is going to run for a senate seat.
That seems almost too good to be true. What would a nice woman like her be doing in a place like that?
Whatever it is, I am willing to bet she would be on my side – and yours. Here’s one of her favorite proclamations:
There are some things worth fighting for and right now it’s about fighting for the middle class.
She would be a formidable warrior. The 62-year-old Harvard professor looks as soft as a sunset (photo above), but at her core she is pure steel. Time Magazine described her as “one of the new sheriffs of Wall Street.”
As President Obama’s Special Adviser to the Secretary of the Treasury, she was responsible for crafting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has set a cat among the Wall Street pigeons. Republicans hate and fear her so much that the timid president did not dare appoint her to head the bureau she created.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone with a spine to back up the lackluster Obama Administration?
Yes it would. And yes we could. Warren is showing all the signs of entering the 2012 senate race for the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat – the one that an inexplicably inept Democratic candidate surrendered to Republican Scott Brown (the man with a truck, remember?) in last year’s special election
One of the refreshing things about Warren is her unapologetic acceptance of Democratic principles. In the tradition of the late Ted (“Lion of the Senate”) Kennedy, she supports such contentious causes as abortion rights, gun control and gay marriage.
And she understands how America’s middle class is being sabotaged.
“I came out of a hard-working middle class family,” she said in a recent Boston Globe interview. “I lived in an America that created opportunities for kids like me. I now see an America in which our government works for those who already have money and already have power.”
There might yet be hope for America if more people like Elizabeth Warren are willing to brave the nation’s polluted political atmosphere in an effort to clean up the mess.
