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...and I have a livestream feed from the DNC there open in another window. (Thanks, nice guy from Seattle in the BigTent who helped me download and configure the plug-ins to make it possible!)
Being crowd-phobic sucks rocks. I started to head over to Invesco. There were what looked like millions of people streaming there over the footbridge, there were buses and shuttles everywhere and in the distance I saw the gigantic crowds... I chickened.
I went back to the Big Tent and gave my credential to a nice fellow from South Africa whom I'd spent some time talking to about the challenges they'd overcome and the problems they face. He compared his disappointment in the Mbeki government to our experience with Bush: corruption, incompetence, indifference, and cronyism.
My focus throughout the convention has been to experience it as a non-expert, an unimportant ordinary citizen with an average level of knowledge and a maybe slightly-above-average interest in the political process. To watch the process from the viewpoint of my experience, age, gender, and opinions, rather than as an expert. To be what I am-- a middle-aged woman with an interest in politics and a passion for my country and its future, but not for the ins and outs of the political process.
I've been within touching distance of any number of celebrities whom I failed to recognize, because read news stories and online reports but hardly ever look at the pictures. And I'm bad with the whole names thing anyway, as Secretary Reich could tell you.
I'm not a newshound or a technical whiz. I wish I could have spent more time talking to people and less time humping a laptop around looking for a connection, or uploading and putzing with pictures and network connections, or schlepping from point A to point B to catch different events; but that's the nature of trying to blog an event like this one.
I'm profoundly aware of my inadequacies and humbled and thrilled by the experience of being surrounded by so many people younger and smarter than I am. And so passionate. And so joyful.
Gwen Ifill is right-- she's interviewing the incoming President of the NAACP as I write this-- this is a great and historical moment. The America of my childhood was disfigured and distorted by its acceptance of assumptions about people based on characteristics like skin color and accent and where they spent their Sunday morning. And tonight I'm seeing the consummation of a lifetime's work by millions of Americans to heal that distortion-- leaders like Martin Luther King; but also millions of ordinary people doing small but extraordinary things every day.
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