I was expecting a party Thursday night.
I can wait.
For all the hype about Vice President Kamala Harris bringing joy to the presidential campaign, she was all business in her acceptance speech, drawing the contrast between her and her opponent, former President Donald Trump. And boy, is it stark.
No matter how successful people become, they are a product of their childhood.
For Harris, she draws deep from that well.
Harris is a child of “the flats” of Oakland, California.
“In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands,” she said of the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay where the hillside homes fetch millions.
“We lived in the flats. A beautiful, working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses and construction workers. All who tended their lawns with pride,” she said.
Trump has known nothing but extreme wealth, which certainly doesn’t preclude him from understanding the plight of the majority of Americans. But if we are to go by his previous term in office, we know his policies will favor the wealthy to the detriment of the poor and middle class. We know he is unwilling to further invest in Social Security and Medicare to keep them up to speed.
On the campaign trail he has said he will not cut the benefit programs. If not pumped up, they are due to expire by 2036.
Harris’s parents divorced when she was young, leaving her mother to raise Harris and her younger sister.
As an immigrant from India, her mother’s accent and small stature would make her a target of ridicule, despite the fact she was smart as a whip with the goal as a scientist to cure breast cancer.
“I saw how the world would sometimes treat her,” Harris said. “But she was tough, courageous, a trailblazer in the fight for women’s health.”
And rather than complain about the injustices she faced, “She taught us to never complain, but do something about it.”
For Harris, that meant putting herself through college and law school.
