Many so called “pro-lifers” mistakenly equate abortion rights with favoring abortion. That is far from the truth. The right to abortion is about putting the decision in the hands of the pregnant woman (and her god, if she believes in one) rather than the government imposing its values on her. Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor of Catholic faith, has always been personally against abortion but a supporter of the right to abortion. This is an important example. To support abortion rights, one does not have to choose abortion — and many pro-choice people are anti-abortion — but respects the choice a woman makes, whether she keeps her baby or not.

A timely example is in the current presidential campaign. This was a quote from CNN about Sarah Palin concerning her pregnant teenage daughter:

Sarah and her husband, Todd Palin, issued a statement saying they are “proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.”

Notice the word “decision.” That is an important one. It sounds to me that vice-president-elect Palin supports her daughter’s right to make the decision. I have heard similar wording to her personal “choice” in keeping her own baby with Down Syndrome.  Those are the words of a supporter of abortion rights.

I returned from a 6-week trip to the US the other day. I have been looking for an opportunity to write about the presidential campaign there in this space. Unsure of what exactly to write,  I have had the idea of something with the view of an ex-patriot filtered through an international perspective. This is an important difference because I have the context of living in Latin America, and of a country that is simply not the US. Here US foreign policy has a lot more weight than domestic issues.

The opportunity has come already with the passing of the Democratic Convention and the ground-breaking acceptance speech by Barack Obama last night. This speech really disappointed me. It made me sad.

Reluctantly, my boyfriend Guillermo watched the speech with me. Well, he watched “CNN en Español” on TV and I used my laptop and headphones to get the untranslated version from CSPAN.com. (I just prefer to avoid dubbing when possible. If it were the president of Argentina speaking, I would listen to her in Spanish rather than an English dubbed version.)

This was a break-through for Guillermo to listen in because he holds a lot of contempt for my native country and its dominance over everything. It’s a perspective not too different from most people in Argentina and Latin America. He calls me naive for believing that a person like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton could make a difference, and always points to Rwanda as an example of how Bill Clinton is no different than G.W. Bush. I argue that I always saw Clinton as someone a bit to the right of me politically and that also a powerful country like the US inevitably does horrific things once in a while; but that a Democrat in the White House would make things a bit better than another Republican, and could lead the US to being more and more responsible over time.

I had voted for Bill Clinton as the better of two evils, and up till this point I have been more passionate for Barack Obama. I think he is the first liberal in decades that is not ashamed of being so, and the public has been responding to that. I was impressed by his A More Perfect Union speech for being so gutsy and turning a negative issue into something constructive, rather than just evading a political scandal. I think that will be his speech that is remembered most in history. And it is this perspective that has brought so many voters to the polls who have sat out elections in the past. But that was just oratory, and last night he was charged with putting more substance into his words.

I have expected that the candidate Obama would turn out to be someone more bland, shooting for the middle-of-the-road politically than he was previously. This is how presidential politics plays out. He is no longer an outsider but now an instrument of the Democratic machine. Guillermo and I followed along the speech attentively. It was not his best speech, but a very good one, and certainly will be seen as a whole lot better than what John McCain delivers in his acceptance next week. That was really smart what he said about cutting taxes for 95% of the people, and accounting for this by cutting back favors to big corporations and to very wealthy individuals. He also talked about making higher education more of a right than a privilege. That is so important.

But his words against shipping jobs overseas sounded more like anti-immigration rhetoric, playing on the fears of US citizens that the rest of the world is waiting at the borders to steal their jobs and lifestyles. He could have said that differently, talking about corporate exploitation of US citizens being converted into the exploitation of foreign work forces under the most inhumane conditions. Something bad for the US and bad for foreign workers.

Then he re-iterated his plan to get out of Iraq responsibly. He has been consistent there, and this one issue has gotten him a lot of mileage. But then he talked about Afghanistan, pursuing the Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban into their caves. He basically stole that line from George W. Bush, and with that Guillermo wouldn’t listen to another word.

Iraq is an easy war to be against, but the war in Afghanistan is horrific enough and I have never supported that one either. When the US invaded Afghanistan I was living in New York with the former site of the World Trade Center still smoldering from that nightmarish attack. It appalled me to see my government glibly participating in such horrors, and after that on to Iraq, etc.

Barack Obama is now playing politics with war to win a few votes in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and is no longer speaking from conscientiousness. He may have turned a campaign that spoke about imagination and breaking with bad habits from the past to being just the same story with a new face. War is horrific in any context, and proving you can be a cowboy just like the others does not get us into the 21st century. I think he turned off more than just the two of us here with this strategy.

I picked up a copy of the Village Voice last week when I was in New York. They published a semi-humorous look back from the future at four years of the Barack Obama presidency. It ends with him invading Venezuela and then leaving politics in disgrace. Chillingly, it comes across as feasible. Democratic presidents have started at least as many modern wars as Republicans.

Barack, please don’t try to prove how tough you are. I hold optimism for your mandate as president. Guillermo tells me I am naive to think there can be any improvement in US politics, but I hope to prove him wrong. The American public is open to new ways, just give everyone a chance. And give peace a chance too.

One of the things about the city of Buenos Aires that appeals to me is how the city retains an individual character. In many cities I see a homogenization taking place. New York is a prime example, in that since the Guliani and Bloomberg administrations took hold, the city has not only gotten safer on a police level, but safer on a character level. Tourists from any midwest US region now can walk Time Square and feel at home with all the theme restaurants and big name stores. There are less and less neighborhood mom and pop hardware stores and more locations of Home Depot, Blockbuster, Starbucks, Bed Bath and Beyond, The Gap, etc.,…

A side effect of globalization, nowhere in the world is free of this trend. In Buenos Aires, McDonalds, Burger King, and various chain stores from Spain, France, and Chile are filling the cityscape more and more. Walmart already exists in the suburbs, and the first Starbucks recently opened here. Gentrification is happening here like everywhere too, with working class families getting pushed out or trendy developments. Historic low-rise colonial buildings that give the neighborhood its character are being demolished to make way for clean-lined hermetic luxury apartment towers. In San Telmo, the neighborhood where I live, one historic building was undergoing renovations when the contractor “mistakenly” removed the entire building rather than just part of one floor as the permit allowed. Now in place of a rundown historic building that was home to various low income families there is a fenced-off empty lot with a stop-work order.

One small change that is happening here is the focus of the photos you see here of sidewalks. A native of the US, I have been impressed at how the sidewalks here are all constructed from tiles of all designs, from the top neighborhoods to the most humble. In all of Argentina the sidewalks are tiled and not cemented, and every morning people are outside thoroughly cleaning them with brooms, hoses and sometimes kerosene. The latter is used more in other parts of Argentina and gives the sidewalks a special luster, while leaving them spotless. Maybe a bit extreme, but you see the character of the sidewalks gives Buenos Aires and every last village a warmer character, making the city a bit more humane.

The new leader of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, made a campaign promise of fixing potholes, etc. He may have been elected on this promise (and the fact that he was once the president of the most popular soccer club in all of Latin America, a job given to him because his father was a powerful businessman). Anyway, the well advertised refurbishment has now begun in several barrios, and I happened across an area downtown where construction crews are at full speed. Blocks and blocks of tiled sidewalks are being ripped up and being replaced by cheaper concrete surfaces. Walking is a becoming a little more comfortable in some parts of the city, but I fear that this is one more change to taking more character away from Buenos Aires to make it more homogeneous and plastic.

I feel like I am saying the all-too-obvious when I say that Barack Obama’s candidacy is important for racial reasons. In the general campaign he himself has emphasized what he offers aside from his African heritage. Hillary Clinton and John McCain too have mostly tiptoed around the race issue. As a liberal white male I too feel a little awkward speaking about race. I don’t know first-hand what it is like to be a person of African descent growing up in the US, nor do I know what it is like to be a white working class person in West Virgina or Texas.

After a week of so much buzz about Barack Obama as the inevitable nominee, I was at first confounded by why he had not tried harder in West Virginia, and why Hillary Clinton was able to win by a margin of over 40%. Polls have shown that race played a much larger role in this dominantly white, working-class state than in other places. Most people do not admit they are racist, and I am not so naive that racism has not been a factor in many voters in every precinct in the US, including people of all races and backgrounds. But I saw a result of an exit poll from West Virginia, where 1 in 5 openly admitted that race was a factor in their vote. The bottom line is that there are too many people who cannot accept there being an African American in the White House, regardless of other issue.

When they were first married in the 1950’s, my parents lived in Virgina, solidly south of the Mason-Dixon line. My mom has told me stories from those days for example about her naively sitting near the back of the bus and being told by another white passenger that she should move forward as the back is for the colored people. As west coast Jews my parents where definitely shocked by the racism they witnessed, to see other humans regarded as something much less than human. Well a lot has changed in those times, and they were recently in North Carolina and Alabama for the first time since those days and my mom remarked how things have changed. She was saying how she is very content to see the tables turned in these places as the people strongly support the candidacy of Barack Obama.

But concurrently with the racist vote in West Virigina, I read about Obama campaign workers being confronted with blatant incidents of racism. At first I was outraged to hear about this, and I still am, but I see a silver lining too. Such a serious candidacy by a black man is forcing people of all walks of life to confront their fears of race. Like good psychotherapy, it brings these buried dark things to the surface. In all of us there exists some form racism; it is in our culture. But having a man of African heritage as the leader will force us all to come to terms in this. One guy cannot solve racism, but his candidacy alone is having such an impact, that already it may nudge the evolution of race relations to a better place. If he wins, no one could deny his significance, like the Jackie Robinson of politics.

Recently I have been discussing various current events in Argentina. There has been the farm strike, the persistent smoke from extensive prairie fires, plus other tidbits. These two themes are still quite present with a new rural strike beginning yesterday. We’ll see if the meat disappears from the neighborhood markets again. Meanwhile, the fires from the farms way to the north of Buenos Aires are still affecting the city. Yesterday morning the smell was strong, with my eyes burning, and a heavy smog color in the air.

However, I wasn’t entirely sure if that color in the sky was from the fires in the north or from the eruption of a volcano in Patagonia. This is a major geological event. El Bolsón, a town in the south that I love in the heart of the Patagonian Andes, has been covered in ashes. Over Buenos Aires, 2000 kilometers to the northeast of the volcano, there is a big cloud of ash at 3500 meters altitude. In the city there is a hazy feel in the sky, but not too much else; but this cloud is strong enough that airline flights to the US and other places have been suspended.

Here in Argentina, airline travel is nowhere near as important as in the US and Europe. The pending meat shortage is given much more importance in the newspapers. Still, what was really talked about most yesterday was the early elimination from the Liberty Cup playoffs of the second most popular soccer team in Argentina, River Plate.

Me, we’ll I am whining about the high inflation here with three-peso empanadas, and also the paving over of the distinctive tiled sidewalks here with concrete. The latter will be the subject of my next installment.