A beautifully depicted historical lesson

Image courtesy of IMDb.

Editor's note: This post contains specific details about about the movie Lincoln. If you've not yet seen it, you may want to postpone reading my commentary (not that you don't already know how it ends, assuming that you have a rudimentary knowledge of American history).

If you watch Steven Spielberg's latest film, Lincoln, hoping to witness a prolonged sequence of bloody Civil War battle scenes, you might be slightly disappointed. The movie begins with one, but that's not what defines this masterpiece.

If, instead, you're interested in an impeccable depiction of 1865 America — including the country's most pressing social and political issues of the time, as well as an intimate portrayal of the president who saved this nation — then you'll enjoy the film as much as I did.

Set during the final months of the American Civil War (and Abraham Lincoln's life), the movie provides some fascinating insight into the struggles involved with the passage and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which cemented an end to legal slavery and involuntary servitude in the U.S. Constitution.

During this racially charged era, social and ideological differences played a central role in the fight over whether to apply transformational change to America's most sacred document, as would inevitably also be the case in the year 2012.

Indeed, many of the arguments of 147 years ago sound similar to those we're confronted with today, albeit in reference to a different battle.

Opponents of the anti-slavery amendment (mostly Democrats) contended that it would create equity among two "classes" of human beings who were, by their interpretation, intrinsically different; and that it would lay ruin to cultural norms and tradition. They also asserted that its passage would create a slippery slope: What if this amendment someday led to suffrage for blacks? Or women? What would we do then?

Letting go of the world — and moving on to paradise

This is a 1948 picture of my father, just a year old
at the time, and grandmother, taken while they
were on vacation at a lake in Ely, Minnesota.

My grandmother, Lorraine Wapniarski, passed away peacefully last Tuesday at a hospital in Roanoke, Virginia, near where she had lived for the past 16 years. By her side were my father and aunt.

I actually hadn't seen my grandmother for four years. I last visited Virginia in December 2008, when she was already suffering from dementia and was living with my aunt and uncle because she could no longer care for herself. Even then, she could recall people and events from 50 years ago, but couldn't remember what you had told her 10 minutes ago.

In the years since, her cognitive decline continued at a slow but steady rate. When my father visited her for the second-to-last time in October — when it wasn't yet known that the end of her life was so near — he discovered that she could no longer remember her husband of 46 years, who passed away on Christmas Eve in 1992.

I'm still too young to have had much experience with the death of loved ones. Twenty years ago, when my grandfather died, I remember not fully grasping the concept of death but feeling profound sadness nonetheless just because I observed the grief of everyone else, including my grandmother, who had just lost the love of her life.

Don't get me wrong — I knew what death was, of course. But its gravity was a bit too much for my young psyche to comprehend.

Admittedly, even now, the notion of the decline of earthly life is tough for me to conceptualize. By any standard, I'm at the peak of my physical and mental health and ability. I've not yet begun to experience arthritis or other physical problems that eventually come with aging. And the idea of ever losing my memory or intellectual autonomy — or the ability to perform basic functions that require cognitive capacity, like driving a car — is extraordinarily difficult to entertain.

But it happens to everyone. Life has its seasons. While I still find myself in the late spring or early summer, when growth and possibility abound, my grandmother just departed from her late autumn, when there are still glimpses of profound beauty, but it's clear that change is on its way — the kind that requires letting go of old things to make room for the renewal that inevitably follows the death and darkness of winter.

Equality and the politics of fear versus affirmation

Editor's note: If you're reading this via email, click through to the post on the actual blog. There are a couple of videos I want you to see that won't show up in your email client.

On November 6, Washington state joined two others — Maine and Maryland — in becoming the first ones ever to uphold marriage equality at the ballot box.

Voters in a fourth state, Minnesota, likewise made history by soundly rejecting a Republican-sponsored, Proposition 8-style amendment to its constitution.

I'm deeply proud of every one of these states. If Americans of my generation are bearing witness to any civil-rights issue, this is it.

Here in Washington, the journey began early this year when our lawmakers approved a bill that legalized gay marriage, making the Evergreen State the fourth to endorse same-sex unions legislatively. (Several others, including my beloved Iowa, have done so via judicial rulings.)

As expected, opponents quickly gathered signatures for a referendum on the issue, putting the law on hold until Election Day. As I noted at the time, placing a minority group's basic dignity and freedom up for a public vote is, in itself, reprehensible. But I expressed confidence that Washington voters would make the right and fair choice if confronted with such a decision.

And indeed they did — by a margin wider than California voters rejected equality through Proposition 8 four years ago.

A five-point recap of the 2012 general election

Tuesday, November 6, was a remarkable evening — and, as a fellow blogger and former classmate of mine put it, "a pretty damn fantastic time to be a human, and an American one at that."

I agree wholeheartedly. Regardless of your feelings on the results, every election cycle carries with it a variety of takeaways. Here are what I believe to be the most important ones from the 2012 general election.

• Oppose-and-obstruct is not a pathway to victory — at least not over the long term.
• You also can't win national elections just by pandering to rural white men anymore.
• Money doesn't always decide elections, but that doesn't mean it's okay to allow it to define them.
• You can't put the American electorate into a box.
• Health care reform is here to stay, no matter how much the GOP tries to convince us that people still hate it.

You can check out my thoughts in their entirety after the jump.

How Tuesday night actually turned out

This is a solid final result.

Just prior to Tuesday's election, I made predictions as to how the presidential race and U.S. Senate contests would play out, making the unspoken concession that Republicans would retain control of the U.S. House (as in fact they did).

It looks like I'll be proven wrong on one race in each set of predictions.

On the presidential side, I gave the state of Florida to Mitt Romney. The last set of votes are still being counted there, but if the current numbers hold, Obama should carry the Sunshine State by a razor-thin margin.

As I indicated in issuing that (most likely inaccurate) prediction, I wasn't comfortable projecting that Obama would sweep all of the swing states — including Florida, where his advantage had long been tenuous at best — when the national polls had been excruciatingly close for so long. Some even showed Romney ahead — and if those had been true, it was hard to envision such an evenly-divided state as Florida sticking with Obama.

Final U.S. Senate prediction for Tuesday: Democrats, 52-46

The U.S. Senate results are even harder to predict than the presidential election, because several of the races are so close that it's possible that votes will be counted well beyond Tuesday.

That being said, here's my best guess. The check marks denote the states with the closest contests whose outcomes are thus hardest to guess. (The green and yellow shades of Vermont and Maine indicate states that are certain to be won by independents.)

Detailed thoughts on each of them are after the jump.