A Letter to Ms. Ferraro on Behalf of My Children

I sent this letter to Ms. Ferraro on March 10.

Dear Ms. Ferraro,

I am personally hurt by your recent words. As a young man I watched your candidacy with youthful hope that I was watching the change from the Old Ways of judging people by their skin, by their gender, by their biology.

Now I am a father of two girls and a boy. Your words make me flinch with the fears and the guilt that I have gotten over as an adult. They make me want to protect my children from the accusations and sick memes that refuse to die off – the sick memes that you just inserted back into the public consciousness on behalf of a politician who cannot seem to do enough to ensure that my children integrate those thoughts, that they too suffer as their parents did.

I want to apologize for my skin. For being male. But I can’t.

You see, my children are “white”, too, whatever that word even means to them. Not much, really, unless you and I make sure that they carry the burden of guilt you wish to gift them.
One of my children is male. He is a boy.

I regret that at twelve he has already picked up some of the guilt that your generation and my generation were so eager to accept, so eager to share. To inflict on one another.

So you see, I cannot apologize for myself because if I did I would have to apologize for my children as well.

And they are still innocent. Do you see?

I do not support your candidate because I disagree with her qualifications to lead my children’s path to adulthood. Not because I want my girls to have a Woman or my boy to have a Man as president – because I want them not to have to think along those lines, but to think about whether the person is good at their job, and I can’t see your candidate being as good at the job as the one I support.

I do not support my candidate because I want my children to grow to adulthood with a leader who matches their skin, nor to see how gracious Daddy is in supporting one whose skin does not match theirs. I want them to not understand that this is even an issue that Mommies and Daddies think about.

And I don’t think about these things, except for the boy inside me that was excited when *you*, Ms. Ferraro, ran for Vice President. That boy lived in a world defined by race and gender differences. He wanted you to win – to break down the barriers of biology. That boy would be happy to have anyone win who wasn’t a biological match for all his predecessors.

But that boy is grown up now. The man that boy became knows that it is more important to elect qualified – even, when we can, *great* - leaders than it is to elect leaders because we want them to break barriers that have already dissolved all on their own.

You helped begin the dissolution of those barriers – can’t you see that you won? They are gone! Margaret Thatcher, Nelson Mandela and many others attest to that already, and so long as you and your candidate don’t succeed in destroying Senator Obama and with him the Democratic party, another proof will be at hand that biology is off the table in choosing the leadership of our species. The leadership of our children.

Please, Ms. Ferraro. Not only do I think you should publicly renounce your own words – words that are doing more to perpetuate the sick thoughts you stood against many years ago than anything your opponents of that day could hope for – but I ask that you repeal your support for Senator Clinton. You are both feeding the dragon you once sought to slay, and it will come out of its cave and damage my children if you don’t stop.

Best Regards,

Chris Blask