PreciouOne eMagazine

To Hillary Clinton
Thank you
for your dignity, your
perseverance and your service
Dear Secretary Clinton,
Though everything
in your personal
history suggests that
Tuesday’s defeat
will not mark the
end of your work in
American public life, I
can imagine that this will be a moment
of reflection and recovery for you.
And though we have some profound
disagreements, on the occasion of this
transition, I wanted to take a moment to
thank you for some of the contributions
you’ve made in the past quarter-century
as one of the most prominent women in
American politics.
In the two and a half decades that Americans
have used you to work out our complex and
contradictory ideas about women, work and
marriage, I have been moved by your dignity
and resilience.
I don’t envy you the compromises — the
enforced cookie-baking, the meeting with a
group of female journalists to ask for advice on
how to present yourself — or what must have
been moments of agony in your marriage. But
as I’ve watched you from a very great distance,
I have been grateful to you for bearing some of
the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune
that is the lot, in different degrees and forms, of
all the women of this country. Every insult that
didn’t level you, and every moment of absurdity
you absorbed without staggering, helped start
conversations about the expectations and
standards women face.
You didn’t have a solution for this conundrum.
None of us do. But if you couldn’t solve
American gender politics in the span of a life, or
act as a shield against the harshness directed at
other women, you created space for the rest of
us. We won’t surrender it.
Thank you for your commitment to service.
Defeat is not easy to accept with grace, and there
is always a temptation in the days that follow to
choose a different course or to withdraw entirely
from the fray. After President Bill Clinton’s plans for
comprehensive health-care reform failed during
his first term, you became one of the champions
of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
After you lost to then-Sen. Barack Obama in the
2008 primary, you campaigned for him and served
as his secretary of state. You’ve demonstrated over
and over again that you are truly committed to your
pledge to “Do all the good you can,” even if the
gains are smaller than you might have hoped, or
if doing that good requires you to put aside hurt
feelings. This is an exhortation and a model that we
all ought to emulate in the weeks and months to
come.
In the days since the election, I have thought
frequently of the example you set in reaching out to
others and forming life-long friendships with them.
Hearing from Ryan Moore, Aleatha Williams and
Janelle Turner about your correspondence with
them, and your care and attention during both
painful and proud moments in their lives, has been
a reminder to me to be more diligent in my efforts to
stay in touch with the most important people in my
own life. Listening to the Mothers of the Movement
talk about how you listened to them is a testament
to the simple power of presence. It’s precisely
because time is in such short supply that offering it
to others is a valuable gesture.
Thank you for laughing in the face of absurdity.
Thank you for apologizing about occasions when
you were wrong, and keeping alive the idea that
politicians ought to educate themselves and
to grow, rather than intellectually immobilizing
themselves as the world changes. Thank you
for your dedication to the Constitution and to
the peaceful transfer of power in our democratic
system; among many other things, your opponents
will be measured by whether they show the same
measure of allegiance to our most valuable norms
and institutions.
I can only begin to imagine how painful it must be to
feel that you are exiting one public arena with your
work undone. I hope you take some measure of
comfort from the idea that, though you may not see
the garden in bloom, many of us will be tending the
seeds you planted.
With respect and gratitude,
Alyssa Rosenberg
Soutce:ww.washingpost.com
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