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Friendships give strength to partnership The New Nation
Linda Bloom, L.C.S.W., and Charlie Bloom, M.S.W. :
Linda: I live in Northern California where we can frequently see the ancient redwood and Sequoias, which are the largest and tallest trees in the world. They grow to a height of more than 250 feet tall and up to 30 feet in diameter. As tall as they are, you would probably expect them to have a deep root system, but they don t. Surprisingly they have a shallow root system. Nevertheless, they cannot be blown over by the strongest wind. The secret of their stability is the interweaving of each tree s roots with those that stand by it. This vast network of support is formed just beneath the surface. In the wildest of storms, these trees hold each other up.
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In the lead-up to the 2016 election, former president (and, at that moment, aspiring first gentleman) Bill Clinton trotted out a stump speech line at an event for his wife, telling reporters, “I am tired of the stranglehold that women have had on the job of presidential spouse.” Four years later, when presidential candidate Joe Biden promised to pick a woman as his vice president and to bean-count his cabinet to ensure that it met a level of racial and gender diversity that reflected America itself he perhaps did not think of the trailblazing first he might be furnishing by proxy: a male vice presidential spouse. With his appointment of Kamala Harris as running mate, a Magritte-style defamiliarization of the familiar took place, as the most traditional image in American politics a blue-suited, brown-haired white man suddenly reconstituted itself as a radical one, and Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer in his mid-fifties, whom she