Crossposted at DailyKos and MyLeftWing
I’ve spent considerable time the past few days wondering about the fight we face and how it is different from battles and wars of the past. It still has that uncompromising agony to it, it still has death and destruction, it still has mighty dissent, it still has a resolve by many to quiet the voice of the weapons being used on the battlefield and on the soil of our homeland.
There is in every turn, in every heart, in every soul, in every spirit, in every person we choose to gather with during these troubling times a sense that we will not give up for to do so is to give up on humankind, to give up on our life as we know it, but mostly it is to give up on our country, the America we have always known, the greatest nation in the history of the world, the beacon of hope and promise for those around the globe as they have said that is freedom, that is liberty, that is justice, that is democracy. We have in years past smiled proudly as we say, “yes that is so.”
Or is it?
Below the fold, the rest of the story
This role of a dissenter was not chosen but was born in me just as my laugh, my tears, my passion, my curiosity, my awe of life was. The defining moment for me was when I took my first breath, looked at my mother and had my first real knowing of love. The moment that shaped me more than any other was when my sister held me in her arms, looked at me with eyes already filled with conviction along with a desire to teach me what she was born knowing, that we are put here to speak our minds, to say what we mean and to mean what we say. In her eyes I saw a determination to never believe the world as it is cannot become the world it can be. It was then that my journey was revealed to me, a journey with these women of morals and values that spoke for every person on this earth. A journey that lasted over half a century.
It wasn’t an easy task for Sister to make me be the person she so desperately wanted me to be. She had to throw away my go-go boots and sit on me to listen to Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, and Mario Salvo. She read to me not of fairy tales or later Nancy Drew or Judy Bloom but articles about Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. She put us front and center in front of the TV with news reports of the bombings of the churches in the South, James Meredith, Rosa Parks and the bombing murders of four little black girls whose only crime it was to be born ‘coloreds’.
Sister watched with me as we saw the signs for white drinking fountains as opposed to ‘coloreds’. We saw the courage of blacks sitting at the soda fountain in Woolworth’s and refusing to leave. We saw the violence in the streets, the blasting of firehoses that threw blacks against the sides of buildings or levelled them onto the asphalt. Sister would push my hair out of my eyes and tell me we were not special but we had been born the right color in a land where to be born otherwise was seen as a sin when the true sin was bigotry and prejudice. She told me to never forget, not for a moment, the things we had seen.
In 1963, on a June day that was already so hot the electric waves were bouncing off the asphalt, Sister took me to our neighbors house to watch the latest assassination of a man whose only crime was to stand up for his beliefs and loudly proclaim the rights for ‘negroes’ were the same rights as for whites.
Shirley and Chuck Hornbeck handed us our own plane tickets that would fly us to Mississippi so we could experience the grief felt by a people that were only asking for justice in an unjust world. Sister kissed my cheek, took my hand and as we walked home told me to not say anything, she would tell Mom and Daddy, she would make sure we went to Medgar Evers funeral no matter what. I still don’t know what lie she told them, it never mattered to me, the only thing that was important then as now, was that I was the lucky one to have been born my sister’s sister. We were 14 and 13 years old the day we landed in Mississippi but Sister had been teaching me since I was born to pay attention, to not forget, to wrap my very soul around the things I saw and heard.
The assassinations of so many further shaped who we are. Malcolm X, George Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy. We saw in Angela Davis a woman that stood fearlessly in front of a microphone and said to our government, you have committed murder in all of our names and you will be punished. The Black Panthers stood up for who they were and thus became an example to us of how far the envelope must sometimes be pushed to be heard and to effect change, that no less than the right to stand tall was at stake, there was no glory in giving up, there was honor in violence but none in bowing down. Huey held his head up and so we learned to also.
There was in us an innate sense that peace could prevail so as Lyndon Johnson stood up and spoke of change, when we saw the Voters Rights Act become the law of the land, when we knew we had in our leader an advocate for poverty in this country, our attention turned to a war that was telling our teenaged friends they must fight. They couldn’t tell us why, they only told us they must. We were in high school, young and firm and ready to raise the rooftops. We had seen strife, we had been raised in a time of dissent, it was second nature to us.
I have recollections of feeling this kind of fear. It was a time when nothing was taken seriously, yet everything was taken seriously. It was a war in Vietnam’s time. A fine time to be young, a terrible time to be at war. I still think, in some ways, I was at my best in those years. It was as if we couldn’t be silenced, we couldn’t be stopped, we had already seen too much to give up. The reality is we were scared to death. We thought it was sex, parties, fleeting attachments, rock and roll, but certainly not fear. We didn’t know we were dismissing those that dared to go to war as we were demonstrating against those that sent our children to war. Everything felt so free to us here; all we knew how to do was try to be wild. We were too young to know how to grieve.
The deeper we tried to get inside ourselves the more pain we seemed to feel. We didn’t understand how we could be so hell-bent on having fun when half the world seemed to be dying. It seemed the more we danced, the louder we got, the more boys died. Why didn’t anything work to drown out the tears, the moans, the last breath of all of our friends and brothers? Why was a land so far away responsible for so much sorrow? We were supposed to be carefree, dammit, where was the immaturity, where was the youth, where was the aloofness, the casualness of being young? All of it was lost in a draft that said, number 161, you go, no name, just a number, you go.
I remember being old enough to have a baby, old enough to be working full-time. I remember boys old enough to go to war, to die, and yet we were all babies. We were so naive and idealistic. At nineteen I was old enough to be running a college bookstore, to be active in an anti-war movement, and old enough to organize the transportation for a moratorium that would consist of 500,000 people. Yet I felt so young, so immature, and so unready to know the answers.
I had a psychology professor at the time tell me that some people were too gentle to live among wolves. That’s exactly how so many of us felt. Watching the news at night became like a catharsis. You could shed a whole skin watching one thirty-minute program and yet not be able to face the world. The partying continues, never enough places to go, never enough people to block the cries and gunfire from another world. Take another drink, another boy dies. Take another hit of acid, another boy dies. Take another hit off a joint, another boy dies. Never enough to make the death go away, never enough to silence the guns, to hold back the bombs, the napalm, the destruction, the callous loss of innocent life in a country that didn’t want our presence or our killing machines.
By day I lived the life as a working mother, of an activist. At night I couldn’t drink fast enough, do drugs fast enough, or have sex enough to make the chatter in my head stop. I had been raised by parents that told me everyone else was perfect, the world outside the walls of my life was perfect. I had no idea there were powers that be that would say no to me. I didn’t know my friends would die 6,000 miles away, too far to reach, too far to touch, too far to hear their last words. I had no idea there were such wolves. My essence started to be shaped by hands other than my own. I felt powerless to do anything until I saw the results of our outrage. For the first time in my life I saw the results of my anger and involvement. I would never forget.
I’ve struggled trying to recognize myself in these times of war, torture and the taking away of women’s rights. I try my hardest to understand and honor other’s opinions and resolve for winning when I see winning as equality that embraces women instead of saying our rights are not necessary for the evolution of democracy.
I can’t seem to reconcile who it is that comes on Kos for hours a day and is so filled with anger and hate leaving behind the softer, more human, inspired, grateful and loving person who wraps herself into the arms of a man who hasn’t lived long enough to know this is Act II, that Act I for me was Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, Roe v. Wade and feminism taking sprout. This is the woman who has fought all those battles and foolishly believed they were in the past, sighed such a sweet sigh of relief they were won, and had a vision of new battles not old ones made new again.
Death Be Not Proud keeps repeating itself in my mind over and over. I have buried my sister, my one-day-old grandson, my mother, my 12-year-old niece, my marriage, my health made well again with chemo and have bounced back everytime because I am and always have been in awe of this thing we call life. Optimism and hope has always won the day against fear and hatred. Passion for issues that make the world the best it can be has always triumphed over the petty prejudice and bigotry of those that would have the few dictate the world for the many.
So why can’t I see the good before I see the bad? Why do the passions of hate and rage come so easily? How have I allowed these monsters to enter my soul and my heart? Why can’t I find the answers that have always been available to me? Why don’t I understand how others can be so dismissive of the rights of some, of heroes of the past and dreams of valiant heroes in the future? How can I so utterly fail, what words are the right ones, what stories will open the gates for all to finally get it that women are making a choice and to the consternation of many, that choice is life over politics? What will ultimately fill the gap of the great divide? What will it take to bring us all together?
