My fingers are still a little numb. It gets cold in Michigan, in November, even in this time of global warming. But that didn’t stop about twenty people from showing up at our local Republican Representative’s office. Including my five-year-old daughter.
It was a MoveOn sponsored action. A “Reverse Robin Hood” theme to protest Republican support for $50 billion in proposed cuts to poverty programs, while at the same time continuing with $75 billion in tax giveaways to the richest Americans (not to mention the billions we are spending burning innocent men, women and children in Iraq every month).
We held signs. Some had empty plates, to symbolize the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, a time when many of our poorest in this country of plenty will still go without.
I know some of the poorest now, since I’ve started to become involved. At last week’s peace vigil at our Capitol, I became very familiar with a local homeless woman. She wandered up and mumbled something to our group leader about how she had lost two sons in the war. We silently doubted her claim, as we’re pretty familiar with those who have lost children locally, and she was pretty clearly only loosely in the neighborhood of sanity. Who knows, maybe she lost sons in the first Iraq War. Or Vietnam. Or maybe she has been driven completely insane living in this country where we consistently grind up our own children, and foreign children, too, in some cyclical, morbid lottery.
Workers for peace and justice are not turned away, as a rule. Even crazy, homeless workers. So the group leader kindly directed the woman my way as we were about to wrap up the protest with a moment of silent reflection. We formed a circle, as we always do. I patted the woman on the back and said I was sorry for her loss, without really caring much that my sorrow may have been for all of mankind as much as for her specifically. As the group joined hands, as we always do, the old, homeless woman leaned in on me and gave my bottom a lurid grope. Not an entirely pleasant moment on the road to peace, I can tell you. But, I am no great shakes, so I suppose I should have been flattered. At any rate, I’m hoping to avoid our newest volunteer at this week’s combination Silver Bells peace vigil / Volunteers for America Art Fair to Defeat Homelessness.
I tell you all this, not to dissuade you from your own volunteer efforts. A minor incident. Sometimes you have to laugh on this difficult road to peace, to keep the images of the burned children out of the front of your head. Right? So if you can think of homely, middle-aged, formerly-stick-in-the-mud, attorney, me, getting groped by a fairly hideous homeless woman, and if it makes you laugh while you are out there working for peace and justice — well, I say it was a moment’s discomfort well worth it.
I digress. Or I should say, I digressed. As did some of the speakers at the cold MoveOn event. So as my daughter and I stood freezing, listening to regular people talk about the way that their government is truly letting them down for the sake of an obscenely wealthy class of overlords, I felt a little tug on my coat.
I leaned down to hear my daughter, against the whipping wind and the wispy first flakes of November snow.
“Daddy,” she whispered in my ear. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
“Okay, honey,” I whispered back. “In a second.”
I have lived and learned that bathroom breaks are easily met with brief adjournment.
When the last speaker was done, we started to make our way to our car, and came across one of my favorite members of the anti-war group. She is a spritely old woman, a former professor. Her body is wracked by some degenerative disease that I have not had the heart to ask about. Wheelchair most of the time. With crutches for short standing periods. But despite her physical challenge, she exudes an energy that is awe inspiring. It is in her eyes. They dance. And in her voice, as it sings to all of us, is a spirit assured that a better world is truly possible, despite a life lived against an historical backdrop that should have crushed the all but the strongest human aspirations. I cannot pass her without stopping to chat. Introducing my young one to a woman she should emulate in life.
After some pleasantries, she says, “You’re going in to express your thoughts.” Her voice is soft and sweet. Matter of fact and commanding. She has inclined her head toward the entrance of the Republican’s office. The same Republican who is busy dismantling the country I once thought I knew.
Using great will, I try to beg off. “I have to get her to Kindergarten,” I say, feebly.
“It’ll just take a second,” says this goddess of virtue. “I always go in. We’re here, aren’t we?”
I am overcome, of course. And I march in to make my displeasure with our government heard, face-to-face.
I am second in line. A fellow protestor, a young professor has beaten me to the punch. Perhaps she was sent in by our Yoda-like commanding general as well. I don’t know. The professor tells an aide, in an eloquent one-minute lecture, that she, as the first person in her family to graduate from college, was the beneficiary of the student loans that the Republicans are cutting, and that she is adamantly opposed. The aide, a young Republican-in-training, is silent. He hands her a form so she can register her dissent in writing.
My daughter tugs my sleeve again, as it is my turn in line, breaking my concentration as I am about to deliver an equally blistering one-minute speech to the young aide. She points to a restroom in the office. I know that the short adjournment is over, and I send her on her way, before stepping to the counter.
Being easily distracted (this is an area where I generally believe women make better parents, as I think they are trained to be better multi-taskers when dealing with children — a skill where my abilities are wholly lacking), I have completely forgotten what I was going to say to the aide. Fortunately for me, I was the first person to graduate from college in my family, too. So I can follow the professor’s speech with a simple, “What she said,” as we say here at the BMT from time to time, when other smart people say something the way we would have liked to. Only I gussied it up.
“I was in the exact same situation,” I say referencing the professor with a gesture. And then I throw in the creative ending tag, “And to cut these programs as we are spending billions on this war is obscene.”
I can be verbally aggressive. I’m a lawyer. So, it happens, I guess. The aide, and a secretary are looking at me with perhaps a hint of unease. “Obscene,” may have been a bit stronger than the civil discourse they wanted to hear. But their boss is a supporter of the war, and a denier of assistance to the needy. So fuck them, I guess.
I got my form. Filled it out. Probably just giving them information for the watch list, huh? But I said it as best I could in a short space, and I prepared to leave.
The only thing I was missing was my daughter, who was quietly clawing from the inside of a locked restroom. The staffer had to get me a key to get her out. Am I glad they had that key.
I took my daughter for her favorite lunch on the way back to Kindergarten. I felt guilty sitting down to a tuna sandwich and a bowl of broccoli-cheese soup, thinking that there were really hungry people out there on the streets who could use it a lot more than me.
My daughter warmed up quick with the soup. And we talked about the protest. I tried to tell it to her straight.
“That man works in Congress,” I said. “Do you know what Congress is?”
She shook her head while blowing on a spoonful of soup.
“Congress is kind of like the boss of the country,” I said.
Her shake turned to a nod as she was slurping up the sustenance.
“They decide how to spend money. And right now they are taking money away from poor people and using it to kill people in a war. What do you think is a better way to use the money, hon?”
“Give it to poor people,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because sometimes they need money,” she said.
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I can hear a song. Teach the children well.
Update [2005-11-16 15:0:4 by BostonJoe]:I forgot to mention a book update — it doesn’t rate its own diary, but it is fun news. I have booked my first radio interview to promote the novel. Only about five minutes on the morning show of WHNN-FM 96 in Bay City, Michigan between 8:00 and 8:15 a.m. on Wednesday, November 23. Drive time, man. Boo-yah! I don’t know if they have live streaming (I haven’t thoroughly searched the site yet), but I promise I will insert a Booman Tribune plug if given any opportunity, and if not distracted by any children.
