A recent Open Letter to me from In The Woods caused me to delve a bit deeper, so I could respond fully to the suggestion that I have misdirected my feelings.
I also needed to re-read my original diary to see what I had said there that seems to gave left some with the impression that I intend to sit by hopelessly while walls fall down around me. I learned more about myself in this process. I learned that the democracy that I see dying, that I have been grieving for a long time, and I finally need to let go of, was really just a dream that lived in my mind all these years.
It’s the dream democracy I was taught exists: the one they told me meant that we all were of equal worth, and that there would be equal opportunity for all. The dream democracy that promised liberty and justice for all, and the one in which anyone could reach the “American Dream,” if only we worked hard enough.
I’ve believed in this democracy with every atom of my being since I was five year old, standing at attention and saluting the soldiers coming home from WWII.
I have now lived for 65 years in this democracy, as a woman who was widowed young, raised children alone, and who has completed over a half century in the work force. My life experiences themselves have proven to me, without a single doubt, that this democracy was indeed much more of a dream, than it was ever my reality.
(Just as it was always a dream for the thousands of those I’ve cared for as a nurse who has worked mostly with the poor chronically ill, the disabled, and elderly of all races.)
Equal rights were not automatically granted me by this democracy. I had to fight like hell for every one of them I’ve ever gained. Justice? Equal l opportunities? Almost always, these cost far more than I could afford on my salary.
I should have buried this dream years ago, but even in the hardest times, I hung on hard, and kept fighting. Someday, we would change all of this, and democracy would come to mean what they told me it meant, for ALL of us, not just those higher up on some “hierarchy of worthiness.”
Any maybe it will be someday. Maybe it’s your generation now, ITW, who are still fighting hard within the political system as it is, who will bring it about. Maybe it will take those who have experienced a different kind of democracy that I have, to do it this way.
But I don’t want to fight anymore to preserve a FORM of democracy that is not working for all of us, and has never worked for all of us. A form of democracy whose benefits are only fully available to those who can afford them, and who otherwise meet certain qualifications such as skin color or gender or some other material based standard of worth.
No. I am done with that. For whatever time I have left here, I am turning my efforts away from a form of democracy I was never allowed to fully experience and for sure won’t now, as an old, poor, disabled lesbian.
Whatever energy I have left, I intend to use as best I can for the time I have left. For me, this means speaking up and speaking out as effectively as I can, wherever I can, from whatever I’ve learned from my own life experiences and learning. It means reaching out to young people wherever I can find them, to empower them to believe in thier ability to change things. It is all I have to offer, and I offer it freely, with no need to convince anyone to think or act as I do, an no intent to tell anyone else that their view or feeling or choices are wrong.
If I’ve learned nothing else along my way, I certainly have learned that my own view is limited to what I can see through the lens of my own my own mind’s eyes, my own values and beliefs, and my own life experiences. I know do not possess anyone else’s truth, only my own.
But as you share your you perceptions and truths here , it expands my view, and shows me aspects of things i did not see that you did. In that way, I see much more than I can see with only my own lonely lens. This, as Martha says, in a good thing, I think.
Honestly, I have never read anyone here say all they were willing to do now is sit down and cry in their lap over a dying democracy. I sure didn’t. I’ve never sat crying my lap in 65 years and I see no reason to begin now.
I see those of us who may have lost hope in this FORM of democracy, and in this political SYSTEM, say we want to stop spending out energy that way, and instead find other ways to contribute to changing things.
Who knows which way might end up working? And why can’t they both be right?
What I do know is this: we need each other along the way, even when our ways may diverge. I know I will always need other good courageous people beside me to lean on when I need to lean, to draw courage from, to share the good and the bad with. People who know my name and want the same tings I do for the country.
I sincerely hope we do not let our different views or our fears or anything else separate us. We truly are not each other’s enemy.
The enemy is over there.
Look. See it?
That butt ugly monster with all the greedy, hate filled tentacles?
Sure doesn’t resemble anyone who hangs out at this pond.
