As I approach my seventy-third birthday this month, thoughts flood through my mostly still intact mind and memory. I am one of the lucky ones. From a family where longevity is a rarity I never thought I would make it this far. I never expected to make it to even sixty and yet I did. I consider every day a gift, and as I had no children, my deceased sister’s children and their children became the best gift of all. My three grand nieces inspire me to live healthy, live in the moment and find joy in the simple things.
As I age, I an keenly aware their future is the responsibility of all of us. I am discouraged that we may leave them a bleak future. So like many of you, I still march, I still protest. I work for progressive candidates who hopefully will have enough time to turn things around for future generations. But I worry we are not doing enough fast enough.
I cannot help but to think back, to retrieve lessons learned, to want to teach and encourage others to learn from my experiences, knowledge gained throughout life. I am after all a teacher, albeit retired.
A child of the1950s, in the early sixties I was in a very catholic high school, very strict, sexist and sometimes even now I find humor in the many ways my friends and I worked our way around the rules to have fun. I was fortunate in that I was born with very strong auditory and visual memory. I did not have the “eidetic memory” like Big Bang’s Sheldon, but it was very strong. So I was a good student, National Honor Society, National Merit Scholar candidate, because so many of the tests back then in Catholic School were based on good memory. And if I saw a math problem done in class once I could recall how it was done easily. Ditto, spelling, grammar etc. So I tested well. Critically thinking, not so much though my state college years improved that a lot. Since I did not have to work hard for good grades, I was often prone to letting things go to the last minute, because I KNEW even if I did not write a good paper, or do a HW assignment, I would and did ace tests. I so frustrated one teacher so much, she had me write the words, “Procrastination is the thief of time” one thousand times. Sadly it did not change my pattern. Only becoming a teacher did that.
Somehow in the 1960s, while in college, I became interested in politics. Perhaps it was the anti war marches, perhaps it was the civil rights marches. Then, still being a practicing catholic, seeing priests and nuns marching, impressed and inspired. At that time, at least in our area, the catholic churches were pro labor, pro civil rights, anti war.
I began my life and career as a teacher, I became much more of a thinker and reader than I ever was. I was on strike twice and understood the power of collective bargaining. I went from working in a very upper middle class school and to working in schools where children got free and reduced lunch as the one decent meal of the day. I moved from an eastern urban area to the a super conservative city (did not know when I moved there) in the southwest and became more aware of sexism, racism, anti semitism, not because it did not exist in the east but because in this city it was much more open. I had watched all of the Watergate hearings and was shocked when I moved west to meet people who STILL thought Nixon was a good guy. It stunned me. I lived near a private liberal arts college in the city and despite the conservative masses, this college had speakers and symposiums that were very progressive. Students there set up anti apartheid tent cities in the 80s. I heard Robert White, former ambassador to El Salvador who criticized the Reagan administration for its support of murderous dictators in south and central America.
That is when it hit me. When I kept hearing how people LOVED Reagan, I was stunned, angry and honestly I cried. For me, looking back, I think that was when I realized how uninformed, how apathetic the voting public had become. GREED was good; lifestyles of the rich and famous was popular. While Reagan was destroying unions, giving the go ahead to monopolies, giving a fast track citizenship to Rupert Murdoch, people were totally oblivious. I began working for progressive candidates and in retrospect I realized: the nun was only partially right. PROCRASTINATION was stealing more than time. No one paid attention to facts, preferring the feel good lies of “shining city on a hill” of Reaganism. Nixon and Reagan were the forerunners of the conservative take over. They (conservatives) learned they could not afford another dour Nixon type. They needed a B actor “gosh and golly” good old boy ACTOR. It worked. While Nixon did some real damage giving the green light to “for profit” health insurance, for his appointment of Louis Powell whose court time gave the green light to the first version of “money is speech”, it was IMO the Reagan admin that did the most damage. STILL no matter how much we pointed it out, getting dems and progressives to the polls in midterms got worse and worse and worse.
This morning on AM Joy, someone said they thought it all went south in 2010 when progressives gave away all in the midterms. I disagree. We, the progressives, have been procrastinating using our large numbers to facilitate progressive change for decades. Why? Because the conservatives were stealthily taking away rights, voting, housing, education, speech rights since the 80s. They saw the power of FDR’s NEW DEAL and how it enabled the greatest growth in the middle class in history. But it did not include people of color or women, so when civil rights and women’s rights began their push, the patriarchal white men had their foils. The began demonizing people of color and progressives way back with Nixon, and the demonizing went on steroids during the Reagan admin. STILL so many CHOSE to ignore, procrastinated doing their civic duty. As turn out numbers for voting kept going down, progressives, democrats kept procrastinating doing anything. Instead they found it easier to move to the center, go along to get along, and WE, THE PEOPLE, procrastinated getting informed, informing others and being active. For years, I told my students,“democracy is NOT a spectator sport…you must be informed and be involved.” Yet when I went to my fellow teachers to get help to knock on doors, go to meetings, be informed about candidates, they were “too busy”, did not like talking “politics”, and stayed home on election nights when it was not a presidential year. Procrastination was so much easier than doing the work. Like me, when I was in HS, getting away with it, not being harmed PERSONALLY by decisions, made it easier for so many to ignore, be willfully ignorant. Those of us employed had insurance, and it was cheap for a while…..until it wasn’t. We did not worry about discrimination until it affected OUR families. As our society became more accepting of biracial families, people who had not paid attention, suddenly had a biracial grandchild and were shocked by the animus they felt from others. Then we a get a dem, centrist one in the form of WJC and we thought it was change. We did not anticipate the rise of the Newts and the Delays and the hate. We again ignored state elections and midterms.
Yes, in 2010, two years after the election of the first African American president, some were sure we had fixed it. Still we DID NOT SHOW UP in numbers and became shocked at how much Obama could not do; how much was happening in the states. I had returned to the east and was STUNNED at how my state had been gerrymandered into oblivion. I was in a state that had more dems votes than republican votes and still the republicans took the majority of seats. The math did not work but the map showed why.
This POS potus did NOT rise out of nowhere. He did not win this election fairly but that did not happen in a vacuum. The table was set. Yes, he had the help of the Russians, of dark corporate money but STILL he could have been stopped had WE, the PEOPLE, not been procrastinating participating in our democracy for decades. Procrastination has stolen a lot more than time.
I also had another phrase I had to write while in HS. “Silence is an individual responsibility,” One can easily ascertain why I had to write that. But I have learned that when it comes to democracy, silence is the enemy. If that teacher who made me write that was still alive, I might send this to her. “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Eli Weisel