Feb
19
By Peg
Categories: Occupy Love, Re-Vision Your Life, Uncategorized
Tags: Apology, Child of the 60s, Civil disobedience, Family, Southern Life
Feb
19
Her name was Rosie. She came several days a week to clean house and take care of my sister and me. She told me if I ate sugar right out of the sugar bowl that worms would grow in my tummy, which I did not believe but still fretted over most of my childhood. She liked my sister better than she liked me, but then, who wouldn’t?
She was, in the language of the day, “the colored help.”
My family was not wealthy. We were barely middle class, living in one of those plain boxes with a chain-link fence on a block of identical plain boxes that went up all over the country in the post-World War II boom. If we were barely middle class, I can only imagine where Rosie fit in the socio-economic hierarchy of the middle 1950s.
A half-dozen years later, Rosie no longer came. Instead, once a week we got in the station wagon about 6 p.m. and took my father’s clean work shirts, rolled into damp, tight balls, to a woman who did the ironing for my mother. She lived in a dingy house at the top of a flight of rickety stairs in a neighborhood we called, using the language of the day, “colored town.” That was polite language, a step up from the language my father used.
Around that time across the South, all hell broke loose. Police used fire hoses to beat back people on the streets of my hometown, people who wanted something called “civil rights.” Little girls died in a church bombing. My friends and I couldn’t ride the bus into downtown for a movie and a fountain soda at the five-and-dime on a summer afternoon any more because of something called “sit-ins.” My father sneered over other language, like “freedom riders” and “outside agitators.”
I was a witness, if a young and confused witness. I know what happened and I was part of it, if reading the news and moving from confusion to outrage can count as some small part of the change that was at long last happening. I tell it now because the blood of racists runs in my veins and because I know what turmoil had to take place to get us to this still imperfect place where we are today.
This afternoon, I read a column by civil rights activist Myrlie Evers-Williams in which she said, “When we speak, if only in a whisper, momentous things can happen.” I would add that when we don’t speak, as loudly and as clearly as we dare, momentous things can be lost.
Maybe it isn’t enough for people to tell the stories of courage and righteousness. Maybe those of us who remember the small minds of injustice and cowardice and hate need to speak, too.
This is part of the legacy I bear: The blood of racists runs in my veins.
Illustration by DigitalArt via www.freedigitalphotos.net
Jan
16
Who is our prophet today?
Who is leading us out of this wilderness in which we find ourselves today? Who is pointing the way to a promised land that seems at least as far away today as it was 40 years ago?
When I was growing into young adulthood in the 1960s, the world was a frightening and dangerous place. A place of war and violence in the streets and hatred based on fear of the unknown and the different. In other words, it was a lot like today. The biggest difference may have been that we had prophets who were pointing the way out of the wilderness.
We had Bob Dylan, who sang to us about a different way to live in that dangerous world. We had Bobby Kennedy, who vowed to help us build a different kind of world.
And, of course, we had Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminded us that God had a different plan from the plan we were living out.
On this day of celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I scroll down my Facebook news feed, read the messages King left us and I teeter between hope and despair. Hope because he spoke with the authority and the authenticity of one who had inded been to the mountaintop, had seen the promised land. And if it was true then, if there was a promised land then, surely there must still be one today.
And despair, because in these 40-plus years since his death, so much of the progress we had made seems to be eroding. It is eroding at least in part, I believe, because the voices that dominate today’s conversation are the voices of self-interest and antagonism and sarcasm.
Where are the voices of hope and reconciliation? Where are the voices that lift us out of our small lives and onto the mountaintop? Who is urging us to act with courage, to live from that place inside us where we are kinder and braver and more compassionate than our fear or complacency or pettiness? In 50 years, who will we remember as the voice we followed out of this wilderness?
Are we without prophets today? Or do we choose not to listen when they speak?
Oct
11
When hopelessness turns to hopefulness
Is it really possible that some people don’t understand why other people are gathering to voice their dissatisfaction in cities across the U.S.?
Agree or not with the people who are gathering under the Occupy Wall Street banner, the reasons are so simple. The reasons are economic and political. The reasons are related to social justice. The reasons are the anger and fear and hopelessness growing like a cancer where there is hunger or joblessness or empty pockets. Others have said what needs to be said about those reasons better than I can. But I see another reason, a reason beyond the economics and the anger.
When I look at people taking to the streets, I see so much more than fear and hopelessness. I also see a hopefulness born of a collective belief that sooner or later in our nation something righteous always wins.
We often seem to wade through ugliness to get there. We are a nation built on bloodshed and hatred, among other things. But our story is also the story of a people who always believe something greater waits on the other side of the ugliness. And we are always hopeful about that righteous prize. We believe in it beyond reason, even when ugliness stares us straight in the eyes.
Claiming not to understand why people are discontented in today’s economic and social climate smacks of contempt, and contempt so easily leads to actions far worse than simply standing up to be heard. Worse has happened, other places and other times, and if we think it cannot happen here again — as it did in Birmingham or at Kent State or in a 1920s mill village right down the road from where I sit today – we are not paying attention.
When I see people gathering and I see the gatherings growing, I am hopeful. Because wherever people care enough to believe they can make a difference, sooner or later, something righteous always wins.
(Photo courtesy of Canadian film maker Velcrow Ripper, from his site http://occupylove.org/ )
