On Friday evening, I went for a walk on the beach. I watched my young niece play in the sand and splash in the waves. I watched my sister fly a kite with her seven-year-old son. My husband and brother-in-law goofed around, my 13-year-old niece looked for shells. The sun set behind the clouds, lighting up some storms off to the east. We were coming to the tail-end of a week long vacation at my family’s favorite beach, a place we’ve been visiting for over 25 years. That we even had this vacation with all of us is something of a miracle, as my dad is sharing his body with a tumor that will eventually take his life. Metastatic pancreatic cancer has been part of our family for two years now, and each milestone and holiday we get to share together is one that I hang on to with every cell in my being.
I was thinking about all of this as we walked back up to the house. I still needed to pack before going to bed, as we were hitting the road early the next morning. I quickly checked Twitter in one last bit of procrastination before throwing my stuff in the suitcase, only to read about what was transpiring in Charlottesville. When I wasn’t driving on Saturday, I spent much of my time following the day’s events on social media, increasingly horrified by what I read. I spent most of the week bathed in gratitude…grateful for a family that continues to choose to spend time together, grateful for parents that made the most of what little we had growing up and who made sure we got to travel outside of our small town when we were young-including this beautiful beach, grateful that my sisters are two of my closest friends, grateful to spend time with their kids-who are all becoming wonderful humans, and grateful for the privilege of spending a week on vacation with all of them. These feelings of gratitude contrasted so sharply with the emotions I felt reading about the “unite the right” rally and the violence that ensued.
As someone who can be a bit of a pollyanna, I’ve spent the last several years reconciling what I think I know of our country with what it actually is. I’m ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until I started working in public health that I began to deeply appreciate the inequities that exist, and how they continue to be perpetuated by public policy. When working in cardiac rehab, I had patients who regularly chose between medication and food, but I had no appreciation for the environmental factors that influence poverty, nor did I understand how policy perpetuates that poverty. When we lived in Fort Collins, I supervised a grant that provided resources for the facilitation of a health equity coalition. We partnered with eight neighborhoods that were low-income and inhabited by residents who were primarily Hispanic, a number of whom were undocumented. For the first time, I began to dig in to the topic of health equity, and to understand how policy contributes to great inequity in this country. I appreciated working with these honest, hard-working people, and I appreciated getting a small window into the immigration debate, a debate that is certainly not as simple and straightforward as some politicians would like us to believe. “Build a wall” is a ridiculously simple solution to a complex issue, and says more about the person offering the solution than it does about the issue itself.
In the run-up to last year’s election, it seemed that a light was being shone into some very dark corners of our collective psyche. A candidate for the highest office in our country admitted to (and bragged about) sexually assaulting women, incited violence at his “rallies”, displayed a shocking level of unfamiliarity with public policy, and thumbed his nose at the transparency we’ve come to expect of presidential candidates (releasing taxes), and was still elected. This speaks volumes to the priorities of a large number of Americans, and to what they’re willing to overlook in order to advance their ideology. Since Trump’s inauguration, Amy Siskind has been tracking subtle shifts in our democracy, and each week’s list is more alarming than the last. This week culminated with a white supremacist rally that ended in violence with three people dead. Many politicians made statements agains hate groups such as nazis and white supremacists, but Trump wasn’t one of them. The anti-immigration, anti-science, anti-environment, and racist agenda of this administration is making every attempt to drag us 50 years into the past. Back to a time when pollution clogged our air and our rivers, when government-sanctioned segregation was still a thing, and when women did not have full autonomy over their bodies.
Throughout the election and the first part of this year, I’ve been careful with my words. I hate conflict and will go out of my way to make others comfortable. In my desire to not offend others, I’ve not honored the values that are most important to me…those of equity and inclusion. Decades upon decades of horrible public policy have harmed entire groups of people in our country. From urban renewal decimating black neighborhoods to the military’s policies on LGBTQ service members, our government has continually and routinely perpetuated inequities. Over time, some of those policies have been overturned/updated, but so much work remains. In addition to promoting an agenda that will only enhance racial and income inequity, our current president emboldens the worst of us-those that promote hate, abhor diversity and stand for everything our country is supposedly against. Time will tell how we will respond. I recently read the book Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, which offered great perspective on these dark times:
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
So I choose hope, and I choose to use my voice. I will use my privilege and the security it affords to not sit silent in the presence of violence, racism and hate. I’ll force myself to get uncomfortable, because the discomfort felt by others is exponentially greater. I’m late to the party, but trust that showing up late is better than not showing up at all. I believe all of us will have to pick a side if you will, that the current administration demands we engage with our government. I do not feel people are being alarmist when they say our democracy is in danger. If you haven’t already been in contact with your members of congress, consider reaching out this week. Ensure they know what’s important to you, and hold them accountable for their words and actions. A little more than half of all eligible voters participated in the 2016 presidential election (61% was the most recent figure I could find). This administration does not represent a majority of voters. Our democracy will function at its best when everyone participates and inequity is all but assured to continue (and likely to worsen) unless we engage. Other forces-money, lobbyists, etc-influence government, but when we are silent we essentially give the microphone to those interests.
If you, like me, are worried, horrified, afraid, concerned, etc, use that energy to act in whatever way you are comfortable. Write letters, donate money, speak out, volunteer your time to organizations that support issues important to you. Don’t sit on the sidelines. As Rebecca Solnit said, we must believe that what we do matters. Because it does.
“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ~ Elie Wiesel
