history | My Eyes Are Up Here

I don’t know a lot right now. The world is on a precipice, most notably, the ongoing administrative coup in the U.S. “Administrative” makes it sound like we are being taken over by binders and checklists. Instead, we’ve had flagrant law breaking by Donald Trump, who told us he was going to be horrible not to mention being horrible in his first term, ending it with a violent coup attempt. Somehow, enough people voted for him, anyway.

One of my psychologist friends who is originally from Ukraine, immigrated to the U.S. as a child, when the then U.S.S.R. allowed some Jews to leave the country. My friend told me that to protect their safety, her parents could not tell her that they were leaving the country until the day they left. She remarked to me that living in the U.S.S.R. was different than the U.S. because there was no sense that laws, police, or other institutions offered any stability or protection.

The U.S. has always offered more safety to some people than others. However, with a strong democracy, there were mechanisms in place to evolve toward a more just and inclusive multi-cultural society. The Trump administration has been attacking our democracy at alarming speed. Federal government workers are being fired en masse, departments are being dismantled, money is being sucked out of our government, and our personal data is being mined by young tech super fans of Elon Musk. Incompetent and malevolent people are being put in charge of cabinet positions. They are the worst people for the job that you could possibly imagine. The President is putting tariffs on foreign products including China and he insists that the lack of ships in major port cities like LA and Seattle is “good” because “it will save us money.” Talk of invading Greenland and making Canada our 51st state are discussed on a daily basis. ICE agents are kidnapping people off of the streets and out of their homes claiming that they are in this country illegally. Even if they were, this would be against the law and our Constitution. All of it is illegal. Everything that I love about the U.S. and humanity, in general, are under attack.

I don’t know how this will play out. How long will it take for “We, the People”, to reclaim this democracy. Will it take months, years, or decades? What I do know is that a lot of regular U.S. citizens are rising to the ideal of “We, the People”. The resistance is stronger this time and thank goodness, has been non-violent so far. We are using a wider variety of resistance strategies, not just marches. We are calling our representatives, boycotting companies, and there are unions who have begun general work strikes. In terms of company boycotts, Tesla has been internationally boycotted and it is working! I also see our historically allied countries banding together and standing up. I am cheering them on.

I have been spending the last several years identifying my democracy priorities as well as identifying the resources I have that are best suited to them. A huge asset that I have in terms of civil resistance is my anonymity, level of education, age, race, and relative financial security. I am not a high profile person. I am smart and can learn about the best people and institutions to follow for effective leadership in resistance. Although I work, I am an empty nester and I have more time and less family responsibility than I had in the past.

Finally, I know that in all of this ongoing and impending disaster, there is something beautiful to see or experience every day.

Be well, Friends,

Elizabeth

I have long loved summer, it’s long long days, the clear blue skies, vacations, and mountain views. 2012 was the summer of surgeries, I had three of them, each spaced two weeks apart. I remember watching the Olympic games from my hospital room on the day after my mastectomy. I spent a lot of that sunny Seattle summer scared and indoors. Since that time, summers have been savored the best that I can. I spend a lot of time outdoors and in nature. I take photos of the beauty around me.

This summer, I’ve been doing a lot of canning. I’ve been preserving the bounty of stone fruits in jams and salsa not to mention our wonderful berries and rhubarb. It reminds me of canning peaches and tomatoes with my mom, when I was a girl. There was so much in the garden, so much in the orchards. It was full and sweet and delicious. Canning is not the same as fresh but in the dark days of winter, it provides a bright taste of summer and the hopes of days of longer sunlight up ahead.

Women, traditionally, are the savers of these normal but parts of life. The save food, remember birthdays, keep photo albums of family vacations, and write milestones, the first steps and first words in baby books. Women preserve history of these day to day memories, the events that are not rare, but to be celebrated and appreciated. These are not events recorded in history books.
The summer of 2016 has brought a new event, one that will be preserved in history books. Yesterday, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was the first woman nominated for the presidency of the United States by a major political party. This is more than a big deal. It is something I did not expect to happen in my lifetime.

Like many major societal changes, the good news has been somewhat offset by negative, qualifying, or discounting remarks. I have seen so many women obviously moved by this historical event include a qualification or apology. “Well, I don’t agree with everything Hillary’s done or said,” or “Hey, I still like Bernie Sanders even if I like Hillary.” I have also seen women admonished for their enthusiasm on social media with cautions of, “Well you know that you shouldn’t just vote for her because she’s a woman. You need to vote for the best candidate.”

As if the women of America would be sent into hysteria and forget how to vote responsibly, something we have been doing as a group, since given the right to vote in the U.S. in 1920. And then there are the other objections, the blemishes, the “good but’s”, and just plain old unadulterated misogyny.

But for now, I am working to preserve, the best and sweetest bits of the summer of 2016, and I am savoring them indeed.