I came of age in the 1960s, demonstrating for civil rights and marching against the Viet Nam War. I never burned my bra, but I volunteered for Planned Parenthood in the years before Roe v Wade. I am not bragging about my activist bona fides. I was one of many, and rarely in the forefront. However, I remember all too well the feelings of both elation and futility. The energy and inspiration of being surrounded by thousands of like minds, filling the streets of San Francisco, chanting and singing. We thought that if we could sing loudly enough and joyfully enough, we could change the minds and hearts of the nation’s leaders. And then came a day when many of us realized they were not about to listen to us. The war raged on, now captured on television in our living rooms.
That feeling of powerlessness was one of the driving forces
behind my debut science fiction novel, Jaydium, by the way. My heroine
is initially trapped on a dusty, barely-habitable planet at the back end of
nowhere, and through a series of shifts through time and parallel dimensions,
she ends up on an alien planet where she has the chance to change history by
stopping a war. It’s about both re-engagement and the quest for peace (and I
was tickled when Tom Easton of Analog praised the latter as unusual and laudable.)
Writing it reflected my personal journey from withdrawal to participation.
I vividly remember how, in the late 1960s, my father, who
was born in 1907 and lived through two world wars, pogroms, the McCarthy witch
hunts, and more, would talk me down from desperation. When I was in a panic
about the Cold War maneuver of the moment, he never dismissed my concerns; he
was just coming from a broader perspective. And he was right. We got through
those years without blowing the planet up.
Now I find myself in the position of being an elder—a crone,
if you will. My earliest political memories date from the mid-1950s, including
the terror of HUAC, the pervasive suspicions, racism, misogyny, and
antisemitism that no one questioned. When I was a bit older, the anti-communist
hysteria had faded somewhat (depending on where you lived), but not the rest.
And always, in the years before oral contraception, sex meant fear of
pregnancy. I knew girls in high school who got sent out of the country and
returned the following year or so without their babies. Later, in the late
1960s/early 1970s but still before Roe v Wade, I volunteered at Planned
Parenthood. And heard many stories. Looking back, I cannot believe how ignorant
I was about so many other issues.
I do not mean to brag about my life experiences or to enter into a contest of which times were worse. Each generation faces its own trials, and each generation is convinced that theirs are world-ending, worst-ever scenarios. This is one of many reasons why we need generational memory (not to mention history books!)
Goethe wrote: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to
thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” It’s horrible that we have to
fight these battles over and over, playing eternal whack-a-mole with the agents
of hatred. That’s why we need all the allies and moral ammunition we can get.
I am mindful of the old joke, “In my day, we walked to school. Uphill.
Both ways. In the snow.” I see no benefit in comparing one disaster to another.
For the person affected by a catastrophic event, whether it’s an attack on them
as a member of a vulnerable group or a purely personal tragedy, loss is loss,
fear is fear, and grief is grief. Instead of belittling someone else’s pain, we
have the opportunity to use our own as a wellspring of compassion and
understanding. The lesson from history is not that those times were more terrible
than those we face today. It’s that they passed. Sure, you might say, they were
taken over by new, awful things.
But sometimes, either by a cataclysmic change or the slow
progress of justice, things get better. Not all things, not for everybody, and
not all at once. Small victories add up to shifts in consciousness. One of my
antidotes to despair is to complete the following sentence:
“I never thought I would live to see…”
- People walk on the Moon
- A Black person become President
- Same-sex marriage become legal
- A woman Vice President
Now fill in your own.
I believe that many of the crises looming over us are reactions
to those victories. Two steps forward and one step back. But the movement of
history is on our side. Rights once gained are not easily (permanently)
revoked. Once marginalized groups are accepted as deserving of respect and
dignity, it’s a lot harder to take that away.
Right now there are many attempts to take away human rights
and dignity. And lives, often for trivial excuses. It seems we are living in a
time when vicious, outrageous, hate-fueled behavior is on the ascendency.
These times, too, shall pass.
In the meantime, we are called upon to protect the
vulnerable and minimize the harm inflicted on them.
Coming soon: My experience with nonviolent bystander intervention
training
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