80 Years of Trying Is Circling Down the Drain [View all]

Yesterday, I turned 80 years old. My life has been very interesting. For most of my life, I watched my country of birth make progress. I tried to help it make that progress as a quiet, unnoticed activist. For a while, it seemed to be working. Now, however, it seems that all of that progress is like a waste product, about to be flushed away.

One week after I was born, the USA became the first country to use a nuclear weapon in wartime. We dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Shortly after that, we dropped another one on Nagasaki. The war ended. I was too young to know that happened, but I learned of it early in my life. It made me angry. I wanted to stop such insanity.

When I turned 6 years old, I was one of the first elementary school children to integrate a grammar school in my little California citrus farming town. A few of us went to first grade at the "Mexican School" in that community. We broke new ground, I guess. I learned to speak Spanish from my new friends, so I could be polite to the grandmothers in their homes. Things got better, over time, in that town. Now, ICE thugs are rounding up people who have Spanish-sounding surnames there, whether they are US citizens or not. Things are falling apart. Life there for some is getting worse, not better.

By the time I was in high school in that same town, I watched and participated in creating a more respectful environment for my friends, and for the girls in that town, as well. Like most places, the late 1950s and early 1960s were pretty dismal if you were a girl. Little by little, that got better. When I started high school, a girl who got pregnant was immediately kicked out of school. By the time I left that high school, that was no longer the case. A year later, the birth control pill became available and they were teaching sex education, finally.

When I graduated in 1963, I was becoming aware of other wrongs. We were about to get into a war in Vietnam. Civil rights was in the news. There was talk about overpopulation as a threat to the environment and a creator of poverty. I decided I would not add to the problem, so I never had children. That was my contribution.

I had begun being political in 1960, when I started helping to elect JFK. I was always at Democratic meetings, moving chairs around and listening. I held campaign signs. JFK won. Then, in my Freshman year in college, JFK was assassinated. A shocking end to something that seemed promising.

In 1964, I dropped out of college. I was disillusioned and frustrated. I traveled around the country, visiting 40 of our states, while driving an old 1953 Chrysler New Yorker. I was in Selma, Alabama when people marched across the Edmund Pettus bridge, and heard MLK, Jr. give his "How Long? Not Long" speech in Montgomery. I returned to California and enlisted in the USAF to avoid being drafted into the Army. I didn't know what else to do. They killed MLK, Jr., too.

That kept me busy, and I spend a couple of years either learning Russian at a military school or working at a remote base in Turkey. I was thinking. I was trying to find a path that would let me help get the country on the right track. I came back to the USA and was stationed near Washington, DC.

There, I fell in with the anti-war protest movement, while still in the USAF. The DC area in the late 1960s was busy with anti-war protests, civil rights protests, women's rights protests and other activism. I was busy. I wasn't part of the leadership, but I met many who were. I was full of optimism. I had adventurous times for a while.

Then, I went back to California, back to college, got married, and started a career as a writer, never again working a W-2 job. I kept doing activism in politics. I got involved in Democratic Party organizations as a minor functionary, ending up years later as a precinct chair in Minnesota. I helped Democrats get elected. I wrote speeches. I wrote campaign literature. I made friends.

I watched women's rights improve. I watched as my LGBQT+ friends got married legally. But Republicans were still winning elections. There was progress, but it went back and forth again and again. It just didn't seem like Democrats could get on top and stay there. Back and forth. A little progress and then some backing up again. Over and over again.

It didn't get better consistently. Then we ended up with Donald J. Trump. The fact that he won even once was shocking. That he won again was a serious blow to my dreams. We just never seem to get a handle on getting and keeping power, and the other side keeps getting worse and worse. Trump is tearing down all of the progress we had made in previous decades. We had two chances to elect a woman as President. We fucked both of those chances up for very, very petty reasons.

Well, now I'm 80 years old and disappointed. This time, though, I'm also tired. I'm worn out. I'm running down. I'm going to have to let others try. It's too bad, and far from where I hoped we would be as a nation by now. I can no longer do anything about it, so I have to hope that others will take up the challenge and make things happen.

I didn't have children. So, I don't have to worry about the world I leave them. But, there are all the others. We seem to be on a downward path.

More's the fucking pity, folks! More's the pity.