The first title for this post was, “Turning Politically Pissed Off Energy into Something Positive.” That was the intellectual side of my brain talking. This is really about cleaning up a gross, crusty, makes-you-grimace sort of situation.
It all started when I went to a political fundraiser last week here in Tucson at which the FLOTUS with the mostus, Michelle Obama, spoke and Calexico played. Positions evolve, or at least that is what one of the three sanctioned sound bytes about “the Presidency” from the week since then tells me.
I believe strongly in funding public education so that every child starts out with an equal informational and critical reasoning footing when their basic education is completed. Politics has no place in the classroom. I believe that every person has a right to live with dignity and have their basic physical needs met. America is too great a county to abandon widows and orphans to malnutrition and starvation, to sleeping on the streets in filth, and harboring infectious easily preventable diseases. Those who have come before, whether we are we are talking about my great-grandfather, the EUB preacher, or my father, the small farmer who lobbied for non-corporate, family farmers rights’ with the Farmer’s Union, worked too hard for maintaining and expanding basic human rights in this country in a just and fair manner for me to allow their efforts and ethics to fall by the way side. That is what came from me listening to Michelle Obama in the Leo Rich Auditorium at the Tucson Convention Center last week. Breathe. Focus. Act. Repeat.
The world is so damn complex and I am so tired. But I have to suck it up and get busy again. I don’t want to, I just want to write my book, blog a couple of times a week, and get to know my husband again after 22 years of parenting. I still parent but from 15oo miles away; and it is a very a different experience than what came before. But I have to be political again. We have to become political again. It is sort of like when as a mother you see a runny, crusty nose, and you just have to get a tissue and wipe the said snotty nose as you hold down the offending vessel so as not to allow escape. Snotty noses are the province of mothers not because mothers love snot, but because we care about the kid. Politics must be the province of mothers, not because we like politicians, but because we love democracy.
This is the framework I will be using to be able to do the things I feel I have to do as just a basic part of my civic duty over the course of the next 6 months. I don’t this is much of a stretch as far as reframing goes. It is more like activating the Mom framework that I previously adopted and then applying it to the political season within which we will be living through November 2012.
So who is with me?
I’m with you – I don’t WANT to wipe snotty noses, I am TIRED of snotty noses.
Yet, they need to be wiped. We (humans in general, women in particular)need to be as politically active as we can if we want to live in, and pass down to our kids, a country and world worth living in.
Yes! We are not alone in our efforts and we can do it! Thanks Bev!