Indulge me, please. One of my favorite Jimmy Buffett songs is A Pirate Looks at 40. Somehow it reaches out to that part of me that sometimes longs for a different world, different challenges, different opportunities. And sometimes you look back at a bright moment of opportunity and wonder if it'll ever come back.
Yes I am a pirate
two hundred years too late.
The cannons don't thunder
there's nothing to plunder
I'm an over-forty victim of Fate.
Arriving too late....
---A Pirate Looks at Forty
from Boats, Beaches, Bars and Ballads,
Jimmy Buffett
I'm looking at 58 this week and it's got me thinking about the miracles of the past year, from the candidacy of Barack Obama to the Peace Prize for Al Gore and the ICCC.
Maybe I get to be a pirate again after all.
When I was fourteen, living in a small town in upstate New York, the boy who sat beside me in many of my classes wouldn't respond even to a simple "hello" when I saw him. Being utterly naive, I couldn't imagine what his problem was until a little further along the road...It must have been hell being the only black family in a white town. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, I began to understand.
When I was sixteen, my parents threatened to ground me forever if I went to the prom with one of my classmates, an exchange student from Uganda. For the first time in my life someone actually told me I couldn't associate with someone because of their skin color. When I demanded to know why, all I got was: "this is a small town and people will talk." Really. I couldn't understand that either but they made sure I had no opportunity to go to that prom.
At nineteen, a black man saved my life on the streets of New York by yanking me from in front of a speeding cab I couldn't see as the crowd shoved me steadily into the street. I guess at times skin color doesn't matter, eh? My roommate (black) and another friend on my dorm hall (black) gave me a real education in race politics. It wasn't pretty.
Then when I wanted to protest the war in Washington (still nineteen) my mother told me that if I went, and my brother was subsequently drafted and killed in Vietnam, she'd hold me personally responsible for his death because I had given "aid and comfort to the enemy." I couldn't see the logic in that either, and protested anyway.
I became one of the countless subjects of COINTELPRO.
I even had a professor who engaged in draft resistance protests who had a sign on his door that said: "Professor Levine is IN/OUT of jail today." With a little arrow that could point to either in or out.
By then I'd been through the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. The only hope I had left was generated by my peers. We were going to change the world, and I guess in some small ways we did. Or at least we made enough noise that the gray heads had to start listening on the war and on the environment.
Sexual equality took a lot longer. My ex-husband and I got the same job one summer... and he got paid more. No reason, except I was female and they could get away with it. Then they gave me an additional job without a raise, and I quit. So we started our own painting business, and flat-out got refused a job because my ex wanted to charge the same hourly rate for me. The couple objected they weren't going to pay as much for a woman, and continued to object even when my ex told them I painted faster and better than he did. So we stopped estimating by the hour. Didn't help my heartburn any, but we got the jobs.
The following year I got denied a job because I "might get pregnant."
But then I became a young mother, and expended my efforts on raising a couple of kids who knew the Constitution inside and out, and knew the importance of fighting for our rights. After all, I'd come out of a generation whose peaceful protests were often met with tear gas, billy clubs and even, finally, bullets. When you could be arrested for how you dressed, and even for having a piece of clothing with the flag stitched to it, or clothing that looked like it might have been made from an American Flag.
So yeah, we've come a long way. When I run across the street to chat with my neighbor, he actually talks to me for a while. Even though he's black. One of my best friends in this neighborhood in a wonderful black woman who's on our Homeowner's association. We have a truly integrated neighborhood, integrated schools, and if there's any racial tension at all, people keep it to themselves. My 15 yr old can't imagine why anyone is making such a big deal that we have a black candidate for president. She looks at me and says, "What's the big deal? What's wrong with people?"
Good question.
So the pirate looks at 58. What I see is that we're far from done. No time to sit on laurels. I'm blessed to have lived long enough to see another "age of change." To have lived long enough to see the possibility of another bright day dawning.
But what does that mean? It means rolling up my sleeves and getting to work in every way possible, at every level possible. It's been a generation or more since the last real winds of change blew through this country. It won't happen again soon, so we have to seize the moment in both our hands and hang on tight.
We old pirates owe it to our kids. We need to look far beyond today, far beyond the next few months and realize that God/The Universe/The Force or simple chance (choose your brand) has offered us an opportunity we won't see again any time soon.
That I have lived long enough to see a black candidate for president will make me die a happy woman...or will, if I don't leave a huge mess for my kids. Time to take the long view. Time to consider how each of our actions will affect the future of generations to come. Time to do the hard work involved in activism.
But many the things we need to do for the future of this world revolve around what we do over the next four months. Make your donations to Obama, as much as you can. Yes. But there's more. Volunteer to be an election aid in your local precinct. Make sure there's no hanky-panky going on. Get out and register people. It's not that hard to sit in front of your local grocery for a few hours on Saturday with registration forms. Demand that your local media discuss issues, not personalities.
But equally important is the activism that won't end with the election or its outcome. Get out on the streets and start the tsunami of change where you can make a huge difference. Go to your local government meetings and demand mass transit, green energy, conservation, recycling.
This old activist still has some fire in her. I hope the rest of you do, too, because, like the Pirate in Buffett's ballad, you don't want to wake up some morning and find you're "an over-forty victim of Fate."