Doing What I Can Do

 

I was in the middle of a haircut when K., my fabulous hairdresser, looked at me in the mirror with her eyes wide. 

"You older women," she said. "I've never seen anything like it." 

I had just told her my schedule for the day: The much-needed haircut. Chair yoga at the rec center. Protest our senator's compliance in the destruction of our constitutional democracy. Lunch with friends. 

K. is a couple of decades younger than I am but she's started to regularly have coffee with a group of my age-sisters, and those women are fired up. For several weeks she's heard them discuss with wide-eyed horror the indiscriminate destruction of  America. Agencies and departments that keep us safe during times of war and disease have been cut (then, often, un-cut with an "Oops! Didn't really know what you did!). Our data has been made available to the shady characters and college drop-outs who delight in punishing what they consider disloyalty. In the name of saving money, the very agency charged with collecting taxes is threatened with massive lay-offs. 

It is insanity.

I have never really been involved in politics. Oh, I was a Youth For Nixon in 1968, before I could vote. Then I signed an "Impeach Nixon" petition as a freshman in college. 

Since, then, I've tried to trust the process. I always vote, and during the last election I wrote postcards to be mailed in swing states, places that reminders of voting options might have an influence. In Kansas, my own state? I knew the race was over way before election day. There would be a big red rectangle on the television results map even before polls closed. 

I had hoped, though, that our senior senator would provide a voice of reason as a clown car of cabinet appointments was announced. Surely he would see that these men and women were unqualified for the jobs they were proposed to assume. A vaccine deny-er as head of Health and Human Services? It must be a joke. A Fox talking head as the Secretary of Defense? Seriously? 

I trusted he would provide a vote to send these nominations back to insist on better candidates, because he's always been a man or reason and a good senator. Spoiler alert: He did not provide that vote.

But because I have friends and loved ones who are on the opposite side of the divide, I've kept politics out of my social media and my opinions to myself unless I knew everyone around agreed with me. I knew I would lose readers, and probably friendships, if I expressed my views.

The last straw of my silence was burned when the global security my father fought for in World War II began to be threatened. A true hero was ambushed in the Oval Office with outlandish claims and demands.

So when a friend said she was going to Big City to try to be heard by our senior senator, I gulped, grabbed my cane, and marched down the sidewalk to where we would almost certainly accomplish nothing. Husband sent the picture of this limping exit to our family.

I was correct in that we accomplished nothing. The senior senator was driven into the building in an SUV, completely avoiding our homemade signs urging support of Ukraine and demolition of DOGE. He acknowledged us exactly as much as he has acknowledged the thousands of emails and calls and letters urging him to help stop this madness before it's too late. 

But even though I knew we would not accomplish anything, I had to do something, anything, for my own sanity and self-esteem. How would I face Babies Wonderful One, Two, and Three if I left them a country that is despised and dysfunctional, and had done nothing at all to prevent that slide from greatness? 

Ann Lamott, perhaps the wisest of us old women who are fighting, wrote an essay in the Los Angeles Times letting me know that all of our souls are hurting. What can we do?

"We can start or join projects to feed and protect those most in danger now, meals and community organizing, getting to know each other. My friends and I recall going to Vietnam protests in the ’60s where 12 people showed up, but ultimately we stopped the war. Will large and small demonstrations make a difference? They’re good for the soul. We have to continue to act on our understanding of what is right. We need to perform acts of compassion that are missing in the current nasty public sphere."

I had intended this post to be funny: "Ha! Ha! We were so old and ineffectual!" I was going to caption the picture "Baby's First Protest." But the deeper I got into it the more I mourned what we've lost in just a few months, and how hard it will be to build back what has been destroyed. 

We are old, but we're doing what we can do. It may not be enough.