I Thought We Were Beyond All This: Now You’ve Pissed off Grandma

I should be sitting on a beach with a drink in my hand and trying to avoid the poke of a little pink umbrella while sipping. Instead I have a pink pussy-hat, action alerts on my i phone, C-Span programmed on “favorites” and congress on speed dial. I’m in that period of life where a career or three has seen its last manic days and the alarm’s no longer set for an ungodly morning hour when the stars are still out. You know that little lever on the steering wheel that you can push to coast? I thought life came with one of those when the objects in the rear view mirror receded into the past and instead of closer, are actually much farther than they appear.

I thought I was beyond all that.

I never thought I would groan out loud: “but I’ve paid my dues!” because the silent price already paid, was already steep for the gains once made. I thought a couple decades in the civil rights movement was enough. I thought the momentum was secured when the baton was passed to younger hands. The personal pain in giving up a very special mixed race relationship not once, but twice in 20 years, because a too-White community and conservative schools would never accept such a neighbor, now circles back round. Even after a painful divorce, there was not enough progress to revisit an old and special bonding while attempting to put children through more existential challenges who were already reeling from divorce. I still regret it. Now comes Trayvon, Michael, Eric, Freddie, Dontre, Tamir… so, so many Black lives and instead of taking a good honest look at attitudes and authority, Blue lives, which also matter, are defensive.

God, I thought we were beyond all that.

I’m far beyond a youth living with a constant drone of any-moment-annihilation in the background like a radio left playing unnoticed, its companion hum so perpetual and familiar that one would only notice when it was turned off. Left behind, is a child’s terrified mind: “I wonder if it will hurt when I am vaporized or will it be so quick that I won’t feel it?” “My dog will be vaporized too; I hope God lets dogs into heaven, I couldn’t bear to be without her.”

I thought that background drone of immanent nuclear war was forever silenced.

I spent more than a decade as an officer in a Sister City partnership with Russia, begun while it was still the Soviet Union, and was called a “communist” and a traitor to my local community, considered deaf to more immediate pressing concerns. It hurt but I tried to ignore it for without a planet, the local community wasn’t going to matter much. I explained each time and each time went back to the work slogging through obstacles, opposition, language barriers, misunderstandings, military protocols, U.N. regulations, unsafe travel and border checkpoints, to make friends of a former “enemy” as a citizen diplomat. It’s harder to bomb someone whose meager meal budget also has to be stretched, who’s concerned as much as you about their aging parents’ health and whose teenager drives them crazy too. It’s impossible when those someones make time to travel to a foreign country in an exchange with another teacher, minister, police, doctor or fill-in-the-blank citizen diplomat from a nation they’ve been taught was the hostile and mortal enemy.

I thought we were both beyond a nuclear arms race.

There is a place in the northern part of my state called “High Ground” where veterans from Viet Nam and people touched by other wars go to contemplate and heal from trauma. It is a place where all points lead to a triangular peak in the center where a bronze sculpture memorializes the banding of brothers carrying an injured to safety. The back of the sculpture holds an upside down rifle — the symbol for peace — and huge metal wind chimes that gong of war and peace when the wind blows into the valley below. The walkways to the monument all leading in the same direction are strewn with names and flowers and colored patches of cloth — the telling badges of warriors who fought in a war we still don’t understand ordered by leaders we didn’t respect, that hallowed path stained with invisible tears we haven’t cried and hearts that haven’t healed.

I thought by now we’d be over war.

There were days I hugged staff nurses while they cried because their patient who had one abortion already was scheduling their second and they felt like human and medical failures trying to teach personal responsibility for contraception. A statewide educator for Planned Parenthood, I was travelling the state teaching professionals about sex education, abstinence, sexual assault, deterrence, consent and contraception. My work was to prevent abortions but that didn’t matter to those who followed me to and in my car and loudly called out “baby killer!” I advocated for women’s’ bodies and women’s’ responsibilities, female reproductive rights, male responsibility, gender and gender roles, but mostly for civil rights and captive voices.

I thought we were beyond all that.

Now deliberately speeding past memories of a hulking childhood shadow looming large over me, before and behind me — cast from a patriarch malignant in his insecurities, narcissistic in his claims absent any boundaries, dying inside from the vacuous emptiness there — although I could not have known at the time but only came to understand with years of therapy — I arrive here in this time of a darkness struggling to cloak the light. And find it all haunting me once again, in my president.

I thought I had escaped all that.

So instead of hanging up my umbrella or finding it in my drink, I take it down to use more as a walking cane on my way back to the streets. Instead of surfing the waves of a blue and salty ocean, I am surfing past a sea of faces in the crowds. Instead of inhaling the fresh ocean breeze, I am inhaling a second wind. And instead of calling the cabana boy to bring another icy refreshing treat, I am icily calling the White House. Again. Because now you’ve pissed off Grandma.

And because as truly human beings, our destiny is beyond all that.

Barbara Kaufmann, artist and writer is the founder of “Words and Violence” Program with more than 600 resources about bullying in all its forms on this planet. She’s written for Voices Education Project, The Charter for Compassion International, Huffington Post and is a poet, scriptwriter and filmmaker — who “writes to simply change the world.” Her ministry and life’s work is dedicated to “establishing a more humane narrative on this planet.” You can find more of her writing by putting her name in the search window at the Charter for Compassion International www.charterforcompassion.org or visiting www.onewordsmith.com