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Activism for our time
Been There, Done That, Got the T-Shirt, Cut off the Sleeves and Fringed the Bottom for Activism
And I’m tired, but still determined
I’ve been an activist since I was a fourteen-year-old teen-ager, full of fire and passion. Living in a tiny town in Texas kept me from actively marching in protest, but I gave pro-civil rights and social justice speeches in my all-white, conservative high school pro Civil Rights and Social Justice. I wrote opinion letters to our ultra-conservative newspaper.
As you can guess, I wasn’t elected cheerleader or to the student government.
In college we worked to get our university to divest from large corporations that did business in South Africa during Apartheid. We marched against the war and wrote to our Senators and Representatives. They were handwritten or typed and sent by snail mail.
When my son was very young, around seven-years-old, I took him with me to march in the Martin Luther King Jr. parades in Dallas and Fort Worth. While there, I wrote a letter to Colin Powell protesting the first Gulf War.
We then attended a rally held by a group for Islamic/American relations. That resulted in my being pulled aside and searched on every flight for two years. See that…
