The Battle To Stand Up
An essay by Rupa Russe of Madison County, North Carolina.
Note: This essay is dedicated to Survivors, the quiet and the loud. You are not alone. There is no shame in overcoming. Your voice is not lesser, and the wisdom you offer can heal a nation.
Surprisingly I haven’t had many folks ask me why I chose to run for public office.
It’s one of the first questions I ask when considering a candidate because it answers two questions in one: “what is their motivation?” and “what skills do they think they have that will be beneficial for the job?” Yet, rarely was I asked this in my 2020 campaign for County Commissioner in our small Western North Carolina rural county.
Perhaps 2020 was an election cycle where voters saw me as a middle-aged woman, recent law school graduate, and empty nester and presumed my motivations were based on a privileged assumption I considered myself a shoe-in. Perhaps voters saw me as a Catholic mother running for office and that I presumed I would be popular with the self-avowed Christian voters who dominate my conservative county. Perhaps voters saw me as an arrogant outsider to my rural Appalachian neighbors, who felt she “knew” better and needed to “save” them. If any of those were presumptions my neighbors had, they were summarily wrong.
I ran for office because I was fed up with the system. That is putting it mildly.
As a child of an older single mother, raised amongst the stigmatism of such motherhood in the 1970s and ’80s, I recall the painful moments at 8 and 9 years of age when, after enduring an hour bus ride to the store, for another hour’s worth of shopping, we’d have to then endure the store manager making a public production about my mother presenting her paper food stamp ballots at the checkout. Only after all that to then decline them on some questionable grounds of his suspicion that they were forged (they weren’t, ever). The disdain of strangers who “othered” my mother, who I knew was doing her best with no family support, in a world where “bastards”, like me, were unwanted and older women, like her, were un-employable, was common. I became hurt.
As a young teenager, who attended 4 middle schools in one month during 6th grade because housing was so unstable for my mother and I; As a teenager with zero interest in attending college because no money had been saved, and I had seen my own mother’s financial choices be hamstrung by the restrictions of her own student loans — I became ignored.
As a young woman falling into the arms of a man who proclaimed to have my back, only to find that ownership was his price — I became quiet.
As a young single mother fighting desperately to keep my daughters out of the hands of a father whose two settings were“control” and “ignore”; Whose constant refrain to my daughters was “don’t be like your mother” — I became angry.
As a less young mother having to explain to my pre-teen daughters why the court chose to take them from me and give them to our abuser; the very abuser I and the court had both previously protected them from because I wanted to move them to a state with better public transportation and economic opportunity — I became hostile.
And, I became determined.
As a woman who refused to give up on her pre-teen daughters, as I watched them fold inwards while their father withdrew them from all their social and advanced sports activities, and forced them to hide away in a basement room with no windows and water leaking under the bed, while dealing with his verbal assaults — I became focused.
As a newly childless mother at 36 who earned her Associates at 38, her Bachelor’s at 40; who, was forced to wait the “required” 2 years so as not to be deemed a “litigious parent” by the judicial system; who saved money to hire a lawyer, and got her daughters back — I became vigilant.
As a mother attempting to heal my teenager’s most recent bout of abuse, I sought and was unable to find the therapy that supports strong women — I became repulsed.
As a 40-year-old unwilling to let what I had become go to waste, I fought for and gained entry to law school. During which I survived Sheriff’s Deputy T-boning me, rendering me unable to write, and having to battle the County’s insurance company to cover the bills; uring which I caretook for my own mother, a 100% service-connected disabled female veteran of the Korean War who had the V.A. dismiss her complaints and fail to diagnose a slow-growing brain tumor for 17 years, causing her death — I persevered.
As a 44-year-old single mother struggling with a developing and healing teenage daughter who herself was struggling with having endured 4 years of Trump and his complicit voter’s support of the very misogynist programming I had rescued her from at her father’s, I experienced that moment when the police make you the enemy. Yes me, a white middle-aged woman, and recent law school graduate. Privileged on its faceAll because I had asked our rural Sheriff’s Department for help to help me protect my teenage daughter from misusing her cell phone. But, it wasn’t their male and female Deputy’s misogynist mocking of me as a concerned mother, or their encouragement of my 16-year-old’s increasingly antagonistic behaviors over a period of weeks that was the final straw. It wasn’t when they detained me after I finally took her cell phone without their help. It was when they then strip-searched me, held me in solitary confinement only to arrest me 3 hours later, after the Magistrate and the Deputy had deliberated over what they could charge me with and how salacious the Deputy could make his charges sound on his arrest warrant.
After a life of overcoming, I became fed up.
Being fed up is why I ran for office. It was that exact moment in solitary confinement, after being humiliated by the men and women who went along because the “men” in blue protect the culture of men more than they do the culture of women protecting daughters from themselves or from men. That is when I decided I was not going to silently take our system the way it was, anymore. Because of the life I had lived, the stories and burdens I had overcome, that my scars, I was good enough to represent. I had to be after all, look at what those in control of the system were capable of. My commitment and confidence cemented. But, not because I was perfect, or a law school graduate, or a Catholic, or a landowner, or a mother. It was because I had experienced the ecosystem “perfect” candidates had built before me in our country. A democracy with a broken system that abuses and supports abuse. As a survivor and as a woman who knows that the solution to oppression, neglect, lazy public employees, and misguided judges is to have those who have suffered from “the system” be in charge of fixing it.
This is why I ran in 2020, in the year our national election caused our country and world the pain of watching millions of abused people support the worst Presidential option because the worst option was better than the system itself. It is because a majority of us know our country is being run abusively, that your community needs those who have survived its abuse to run.
A democracy can only be as cohesive as its representatives reflect the variety of people it has in it. For far too long the perfect candidates have been chosen to run and win. Where has that gotten us? If we keep choosing candidates who fit into pretty boxes; who make us comfortable as voters because they don’t have scars that remind us how unfair and undemocratic our system is, we are destined to repeat the history that perpetuates the injuries our society produces.
This is where you, and I, come in.
We are the voices of those who have survived the system. We haven’t manipulated it or abused it, or been able to buy ourselves out of it. We’ve withstood it. Being a candidate for office is the right each of us who have overcome has, as an equal member of our democracy, to grab the megaphone and shine a light on the solutions to the problems that the system (laws, regulations, judges, policing policies) has caused us, and that we have overcome.
The open-mind of a Survivor who has overcome is exactly what makes an excellent steward of the people’s needs. Survivors are not privileged folks. We do not merely have academic experience dealing with challenges. We’re not blind to what it takes to overcome. We have not been able to count on a buffer (money, family, church) to save us in a pinch. This is why the greatest gift a Survivor can receive is to be accepted; and the greatest gift a Survivor can give is to share their story, unabashedly, and with the intent to problem-solve within our system. Our country is in deep need of your voice in any election; and even more so your thinking in the decision-making process, so others don’t drown it out anymore.
So, how can we win when the victimized are often disregarded as shameful? To voters, it starts with you: end the stigma. Check your privileged perspective of what the perfect candidate looks like. The best elected representative is not one who merely makes you comfortable because they look and represent what your life’s choices were. Instead, whether young or old, choose candidates who are survivors of abuse or violence, who are the single mothers and fathers who have fought and lost and won, who have persevered through and beyond the constraints poverty oppresses onto people for generations. Choose and support those who know the damage ignoring societal ills causes. Survivors may not talk like you, dress like you, but we are the ones who will refuse to allow the ills to perpetuate any longer. We got fed-up enough to do something about it, for the benefit of us all. That’s who you want representing you, not someone who will comfortably ignore the problems as they persist because they can.
For my fellow survivors, if you are a young woman; a sexual abuse, domestic violence survivor; a single parent; a person who has survived poverty, what you have overcome makes you the leader we need. Privileged perfect candidates will never be able to govern like someone whose survival depended on their problem-solving skills put into action. We were sold the kool-aid into believing a survivor is a failure. Truth is, we are the best equipped to help fix this society we were injured by. Our communities need your voice crafting the laws that determine whether others can survive. Our voters need to see what it looks like when people with scars stand up to protect our ever-perfecting union. It’s only hard to do because not enough people try to do it. Pragmatically, running for office is as difficult as keeping up with the quarterly Food Stamp application, but luckily it’s easier than finding a ride to the grocery store. Our representative democratic republic needs you to protect and fix it, now in 2022.
Please run.
