Wondering about a reckoning

I was raised in a blue-collar, hardworking, patriotic-to-the-core household. My parents both grew up in the South and are proud of where they came from. They also realized, as they became older, the deep-seeded and problematic beliefs that can come from being raised in this region while being white and working class. I am a native Floridian and have the same pride and disappointment in my southern roots. My mom was a nurse and cared for others, in her professional and personal life, without batting an eye. My dad was a true-blue Union guy in the construction trades, the epitome of the backbone of the Democratic party at the time. I wasn’t raised particularly religious (much to the chagrin of my Nanny Cherry), but I was raised with a set of values that hasn’t wavered in all of my life experiences, namely that you treat others well, you fight for those that may not be able to fight for themselves, and you put good into the world. And you do these things not because you are scared of eternal damnation or even of what others may think; you do these things because it is the right thing to do. I was blessed beyond belief to be raised in this manner, but don’t get it twisted; I was also encouraged to be a free-thinking, independent little shit who stood up for herself and others and didn’t back down just because someone older thought they were right and I was wrong. My dad got me a bumper sticker for my car at 16 years old that said, ‘Question Authority’. That bumper sticker led to my boyfriend’s grandmother proclaiming that I was the devil, which made us love that sticker even more.

For a year or so in high school, I became obsessed with American history. I wasn’t stuck in the traditional schooling structure, so I was able to find different resources to learn from. What I recognize now is that those “different” resources weren’t really that different after all and still only told a small fraction of the story, and sometimes just outright lied. And while my parents were constantly fighting for and taking care of others in their work and within our family, their own experiences in life limited their views of some of the innate problems in this country. I was raised to believe that America was the greatest country in the world and that while we certainly had problems we needed to address, our foundation as a country was strong and good.

As an adult, my career has been based on fighting for the working class, right beside my dad. My focus became pretty singularly focused on a small group of people with whom I could help in a hopefully significant, but also narrow way. Of course, there is nothing small or narrow about the myriad of issues that the working-class in this country face, but the part that I could try to effect change in was. While my professional focus had to be narrow in order to be effective at the day-to-day fights, those fights led me to ask bigger and bigger questions about the foundation I was raised to be so proud of.

I know I’m not the only one that feels like we are at a tipping point. But what is this tipping point going to do? Where does it end? What does it accomplish? Are we going to be better on the other side? Or are we all just drowning together? Are we going to continue to see the problems that face us, or those that look or believe like us, as the only problems that matter? Or are we going to start taking seriously the problems that those who don’t look or believe like us have spent generations fighting on their own? Do we find the commonality and empathy needed to put others’ justice and equity before our own convenience and ease? Do we continue to allow the powers-to-be to control how we see ourselves and each other so that we don’t join forces to fight those in power? Are we in this together or not?

I feel like I continue to add to my list of questions without ever figuring out the answers. And the more questions I compile, the less I trust those that proclaim to have an answer to any of them. So, at this point, if I have no answers and I have no trust in who to look for to find them, what good am I possibly able to do? Hell if I know! But for the time being, I have settled on this: perhaps by asking these questions out loud and working through my thought process out loud, maybe someone else will be willing to question themselves or their thoughts too. And maybe if more of us were simply interested in finding answers to more questions, we could figure it out collectively. Eventually.