Today is Going to be My Peaceful Day

Today is going to be my peaceful day.

And I am comforted by the thought of being peaceful again tomorrow, when that comes.

As lightly as the snowflakes fall on the butterfly’s wings.

I’m entranced by this anomaly in our current social culture. In the middle of all the chaos and violence these monks and loyal Aloka are simply walking from one place to another to carry peace to us.

I’m in tears just about every evening when I catch little clips of their interactions with the people waiting all along the route with flowers and notes and smiles, to be just a little part of this gentle experience, and then listening to the address at the end of the day.

I hope everyone who’s been watching this can hold onto a little piece of that feeling of harmony with others as we continue our bumpy ride through current events.

Took a little break

I took a little two-week break from posting and social media. I got ready to start posting again on Sunday, but I’ve gone past that deadline already. So I’ll start catching up today!

I’ve been working on a few big projects as well as more sorting and organizing whole rooms of materials and furniture to change things over from the 25-year span of being a freelance commercial artist working at home to still being a productive creative person with no need for file cabinets, old paperwork and things to store it in.

In all this time I’ve never had any place to just sit that wasn’t part of my workspace, like to read or crochet or something. I’ve devised a small space where I can fit an actual chair and sit, put my feet up and just chill. Or probably discuss the matter with the feline who thinks it belongs to them.

When I feel the urge to start sorting and organizing things I take advantage of it and stay with it even if I had other plans for my day. I miss communicating, but wow, for 25 years both work and family issues have kept me in constraints on my time and the freedom to just keep working and get something big finished in a day or two is exciting.

It’s time for me to set up my Medicare coverage and get to know my new doctor after my doctor of 25 years retired. It’s the slow time right now and soon enough it will be vendor show time and no time for the details of these things. Planning on how to set up and tear down my display without the generous help of my friend Mary brought memories and thoughts of her. Taking care of new business license and other things regarding my business also took a few days. Since I’ve been working at home I’ve rarely had the time to take whole days to slowly and thoroughly work my way through some of these things until they are finished.

I’ve also been “talking to Mr. Sunshine’s flower” as it were, really standing in the garden facing Mr. Sunshine’s flower but talking to myself about how I feel about all these changes to these spaces with the memories of those seven cats we lost still feeling fresh. It’s been a journey, one I’ll share in a second essay today, my next entry in “Pet Loss in the First Person,” rather than waiting until this coming Sunday.

But the press of social and political news, about which I’ve always cared deeply and continued to follow since I was a young teenager in the early 1970s, has been overwhelming, chaotic and frightening in its progress and sometimes I have to take my attention away from my life, pay attention to what’s happening and take some action against what I feel is wrong for individuals, criminal for our government and destructive for our country.

Below is my essay that provides a little background on my experiences from growing up during the Cold War through the protests and progress of the 60s and 70s, and further.

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Growing up in the nuclear age

I grew up during the Cold War when atomic mushroom clouds loomed on the horizon, threatened by the “Union of Soviet Soviet Socialist Republics” (USSR), formed by Russian aggression and imperialism after WWI. Signs for “fallout shelters,” (1) public buildings with a below-ground area large enough to hold a number of people and stocked with food and goods to survive after a nuclear attack if you weren’t near or didn’t have a home fallout shelter, were next to the entrance doors of both my public and Catholic elementary schools, as well as on banks, churches, libraries, office buildings and larger meeting and gathering places.

Along with the usual school fire drills were occasional “duck and cover” drills when, with an alarm, we were instructed to get on the floor under our desks and cover ourselves with whatever we could, tuck our extremities under our bodies, put our heads down and close our eyes to protect from the blast wave of a nearby nuclear attack that would break the windows and possibly collapse the building we were in, then the following wave of nuclear material intended to kill us.

With our steel, mining and manufacturing industries as well as our river and interstate road travel, Pittsburgh would be a target. Just a few miles away from our house was a Nike Site (2), the observation platforms built throughout the country as the last line of protection against Soviet bombers that might evade the Air Force interceptors to destroy the invading jets. I could see the top of that Nike Site on the western horizon from our front porch every day. The idea that any day we could die a horrible and violent death that we couldn’t even run away from and all this world could disappear at the hands of unseen strangers, reminded constantly by the sight of the distant and enigmatic Nike Site and those fallout shelter signs right above my eye level made, me doubt we would ever see the future teen and adult lives we were preparing ourselves for.

Social changes

At the same time the late 60s and early 70s were filled with assassinations, public kidnappings, Viet Nam war protests, violent riots over race and integration, and increasing political corruption. I learned to read newspapers early, and we didn’t always have a television but we always had a radio, both with what always seemed to be ominous news every evening.

But while people seemed to be fighting each other, it seemed just as many were fighting for each other. I was relieved when my parents and other family members said, in my simple memory, that they thought black people should have as many rights as we did, and women should have the same rights as men, and they were glad our school district was planning a fully-integrated high school, because why shouldn’t they, I thought, and maybe this would stop all the fighting. A few of the young nuns in Catholic school who had done their missions in inner-city areas in the US reinforced this with the very Christian ideal that you love your neighbor as yourself and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In answer to opposition to social aid programs they told us “when people need something you give it to them if you can and let God judge if their need was honest.” I’ve carried that with me all these years.

So it seemed like most of the people around me were in agreement on this. As the 60s and 70s progressed and the hoped-for equality was legislated and enacted—as I attended my high school with just about an 80/20% balance of white and African-American students (who still couldn’t live in “white”neighborhoods, though, or easily get jobs) we’d finally set things up so we could someday achieve that elusive “freedom” everyone had been fighting for. Women were required to have equal status with men in the workplace, and were also given autonomy over using birth control and continuing a pregnancy, giving them greater education and employment opportunity. And then the environmental legislation, my beloved woods, the totally polluted creek that ran through our communities that I nonetheless loved, the rivers in Pittsburgh, the often visibly dirty, smelly air we breathed, could be cleansed to a point that I’d never seen.

Possibly becoming aware of social and political issues in our white suburban life in the midst of this loud and violent fight for ending wars and equality, and seeing the changes begin to take effect, set my path on the desire to see them continue to evolve in this country. And I saw that one of the most influential actions for change was all that protesting, individual people speaking out—sure, the laws were passed in Harrisburg and Washington DC, but the laws were supported, loudly, publicly, by the people who wanted them. That was what “representatives” were for and why we paid attention to who we voted for and was elected. I fully participated in this political process from then on and began to cast my votes the year I turned 18. My first presidential election was Reagan-Carter, and I voted for the kind intelligent man who I felt cared about us and tried to do his best, not the actor whose whole demeanor rang false to me as he began the effort to try to pull us backward from the framework that had finally given intentionally-disadvantaged minorities the same opportunities.

The undercurrent

Of course, I had heard dissent and disagreement about these changes on the news, even after the laws had been enacted and policies adopted. But I also heard it locally, adults and even kids my age who said they didn’t want—sorry—“n…s” in their neighborhood, that insulting word thrown around about “unqualified black people” taking their jobs, lowering property values and quality of schools, and on and on. In time, these people quieted but still bits of an unchanging lack of acceptance popped out in smart remarks now and then, often enough to know the opposition hadn’t simply faded, they hadn’t given up, but were just waiting for their chance to “change it back.”

The Reagan years made it look as if they might just get their wish right away (3), but as the decades rolled along and some white people continued to complain about “reverse discrimination” the laws continued to evolve as more and more wrongs were recognized, discussed and attempted to be made right.

Apparently those flowing along in that undercurrent were waiting for someone like Donald Trump to come along to save them and “take America back” to the time before they had to give black people a fair chance, treat women as equals, when they could still discriminate against whole groups of people who weren’t like them in some way, especially if they felt those people were getting advantages they weren’t. That included people with any color skin not considered “white,” immigrants, any person of a sexual identity they didn’t like or didn’t understand, or anything they classified as “woke,” a term ironically stolen from African-Americans and twisted to mean whoever and whatever they didn’t like.

This didn’t expand the list of targeted discrimination from what it was in the 1960s, because most of the groups of people they claimed got more benefit than they did or who actually didn’t belong in this country never had their rights ensured by this country, but had hidden behind a mask they’d had to construct to survive.

Trump back in the 80s

I first encountered Donald Trump in the late 80s, being interviewed on TV. I have never watched too much TV but I worked crazy hours and not much was on when I’d come home late and needed to reconnect with the world, so this was probably an early CNN show. The interviewer was asking the man about his buildings and real estate development, but the man wanted none of this, he wanted to talk about what he could get away with among women. It didn’t get to the level of the “Access Hollywood” show but it was clear he wanted to present himself as an irresistible playboy.

I remember thinking how pitiful this guy sounded. I’ve heard that speech from guys in bars trying to impress me or someone else and I’m embarrassed for them. I also steer clear of them and their egos.

It wasn’t until the interview was over that I heard the interviewer say “Donald Trump” that I realized who this was, who I’d never seen but whose name kept coming up in news stories in the papers and magazines I read as American business culture celebrated the CEO culture growing in this country. A year or so later was the rape and beating of a jogger in Central Park (4) and Trump’s insistence, in a New York Times full-page ad (5) that the state should bring back the death penalty and make these five criminals suffer, make all criminals suffer and their deaths be a deterrent to future crime. Even then there were questions about the five’s guilt and the way they were questioned because police tactics with people of color were well-known. They were exonerated by the confession of the actual rapist (6) a decade after their trials. Trump continued insistence on the death penalty and crackdowns on crime using violent tactics and has never wavered in his opinion about their punishment much less retracted his statement or apologized for recommending they be killed for a crime they didn’t commit.

He was a has-been (7) before the TV show The Apprentice which was scripted to be entertaining and make him seem like a strong character and a good businessman (8) and made him popular.

I’ve already fought for these things

I see what he’s perpetrating on our country now, the wanton violence against people who he and his followers, those same white people I grew up with who still today complain about having equality for people they didn’t feel were equal to them forced onto them, clinging to the chance to get rid of those people or make them suffer for who they are. I think of those people who’ve wanted to “turn the country back” from the progressive times of the 60s and 70s and flocked to him once he became a presidential candidate, supporting him through criminal and treasonous activities, and how neither Trump nor they seemed to have changed at all from those days.

I already lived those days. I worked hard within our system to get us out of the system that openly promoted some people and held others back in any way it could. I no more want to return to those days that I felt liberated from than I want anyone else to have to live them this time around.

I can’t list all the things that fly past me like I’m in Oz and the tornado is coming, people battered and abused and even killed by ICE just for filming them or even just holding a sign and chanting a protest; incremental changes to election laws that make voting more difficult to impossible for certain groups of people, canceling mail-in ballots and requiring ID that half the country doesn’t have and taking over elections in the states; bombing small boats and killing innocent people with no evidence of the drugs they claim; ignoring court orders to stop doing something unconstitutional or to start doing things in accordance with the constitution; the implications of just those things for individuals, for our system and for our country, I’m sometimes just as frightened now as I was when I thought about atom bombs falling on Pittsburgh, maybe more because this is our own government doing this, not some foreign aggressor.

I fought too hard and played by the rules within this republic and its democratic principles to want to spend my senior years in the hell they are creating. This is the year, our 250th as a country, we should be celebrating our independence from colonial rule to form and refine the government we felt was right for all of us, so let this be the year we re-establish that independence by throwing off another tyrant, within the rule of law and electoral procedures that have made our country great.

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Resources

Some of my preferred resources are behind paywalls so I’ve chosen alternates.

1. The history of fallout shelters in the United States. https://orau.org/blog/museum/the-history-of-fallout-shelters-in-the-united-states.html
2. Nike Missile Site. https://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm
3. It’s Time We Face the Fact that Ronald Reagan Was Hostile to Civil Rights. https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/its-time-we-face-the-fact-that-ronald-reagan-was-h
4. Central Park jogger case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case
5. Full-Page Ad: Donald Trump – Letter on Central Park Five – May 1, 1989. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-letter-central-park-five-19890501/
6. The Crimes Of Matias Reyes — The Career Criminal Whose Confession Exonerated The Central Park Five. https://allthatsinteresting.com/matias-reyes
7. The TV That Created Donald Trump. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/the-tv-that-created-donald-trump
8. The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice.
   https://slate.com/culture/2024/05/donald-trump-news-2024-trial-verdict-apprentice.html

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