Now Is the Time to Choose Your Purpose

One of the many commercials promoting the US Marine Corps says "Many are called, few are chosen."  At this time in our history of the United States the majority of us are hearing the call to act, to stop this mad descent into white nationalism, isolationism, and overt discrimination and oppression against members of the human race.  Now is the time to choose our purpose going forward and stand up for what we believe and I hope that more than a few choose to do this.  Let's stand up and be counted!  We're off to a good start after last week's Women's March on Washington reports that more than 1,000,000 people attended the march there and in extraordinarily large numbers across the country and around the world. We have a fight song, Quiet, and more and more ways to make a difference popping up.  Today I pick up my postcards to send off to my representatives, all of them, describing the issues that are important to me.  I have a long list.  This is the first of ten actions in 100 days being promoted by the march.

It's certainly not been a boring first week of the Trump administration.  We've seen our President stress the country out over how large his inaugural crowds were, continue to blame his popular election loss on illegal voting for which he has shown absolutely no evidence, remove the Joint Chiefs from the National Security Council and add-in Steve Bannon his chief strategist who is  described by Matt Taibbi on twitter as "tactically a Leninist and ideologically a racialist/white nationalist..".  Some at the CIA, like former Director Brennan, expressed anger at Trump's speech in front of the wall of stars while at least 400 agents accepted open invitations to hear him speak.  

The week was topped off with an Executive Order banning entry to Muslims from many countries in the Middle East including Iran, Iraq and no surprise Syria.  Not included on this list are the countries that quietly fund terrorism and from where the 9/11 hijackers all hailed from like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE.  Unless you were out in the woods yesterday with no access to a mobile device you know that Green Card holders, people legally residing in the United States, were detained at airports across the country, placed in handcuffs, their social media was searched and they were asked their views on Donald Trump.   The lack of due process in all of this is glaring which prompts me to see if I can find a good class on the US Constitution on iTunes U that we might all want to take.

In other news, George Orwell's book "1984" is topping the best seller list and I began to think of other books that speak to American values that we might want to read as well like Walter Van Tilburg Clark's "The Ox Bow Incident" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird".  Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments, which I'm sorry to say I have to moderate now.  I embrace dissenting view points but not abuse and after my last post on the Women's March on Washington a particularly mean-spirited and abusive comment was made which I deleted.  I think some found the march threatening to them personally and felt the need to strike out.  If the commenter is reading this know that if you can't engage in civil discourse, then you're cut off.  

I watched a video this morning of an interview with Jane Elliott on the Rock Newman show.  It's under an hour long and well worth taking the time to watch.  I think it solidifies what we need to do today.  We can't sit back and wait for someone else to act.  She specifically says she has a purpose.  She calls on white women to be the leaders in ending racism.  We have so many issues today that are rooted in racism, white supremacy.  Today is the day to make the choice to make the difference as Jane says and stop living in ignorance.  Choose your purpose. 

The Women's March in DC Was Huge!!

UPDATED BELOW (1/25)
In keeping with my theme this year, yesterday I and about 500,000 other people chose to participate in the Women's March in Washington, D.C. and it was awesome!!  My sister Diane traveled from New Jersey so we could go together along with her sister-in-law and some close friends.  We were a group of seven traveling to DC via car and metro.  Another good friend offered parking at her house near the Takoma Metro station where we hopped on the Red line to Union Station and were part of something HUGE!!

Our Group of Marchers

Our new President likes to say many things are going to be, or will be HUGE, but this truly was.  Far exceeding organizers expectations, women traveled from all over the country to be in DC yesterday and those who couldn't make it here, marched in their local cities and suburbs in HUGE numbers as well.  On the way down from New Jersey my sister called near the Delaware Memorial Bridge to tell me she was in a "Women's March Traffic Jam"!  Everywhere she looked were cars of women, by themselves, in pairs and in groups heading to DC.

I've heard reports that at least 1200 buses applied for parking permits and I saw many pictures of planes filled with women flying to DC.  Some of my friends turned their homes in to Airbnb for the weekend to give many people a place to stay when local hotel prices were out of reach.

Why did I, and all these women decide to go to this march?  Is it the birth of a new women's movement or something even bigger?  I don't know.  I hope the momentum from yesterday turns in to something spectacular.  Before I go further describing the march experience though, I will tell you why I marched.

I marched for a lot of the same reasons that I consider myself a liberal and a progressive.  I want women to have complete and total control of their own bodies.  I want full reproductive freedom whether its access to birth control or safe abortion or my doctor telling me the truth about my medical decisions.  I want us to protect the environment.  I want us to invest in renewable energy and I want us to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.  I want to keep the clean air and clean water act.  I want to protect Social Security and Medicare and I don't want the Affordable Care Act  to be repealed.  I want us to ensure public education is available to everyone.  I believe in raising the minimum wage and making college affordable.  I want women to earn equal pay for equal work.  I marched for Women of Color because I believe Black Lives Matter.  Finally, I believe that a lot of the progress we've made during my lifetime is now under threat with the new Administration unlike anything we've seen before and I want my voice to be heard.  I want to join with others who have similar inclinations and work towards changing not only our representatives at the national level, but at the local level as well.

Our group departed my house at 7am to drive to Takoma and catch the Metro.  When we got to Union Station around 9 a.m. it was already packed.  The line to Dunkin' Donuts as soon as you come off the Metro was long and we headed up the next elevator to grab a quick bite at Au Bon Pain.  We walked out towards the Capital where free signs were available and of course the non-official merchandise that is found at every single event ever.

My friend Tracey and I with our signs

Of course as we made our way towards the Capital we stopped for pictures and to buy a tshirt or two.  We even managed to run into a friend from school before we headed towards the larger crowds. Their were rows upon rows of port-a-potties up to and around the Capital building and the bunting and chairs were still out from the inauguration the day before.  As we approached the main area, which we still couldn't see, the crowds were getting thicker and thicker.  We saw a lifesize Hilary marching with a pussy hat on.  There were a lot of homemade signs too.  One said "Super Callous Fragile Ego Trump You Are Atrocious" (hopefully I remembered that right).  We managed to get ourselves in with a large group of people making their way up and around the National Museum of the American Indian.  A woman near me said she thought if we went that direction we could go up a block or two and see and hear the folks speaking on the podium.  Native Americans at the museum were engaged in a small gathering focused on stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Everywhere we looked were women in pink pussy hats and the crowd was friendly and extremely happy.

Now, I didn't do all my homework about the march.  I had it in my head that the march started at 10 am, but apparently the speaking was starting earlier and the march itself wasn't starting until 1:15pm.  Okay, that's fine.  Of course, as we worked our way around the patios and steps of the museum, we were in a giant crush of people.  When I say crush, I mean that each person occupied a space as big as their person and not much more.  People pressed in on each other from all sides.  We were intimately close with one another.  You really couldn't inch any farther forward and going backwards was a bigger challenge than what a Salmon faces swimming upstream to spawn.

My sister and I attended Oakland Mills High School ('86 and '83 respectively) and the halls were packed with students and moving fast in between classes.  We know how to move through a crowd.  Not on this day.  There was no where to go, and some people were getting very antsy.  At about 10 am we were standing on the patio around the museum, off to our left we could glimpse the jumbotron, but we couldn't see it clearly and we couldn't hear anything the speakers were saying.  The crush of people was only getting greater.  No one had any phone service to speak of.  Diane and her sister in law were probably 15 ft away from me, but at least 30 people stood in between us.   Looking at my watch I was thinking I can't see the speakers, I can't hear the speakers and I'm feeling mashed and so I thought we should get out of the crush.  I tried to signal Diane but at times the crowd was loud and it was hard to get through.  I couldn't text or call because I didn't have phone service.

Looking across the sea of people towards
the Air and Space Museum

I looked across the street towards the Air and Space museum and I could tell that people next to the building had freedom of movement, but not a lot.  I also didn't think we could make it there when I looked at the sea of people.  I turned around and could see the National Gallery of Art and thought we might have a chance if we went in that direction.  I didn't see any way we could go back the way we had come.  I finally got Diane's attention and we turned our group around and made our slow way out of the crowd.

I said earlier that the crowd was friendly and polite, and that's mostly true, but put even the most polite people together in a crush and nerves are sure to be on edge.  Groups attempting to escape the crowd had linked arms and would push through a crack in the people and you'd be trapped, unable to move while they forced their way out.  Or you'd be faced with people who surprisingly were attempting to move deeper in to the crowd.  Folks next to me at the National Museum of the American Indian said Jamie Raskin was their representative and they were supposed to be meeting up near the podium.  I learned last night they had stopped people from coming into the area close to the podium because there were already too many people at that point.

Scary moments are when you feel a force pushing at your back and know that you are powerless to stop it.  Calls to cease pushing could be heard.  An ambulance appeared seemingly out of nowhere on Jefferson Drive and 4th Street.  The crowd could not part to let the ambulance get through.  As we weaved our way slowly through the crowds I could hear people calling to let the ambulance through and knew we could make it across Jefferson Drive and the ambulance wouldn't have made it to where we were the crowds were that thick.  In desperation to get through the crowd people started claiming, truthfully or not that they had a great need to move ahead of others.  A woman near me said that people she was with were having anxiety attacks.  I was concerned and asked where they were.  "Well, they're ahead of us now, I can't see them."  Another woman was softly calling "Lilly!" and peering behind me.  I asked if she needed help locating someone and my efforts garnered me a dirty look.  I'm not innocent of the snark.  At one point four tall men pushed their way in front of my friends and I, and I felt that I had been shoved aside.  I said "Don't worry, women are used to being pushed aside to let men through, don't worry about us."  The young man turned to me and said "We're marching with our Mom and trying to keep up with her."  Well, okay, good for you, but you still didn't need to push me aside.

A woman on a scooter yelled out "Scooter!! Coming through!!" and literally ran over the feet of a man near me.  He said "You're running over my feet!!"  The woman on the scooter didn't seem to care.  I heard that an elderly, sick woman needed to get through, that a child in a wheel chair needed to get through, that a woman in a wheel chair needed to get through, and when I or someone else in the crowd would ask where they were, they were not near enough to be seen.  I also saw people smile and help people catch up with their groups.  At one point my sister and I were separated and the crowd chanted my name as they parted enough to let me slide through and catch up with her.  That was the majority of the time.

I think it took us a good hour to move through all those people as we worked our way up 4th street to the National Gallery of Art where we finally had room to move about.  We also managed to run in to another friend who had grown up across the street from us.  We took advantage of the time to head in to the museum, use the bathroom, look at some art and regroup.  We decided to grab lunch a few blocks from the march and then join the march in progress afterwards.  When we made our way back to the march though, everyone was pooped out.  At least one in our party just wasn't feeling right and we decided to call it a day.  We hopped on the red line at Metro Center and headed out.

We listened to the coverage on the way home and got to my house and kicked back to take in all the televised coverage.  It was amazing watching all the people who had gone to the marches around the country and seeing how many people had shown up in DC.  I'm so glad that we went even if we didn't actually join in a moving march.  I felt and still do feel energized like something great is about to happen and this is just the beginning.  I hope the momentum sticks with us and that people get involved at all levels of government.  Think about all the people who have a say over your life that you vote for.  From the group of people deciding about reserved parking and what color I can paint my door in my townhouse community, to the Board of Education, the County Council, the State Legislature and all the way up to the President of the United States.  It's a lot of folks who are making decisions that impact the way we live, whether or not we thrive, and determining how much freedom we get to lead our lives in the way we see fit.

The importance of the march yesterday to me at least is, as I said earlier, I want my voice to be heard.  I want to be taken in to account when decisions are made.  I'm going to be writing and calling and attending meetings and if there's another march, I'm going to be there.  Today the women's march sent out a plan for 10 actions in 100 days.  The first one is a postcard that goes to your elected representatives.  They said have a party and fill yours out and mail them off.  Well, okay, I will do that.  I commit to do the ten things they're going to ask.  It's a choice I'm making that I'm involved and I'm committed because this is important.  We're deciding what we want our world to look like and I'm not sitting on the sidelines for that.

UPDATE 1/25 - When I originally published this on Sunday, crowd estimates were at around 500,000.  I'm now hearing that more than 1,000,000 people were at the march in DC.

The Choices You Make

Happy New Year to All!  It's just the second day of 2017 and I am going to work on a theme for my posts this year - Choices.  I think it's a good and important theme because as we are all aware, choices have consequences.  Sometimes we have immediate feedback on our choices and sometimes we feel no impact at all.   I want to touch on some simple choices like exercise and dinner, but I also want to talk about broader and bigger choices like who we choose to represent us in government and some stuff in between.  At the end of 2017 it would be nice if we could say to ourselves that we had made some really good choices in the past year.

Every single day we make hundreds of choices.  I will try not to run down a bunch of rabbit holes that make your head swirl as I write, but instead, I want people to think about what every choice means and whether or not you can live with the consequences of those choices.  What does a choice mean to you?  Why are you choosing what you're choosing?  Does the choice you're making bring value to your life? What would happen if you made a different choice?  What would happen if you couldn't get your first choice?

Years ago I read the following:  Make your decision and then live your life like you had no other choice.  It's about not having regrets, or looking back.  However, sometimes we make a choice that turns out badly and it's good to look back to try and figure out where we went wrong.  Maybe we'll conclude that given the same set of circumstances we'd make exactly the same choice again.  It never hurts to have a 'debrief'.  What you want to make sure to do is learn and grow and keep moving forward.

When I was little my parents would take us over to the Columbia Swim Center in the evenings.  Unlike today's Splashdown, we had a high dive to climb up and jump off.  I was eight and my sister was five and we loved going off the high dive.  On my way up the ladder I'd stop and let go to show off my bravery.  My sister wanted to show how brave she was too - and she slipped and fell hard on to the concrete below, cracking her skull.  I was a little kid of course, but I knew my sister liked to copy me.  Younger siblings are doing everything they can to keep up with older siblings.  I knew she'd try to do everything I did.  I didn't know she'd slip and fall.  She and my Mom went off to the hospital in the ambulance and my Dad followed in the car.  No, they didn't leave me alone at the pool, a neighbor watched out for me while they looked after my sister.  In case you're wondering, she's fine.  She grew up and is having a very good life.

Okay, so while today's parents are freaking out over this story, I'll fill in some more details.  Where were my Mom and Dad?  Why weren't they hovering over us like today's parents making sure we didn't fall off the high dive?  This was 1973 and kids were given a lot more space then.  All of the parents were swimming laps or chatting at the other end of the pool.  All of the kids were swimming in the deep end of the pool and jumping off the diving boards.  There was a lifeguard sitting in the stand.

In 1973 Columbia was a small town.  Nearly everyone we knew was on swim team, including our parents.  My sister was a "Mini-Might!" - the name of the group of kids in the 5-6 yr age group.  All of us went to swim practice multiple times per week and all of us were excellent swimmers.  Jumping off the high dive was part of regular practice for the younger kids.  We did it all the time with no incidents.  My sister is athletic - she was jumping in to the pool and swimming by age two.  My Mom tells a story of her standing on the edge of the pool saying "'mere Daddy" and signaling to my Dad to come over because she was jumping in.   Sometimes she would say it and leap before my Dad was ready and he'd have to quickly move to her.  As a Mini-Might she swam quite a distance without taking a breath.  She hadn't gotten the breathing part down yet.  That happens with a lot of kids.

My Dad heard my sister fall off the high dive.  She didn't scream, but he heard the thunk as her head hit the pavement and he knew it was his little girl.  He said he felt it in his heart.  He was in the pool at the time, at the other end in a lap lane.  He leaped up and ran.  So did the lifeguard, my Mom and a lot of adults.  It happened really quickly.  As I said before, my sister had cracked her skull and had a minor concussion.  She missed a day or two of school.  After all of this, she still went off the high dive again.  We went back to our normal routine and my Mom said "Don't let go when you climb the ladder."  She didn't.  At least not for a while.  Neither did the rest of us for a while, because we had seen what happened.  Of course as a kid there comes a time when you do it again to see if the same thing will happen.  I never ever did it in front of my sister though.

My Mom and Dad made the decision that the pool, both before and after the high dive fall, was a safe place for their kids.  Like all environments, and I mean all environments, it comes with hazards that you need to be aware of.  Should they have stood over my sister as she climbed the ladder to the high dive?  Should they have forbidden her to use the high dive even while all the other kids were using it? They made the choice that this was a one off incident.  Also, they know that my sister has a bit of a daredevil gene and that they wouldn't be able to protect her from everything.  On our recent trip to Hawaii she was racing down steep mountain roads at top speeds on her bike.  She's jumped out of an airplane.  She likes to ski fast.

All through our childhood my parents encouraged us to try stuff, physically and mentally.  They didn't want us to get hurt, but they also knew that some of the stuff we did had an element of risk. They let us do it anyway.  I personally think they made good choices.  From swimming in the ocean, to skiing in the mountains we learned how to handle ourselves and to know when we were taking on too much risk.  That's a choice our parents made for us.  I'm glad they did.  Different people might have made different choices and everything would have turned out just as well for them.

I think the first time my sister started up the ladder to the high dive after her fall my Mom was close by, but not right next to her.  My Dad was watching from a distance.  After she made it up without falling our lives went back to normal.  Would it have been better if she hadn't fallen?  Maybe, but maybe not.  No one wants their child to get hurt ever, but they do.  So, we make choices about what kids can and can't do and how much hovering we'll do as they go about their business.  We put helmets on their little heads when they ski and bike.  We make them wear shinguards when they play soccer and helmets and padding when they play hockey.  We try to teach them funny comebacks if they get teased or bullied at school.  We help them with their homework so they have a better chance at succeeding.  We don't drive the car until everyone has their seatbelt on.

We make considered choices all the time about the activities kids get to pursue and there are real consequences.  As we make these choices, the kids are watching and learning because they're making choices too.  My sister did not stop doing stuff after she fell off the high dive.  Two days after Christmas this year she climbed into a wind tunnel to do indoor sky diving and had a big grin on her face the entire time.