Band-Aids for Burned Out Activists
As a child, I watched bombs being dropped in Vietnam and Palestinian refugees walking down dirt roads headed nowhere on the nightly news. Afterwards, at the dinner table, my parents admonished me to "clean my plate" because there were children starving in Africa. And then there was Watergate. It ruined a whole summer season of game shows and soap operas. My child's mind didn't quite understand what was happening but I pretty much got the message that the world had gone to hell. Perhaps because I was a child, I thought that the chaos that I saw and heard about was an aberration and would be over soon. I thought that I would grow up and the world would be fixed - that the world leaders would fix it. That's what they promised on TV, and somehow it made sense. If my mom could mend skinned knees and elbows with band-aids, someone could make adults behave, stop world hunger and end the fighting.
Later, in my teens, I found out about child abuse, domestic violence, rape and all the atrocities that we human beings do to other animals and to the planet. I had already begun to realize that the leaders weren't going to make a difference on their own. I understood that "we the people" would have take action as well. And I believed that I could make a difference if I fought hard enough. So as an adult, I do everything that I feel like I can do to make a difference in the world. I vote, facilitate workshops on violence prevention and diversity, protest political actions that I am opposed to (like the last 2 gulf wars), write letters to and/or call politicians and corporate leaders supporting and challenging their policies, and try to "live simply so that others can simply live." And yet the political situation hasn't changed all that much, or at least not for the better. On those rare occasions when I turn on the nightly news, the screen is still filled with bombs and gunfire and Palestinians looking for shelter because their houses have been blown up.
I feel betrayed and frustrated. It seems like the promise of a great society was just a slogan to keep us quiet until the next election. And all that talk about "democracy" and the "power of the people" was just an ideal that looks good on the pages of high school history books but has no real meaning in the current political environment. The irony in the fact that we are sending soldiers over to foreign, oil rich, Muslim countries to force them into having democracy seems to be lost on the majority of the American public.
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