I often write about my passions, although I have purposefully not written about one specific passion here on my blog. But then sometimes in life, something touches you so deeply that you can’t continue to pretend life is normal. There’s more to life than knitting and drawing and my summer reading list, and now is my time to speak up here.
The day before yesterday I was listening to the radio and heard a refugee from Honduras
Also interviewed was a local pastor in a Presbyterian church working with a largely Hispanic congregation. It was his statement that made my breath catch:
“Jesus separated the nations into two groups, two groups of nations, those who welcomed him as a stranger and those who didn’t welcome him as a stranger. And to those who welcomed Jesus, he said, ‘come and enjoy the kingdom of God
I am not an overly religious person, which I’m sure is probably a great disappointment to my mother. But this struck a nerve deep into that little Catholic girl I was growing up, who now as an adult is struggling to verbalize my reasons to my family why I don’t support President Trump’s policies. Because let’s face it, it’s difficult and dangerous to argue with family. You love them, you know they are basically really good people. So how can they just sit there and defend the policies put in place by this administration, no matter the consequences?
Never mind arguing their party and the current administration want to cut their Social Security and Medicare, or that they care nothing about climate change and protecting the planet for my grandchildren, or that they are making enemies of our allies and allies of our enemies, or that more people have died in school shootings than active service men and women have died in active duty this year. But this latest and most egregious policy, how do you support that? Surely, those words spoken by that pastor will make a difference to my family!
My daughter, an elementary special education teacher working with mostly Hispanic children said to me the other day, “People don’t see these immigrants as human beings. They don’t look them in the eye. They don’t speak the language. They view them as animals.” More words I won’t forget.
Where I live, being Democrat is very unpopular. We hesitate to speak out because we don’t want to offend our neighbors. We don’t want to be part of an “us versus them” mentality. But what about all of the moderates in the middle, when do you say enough?
A year ago I said enough. I started putting myself out there and the people around me are learning who I am and what I stand for. My husband and I are the new chairs of our county’s local Democratic Party. My husband, children, grandchildren and I have been marching in the streets. It’s become a passion of mine to do what I can to make a change.
And now, finally, I’m writing about it here. Because this is a big part of who I am now.
There will be more writing about knitting, books, and art, but now that I’m newly retired, there might be more posts like this too.
You can listen to the podcast of that radio program here: http://kcur.org/post/seg-1-life-immigrants-american-detention-centers-seg-2-why-pseudo-science-persists
Cup of Jo wrote two excellent posts on the immigration crisis. You can find those here:
On Wednesday evening we held our first event as chairs. People still came out in the middle of an excessive heat warning with temperatures hovering around 100 degrees to hear from Democratic local and gubernatorial candidates running this season. Maybe, if that can happen in this community, the tide just might be changing.
