I took down our shiny, new, pristine, “Cats for Kamala” and “Harris/Walz” yard signs. Still in the yard are two, very old, ragged signs. One says, “In this house we believe: Black lives matter, woman’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal, science is real, love is love, kindness is everything.” The other says, “Leaf blower free zone, cleaner air, quiet neighborhoods.”
I put up one shortly after George Floyd was murdered, the other while working to pass measure V, to ban gas powered leaf blowers in the city of Sonoma.
Today I realize that half of the voting population does not believe a word of what is on my two old, ragged signs. I realize that we have forgotten the wellbeing of our people and our planet. We see only what is right in front of us, while lacking reasoning and critical thinking required to change this. We see the prices of groceries, rents, gas as the most important things in our lives, without questioning why these things cost more now than in the past.
Think for a minute: Prices of many consumer goods are controlled by a few massive corporations and their billionaire owners. Large corporations are buying up rental property at an alarming rate. What If smaller, affordable housing was built, rather than 3,000-to-4,000 square-foot mini mansions? If we did not spend the majority of our efforts on wars and the machinery of war. If we cared for our youth. If we all had access to quality education. If we all had affordable health care. If we gave up the idea that the population and economy must grow and grow, so that more people can consume more. Then perhaps things would not be beyond our grasp, perhaps the cost of things would not be our priority. We then could shift our priority to saving ourselves and our planet. We could mentor our youth to put themselves in the place of others, to develop critical thinking skills, to understand the history and feelings of those who are different from themselves.
Where we are today did not happen overnight, it has built over time. I think of the stories my mother told me of life during the great depression of the 1930’s and World War II. As a Sicilian American she and her friends at Hunter College at first admired Mussolini for getting the trains to run on time and dismissed the rise of Hitler. Then they saw the tragic results.
When I was very young she told me her stories, her history. She told me how she came to realize that how FDR handled the depression by trying to care for all Americans, contrasted to what happened in Europe. And she demonstrated to me how important voting is, and how important it is to care about the welfare of others and think beyond yourself.
My mother’s neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York was mostly Italian and Jewish. She told me the stories from the Jewish families that had lost loved ones in the Holocaust. She told me stories of how they had urged their loved ones to leave Germany, but they did not and perished. I think of these stories today, as I research the idea of moving to Costa Rica, Malta or Portugal.
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