activism

Naked Despair

~ MaryG ~ 15 Comments

I encountered a lot of naked despair, grief and anger at church today. I belong to a liberal Unitarian Universalist church outside of Boston. Many people were absolutely wrecked over the election results, including the minister.

We have many older members (I guess that includes me now at nearly 60) who have been fighting for all types of causes for decades, from the climate crisis to abortion. My church helped lead the marriage equality movement in Massachusetts. (We were the very first state in the country to legalize gay marriage in 2004–twenty years ago!) During the fight, our then minister refused to perform weddings in our beautiful historic church until same-sex marriage was legal. He really took a stand and it helped move things forward. Shortly after the law was passed, he married two longtime beloved church members—two women—in front of of the entire congregation. It was euphoric.

Anyway, I was doing OK at church, holding up pretty well, until the music director played John Lennon’s Imagine during the offertory. Oh man, hearing that just broke me (and a bunch of other people too). She was playing it beautifully on the grand piano (with no vocalist) but of course everyone in our congregation knows the words and was quietly singing along.

The dream has never felt further away. 😢

Related:

Time to Circle the Wagons

Letters to Voters

~ MaryG ~ 4 Comments

I’m mailing my last batch of letters to voters this week. It doesn’t seem like simply asking someone to vote would have a big impact, but I think it can.

I liked this message from Vote Forward:

Header with Vote Forward logo

One of our favorite parts of each year is when we receive messages from letter recipients letting us and their letter writer know that they have a plan to vote. As the messages are already rolling in, we wanted to share one we received from a letter recipient in our U.S. Voters Abroad campaign! 

I’m 37 and while I have always maintained my registration to vote, I knew it expired at the end of last year and I honestly wasn’t going to re-register to vote. I had no plan to vote this year at all. I’ve lost so much hope in watching how things in my home country are progressing that I caught the mindset of “my one vote won’t change anything.”

Then I received my first letter from one of your volunteers. There was a simple message in it about it being important for me to vote because all votes count. My husband looked up the process with me to register to vote. We both realized how silly it would be for me to not register and cast my vote. I filled out the documents, printed them, signed them and then they sat on my desk for too long waiting to be scanned.

A few weeks ago, I scanned them and sent them to Hillsborough County, FL to register myself to vote for the 2024 presidential election. I received my ballot last week. I received my new, valid, voter card yesterday. Today, I received a second letter from your organization and this time the message really captivated me.

The message in this letter was from Joseph W. and he mentioned he is 82 years old. He wrote how he feels it is so important for strong voter turn out in order to aid our country. He is right and I wish I could send him so much gratitude for changing my mindset of “my one vote won’t matter” to it “takes a village to make a change.”

My ballot will be finished and mailed off by Friday. I will not give it time to collect dust. From the bottom of my heart, thank you to all of your volunteers who take the time to write letters to those of us in other countries like myself. Thank you for reminding us that our votes still matter and count. I never knew before that this organization existed, but I am certainly glad it does!!

Our group of “Letter Writers for Democracy” at my church last weekend. We wrote over 3,000 letters for Vote Forward.

Leader/Follower

~ MaryG ~ 9 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Are you a leader or a follower?
View all responses

This prompt gives me pause.

I mean, I like to think of myself as being a serious person that people listen to, but I’ve not held many traditional leadership roles in my life. I can’t think of one committee that I ever chaired or co-chaired. Maybe that will change, as I’ve been appointed to my church’s executive team for next fiscal year.

At work, I was always a respected “individual contributor” (as they say in HR). I never managed a team.

With my family, I’d say I’m pretty much the leader (CEO), with my husband as CFO (and let’s face it, CTO—I’m clueless about technology), but with my son soon to be fully launched, I may be in more of an advisory role soon.

With my activist volunteer work, I’m definitely a follower. Tell me who to call or write, and what to say, and I’ll get it done. I respect the work of the smart and serious activists in my community and I gladly follow them. We’re united in our mission to create a blue wave in 2024 and save democracy from the MAGA cult. We’ve got new and different people showing up every week (including men—yay men!), plus many helping out from home.

Can you tell who the leader of this group is? It’s Denali (front right)—an experienced, passionate activist who has been organizing since the 60s. She even gives us tips on how to quickly apply stamps. 😉

A unique brand

~ MaryG ~ 6 Comments

What are your favorite brands and why?

I got to see Emma’s Revolution perform live last night. They’re a duo (Pat Humphries and Sandy O) with a long history of combining performance and activism for various causes particularly anti-war movements, climate and environment, and women’s and LGBTQ rights. Last night they were performing with two other women (about ten years older than them) who are also folk music icons: Claudia Schmidt and Sally Rogers. They all sounded great. It was a powerful quartet. Their songs are poignant, yet hopeful. We (the audience) learned that a documentary is currently in production about Emma’s Revolution. I can’t wait to see it. Pat Humphries is a tremendous songwriter and last night she played the song that “changed everything” for them—Swimming to the Other Side.

They sell their own merchandise at intermission and have no obvious corporate sponsorships or affiliations of any kind. They perform mostly in Unitarian churches, coffeehouses, and small nonprofit venues.

So, what’s their “brand”?

I don’t really know (just trying to bring it back to the prompt).

Clearly, they’re on the left politically.

They’re white and so is their audience (mostly), but they frequently reference icons of the civil rights movement like John Lewis and nonwhite immigration/refugee activists.

They’re acoustic (although they come with a lot of amps and sound equipment).

They’re good. Like really good. They’re total pros. They sing and play beautifully. They make it look easy, but it’s not. In addition to playing songs, folk musicians build a true rapport with their live audiences. They tell personal stories and anecdotes while they tune their instruments between songs. Again, not easy.

That’s all I got. Go see them on their next tour, if you can. Actually, you can see them tonight (from Schenectady) if you buy a ticket to the livestream.

Dear Mary

~ MaryG ~ 7 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.
View all responses

Dear Centenarian Mary,

Congratulations! We made it to the big ten-oh. I hope 2065 is treating us well and that we haven’t run out of money. Seriously, we’ve lived 8 years longer than our financial planner modeled. (I hope I didn’t fuck us by retiring at 58.)

In case you’ve forgotten, 2024 was quite a year. If the United States is now a dictatorship under Baron Trump, it’s not due to lack of effort on our part. We worked hard to try to stop his wretched orange father from overturning democracy.

Here we our with our activist friends in 2024

Hopefully things took a turn for the better in 2025—the year we turned 60. Hopefully. Fingers crossed that we get to go out on a high note.

Love,

Middle-aged Mary

Related post:

The Big One

The Big One

~ MaryG ~ 8 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?
View all responses

My biggest challenge in the next nine months is our national challenge: to try to make sure Donald Trump does not get re-elected President of the United States. If overturning Roe v Wade and staging a coup d’état was not enough to convince you that a second Trump term would be truly disastrous for both the United States and the world, then please get up to speed.

Free gift article from The Atlantic: The Danger Ahead

This is not a time to be shy about your political views or to sit on the sidelines and see what happens. It’s a Code Red, people. The simple act of handwriting postcards to likely voters in key districts has proven highly effective in the last two election cycles.

Over the next nine months I’ll be volunteering with Vote Foward and my local Indivisible group, along with a bunch of folks from my church.

Yes, Joe Biden is too old to be President. But the likely alternative, a second Trump term, would “instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.”

I don’t want to wake up on Wednesday, November 6th regretting that I didn’t do more.

Some church friends and me mailing our last batch of letters before the 2022 midterm elections

Related posts:

Look for the Glimmers

Protest photos: then & now

GenX Mom Not Calm

Yeah, it’s politics

Life’s not fair…

AIDS made me a lifelong lib

~ MaryG ~ 2 Comments

How have your political views changed over time?

I’ve gotten more liberal.

When I was young, my views were influenced by my parents and the Catholic Church. I remember defending Nancy Reagan in an editorial I wrote for a high school social studies class.

By the time I was a junior in college, I had totally changed my mind about President Reagan. Working in the arts after college, and being exposed to the AIDS activism in that community, opened my eyes further to structural inequities. The fact that the AIDS virus (HIV) was considered a “pre-existing condition” by insurance companies and could leave young, sick people without medical care was very real and horrific to me.

Reagan was so slow to even acknowledge AIDS was a disease (much less a full blown crisis), the arts community was absolutely furious and made a lot of art about it. That had a profound effect on me.

Activist art by the Keith Haring, who died of complications from AIDS in 1990 at age 31

Look for the Glimmers

~ MaryG ~ 6 Comments

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

The best piece of advice I ever received was probably something about not worrying too much, because most of the things you worry about don’t actually happen. My father said that my grandmother’s saying was “Don’t Borrow Trouble,” which meant: don’t concern yourself with problems that aren’t directly facing you.

I appreciate that advice, but I feel like there are so many very real things to worry about in 2023, it’s a bit like telling people to bury their heads in the sand. Women in about a third of the United States have lost their bodily autonomy, a convicted rapist who led an insurrection is the leading Republican presidential candidate, the US government is about to shutdown because of that rapist’s supporters, and we’ve had at least 470 mass shootings so far this year.

So yeah, you should worry.

But don’t become hopeless. My minister says to “look for the glimmers.” Glimmers are those little moments that give you peace and hope.

My glimmer for today is that some women in my church organize our activism and make it SO EASY for me to help! All I have to do is pay for the stamps, and they hand me a neatly organized bundle of postcards, stamps, address labels, and a script. During the week, in my spare time, I write out the postcards.

This week we’re writing to Virginians.

Life’s not fair, but justice is worth working for.

~ MaryG ~ 2 Comments

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

Kids think things should be fair. Siblings, especially, are always going to their parents with equity gripes. “She got more” “ You like him better” “Why does she get to stay up later than me?” “How come he gets the last doughnut?”

The sooner you accept that life’s not fair, the easier it is.

Many people are born with tremendous disadvantages—from physical disabilities to impoverished circumstances. Others have horrible bouts of bad luck—from getting hit by drunk drivers to graduating high school amidst a world war or global pandemic.

Not only should you try to appreciate what you do have (because it’s more than a lot of people and it could change at any moment), but you should waste as little time as possible expecting things to be fair. They are not.

However, I believe it’s a worthy (and honestly, patriotic) goal to try improve truly inequitable circumstances for people.

“Liberty and justice for all” is going to take some real effort from all of us in the coming year. Voting is the least you can do! Here’s an organization I work with to increase voter turnout: https://votefwd.org/. We send handwritten letters to people encouraging them to get to the polls. It’s easy and fun to do with other people in groups.

Vote Forward letter writing pool party in Hollis, NH, July 2022