Just(e) Words

As I write, the Presidential election of 2020 is ten days away. I agree with those on both sides of the aisle that it is the most important election at least in my lifetime (which is long); I will not, however, be so hyperbolic as to include all elections since 1788 in that pronouncement. In any case, most of my life I have been (t0 a fault, perhaps) transparent and forthright about my views on all range of topics–until this year. Oh, I have spoken out about specific subjects that touch me deeply, but I have hidden my deepest thoughts and fears about the direction of politics in the United States. It has been difficult to see myself betraying the values I embraced at the University of Arizona in the early 1970s as I transformed from a naïve and conservative girl from a mining town in the West to an in-your-face and almost knee-jerk liberal who went to graduate school (twice!) at that bastion of Southern liberalism in Chapel Hill. Moreover, I have been embarrassed to have to eat the words of forty-plus years and even ashamed to confess my current thinking to my friends.

However, I have recently realized that I am in good company, growing every day, with the members of the #WalkAway movement–now almost 500,000 strong. With that throng of all ages, races, creeds, and sexual orientations, I am finally willing to confess–nay, proclaim–my developing political ideology. Because I believe that the most meaningful ideas are transmitted though narrative, I am going to collect here the stories of my initially tentative self-revelations over the last two months.

I realize that what I have written is long and tortuous (but not, I hope, torturous). I don’t expect many will have the patience to get through it all . . . but I have been voting since 1972. It’s a long story!

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