Resistance is Worthwhile

“I had to turn the TV off. I was screaming, I tell you, SCREAMING at it!” Mom told me after watching a news conference during which our president blamed DEI and Joe Biden for a plane crash. “He is the most despicable human placed into this universe.” a post read from her on Facebook, her first post possibly ever aside from a blurry IPad picture here and there. At 90 years old, she has arguably seen enough for two lifetimes and knows bullshit when she sees it. “I tell you I was SCREAMING.” she reiterated. She was in the ICU a little over a week ago and nearly cashed it in. Now? She’s using her oxygenated breath to let me know how she really feels about Donald Trump. “He’s tetched” was all she could say about Robert Kennedy, Jr. Tetched means not all there for those of you wondering.

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For those of you readers who support and voted for Trump, I hear you and love you still. I know that politics is a topic that many wish to stay away from. I get it. However, this is no longer about politics but about values. Clearly, what I value in my life and in this country is wildly different from what you value. When there is a crisis of values, relationships suffer. My kids, half Salvadoran, worry that this current situation is going to have a negative effect on their Salvadoran father and family. They hear the rhetoric and it is clear to them what it is—racism. There’s really no explaining that away by saying “it’s just politics.” No it isn’t. This is immorality parading around with Jesus as a sidekick as if he, honestly a radical leftist of his time, would have ever sided with them. We are normalizing hatred of one another, all of us the working stiffs of this world, while a bunch of very rich, mostly white, men run our country. Together they have more money than all of us combined. They are NOT for the working class and never will be.

The antithesis of “woke”, Mom is just tired and completely without filter anymore. “I hate that bada ba ba baaaa” she said after a McDonald’s commercial aired for the 2342nd time. “I’m sick of it.” No longer holding back, I am inclined to see most of what she says as truth whether I agree with it or not. To know her is to know that she cannot be ignored or dismissed and that includes any and all of her opinions. She will roll her eyes at a lot of the wokeness of the more recent generations and tell anyone under 30 that they think entirely too much about themselves and their identities, spend too much time on their idiot phones, and need a real war in their lifetime to wake them up. She’s had it. With all of it. Now that she is watching that all the idiocy has resulted in the Bigoted Bunch running our country, she’s really had it. But, as she said before, she’s “not protesting and not waving any flags” and she’s “going to sit right here” in her chair, spitting fire until she runs out of breath.

“She’s got a pair of hips just like two battleships!” Mom sang as she went about the arduous task of changing her pants the other night. This is a song from South Pacific that apparently goes through her head every single time she puts on and takes off pants. Sometimes I forget exactly how old she is and how much she has lived through in her life. Her sayings and songs fill in the blanks here as the kids wander in and out of our common living spaces. Tonight is trash night and I guarantee you she will sing “Take out the papers and the trash…..or you won’t get no spending cash!” as the kids scurry around here. My kids, absorbing this distilled wisdom, are much more empathic, thoughtful, and caring than I was at their age. I don’t give them enough credit for living through all that they have with the slow loss of their Grampy and the bumpy ride of caring for their Nana through illness in her golden years. They slept through the paramedics that came last week and I’m not surprised. My point in writing about all of this is that I believe, with my whole heart, that the opinions, feelings, and values of all those under this roof are well developed and carefully thought out. We, this multigenerational sampling of our country, will continue to speak out and resist all the damage that is currently being done all the while clinging to our hope that we can be better than this. At the very least, my many videos of Mom ranting can entertain us all for days.

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