50 at 50: Idealistic Me

I went to bed last night with a heavy heart, with another mass shooting in our nation. I woke to the news of another mass shooting. I'm lost somewhere between numb and angry -- I'm not numb to the pain, just numbed by the idea of "how many more lives must be lost?" And damn right I'm angry. I'm pissed beyond all hell that as a nation, we have turned one piece of a 225-plus-year-old document into a mantra, something that has been placed on an altar where inanimate objects of death and destruction are worshipped as an inviolable right, while the lives they have taken are treated as casual losses, just part of the collateral damage of the business.

God help us all. Not by some magical immediate end to all the evil in the world (let's face it, ain't happening) but by changing our minds and hearts.

I firmly admit that I'm an old idealistic sort. I believe in the power of love and in hope and in real prayer to change things. I believe prayer changes things not by magic but by our actions and our being the agents of change. I believe that we can still make a difference.

But I also came along with a healthy distrust of the government, the everlasting legacy of Watergate. I have zero confidence in elected authority to do the right thing at any time. I voted for people who I believed could be agents of change, and then......

I will always vote. I will always believe in the power of the people to make the real change. And so it's up to us. I don't know how but we've got to figure out how to do it. We have to be the ones to stand up and say "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH."

Because the hatred and ignorance and seething fear and unchecked racism is not the America I believe still exists, it is not the America I know still lives in our hearts. But it is the America that has lurked in a dark underbelly. It is an America that is foreign to me, even as a white female. Maybe because I have chosen not to foster it in my life. Maybe because I want to see things through the eyes of my minority brothers and sisters, to understand how in my privilege I have failed to see their pain and suffering. How I can use that privilege -- which isn't much, but it's there -- to empty myself and make things better. Thanks always to my dear friend Kevin (whom I hope to meet in heaven someday), I have learned not to be colorblind, but to see each person's beauty and their story through their eyes and their experience and to honor and love them for that.

I remember very well the idealistic 17-year-old girl who went off to college, fresh-faced, scared, but determined that I could make a difference. Well, here I am, inching ever closer to 50, and the idealism has been tempered by reality, but only slightly. I still believe in the collective power to do good - maybe not on the global level that I imagined all those years ago, but certainly where I am.

I will do it by refusing to entertain those who believe the color of one's skin determines one's worth. I will do it by refusing to single out those who come to our nation to better themselves. I will do it by standing up for wrong where it exists.

And I will love. I will love wholeheartedly. I will love without reservation. I will love regardless of condition. 

Because love has the power to change the world. Of that, I am sure.