I haven’t seen Judy for fifty years, but here she is on Facebook, standing next to a sign that reads: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.” Her face not really familiar to me but it triggers the memory of another face---her mother. Of course, I might not recognize Judy herself after so many decades and never seeing her as a grown up. But when we were kids our mothers were in their prime. I remember their adult faces very well, those female models in our child lives, sometimes adversaries or rivals, subjects of our intense interest about their mysterious world of grown women and their secrets which we were beginning to intuit. And so it was Judy’s mother who jumped out at me from the computer screen, there at the Women’s March in San Francisco on January 21, as if from another world.
I last saw Judy when we were in the fifth grade, she with tousled black hair and the heft of a tomboy who could be rascally, her antics hovering at the fringe of legal elementary school decorum. We grew up in northern California and lived on the outskirts of our town where our school was nestled at the dead end of a valley. Classes were small, the postwar baby boom having just barely begun to swell the numbers of children.
When I commented about recalling her mother’s face, Judy (now Judith) responded that when she was six years old her mother took her to a march against nuclear war. The year must have been 1951 or 52, six years after Hiroshima. My mother was not as daring. Judy’s mom was probably the most radical woman my mother knew during my grade school years and I suspect that my mother was awed by her.
So here we are on
Facebook, Judith and I, sharing pictures of our respective marches, she in
northern California and me near Los Angeles; bolstered by seeing others, we’ve
powered through a fortnight of demonstrations.
For the first one, the
Day of Action to Save Health Care, I went downtown to LA General, officially
the Los Angeles County/University of Southern California Medical Center. Founded in 1878 and one of the largest public
hospitals in the US, the old hospital (Mary Pickford laid its cornerstone in
1930) stands on a hilltop in an area called Boyle Heights, once a wild mix of
Jewish, east European, Hispanic, Portuguese, and Japanese. Today it’s Latino east LA. The site reminds
me of Hurley hospital in Flint, with its current “old” building up high and new additions grafted
onto it below. Around the bus stop at the foot of the hospital hillside several
bundles stowed under benches await the homeless who gather at night around the
exhaust grates that belch gusts of warm air from the hospital.
Some 800 or 1000 people
stand on the steps of the new entrance to the medical center that slopes down
to the street. There’s a podium, yellow tape, and a small tent to our right
where security men are visible between the flaps. The first speakers are women
who tell their stories of severe, chronic conditions, of how they survived
without medicine until the ACA came along.
Then white coated staff from the hospital are introduced and the first
one stuns me. He is an African American
psychologist in the Emergency Department---LA County is a Level I Trauma Center
like Hurley. He announces that he was raised in Grand Blanc, Michigan. He rises today, he says, to speak about
Flint and the suffering there due to lead contamination. People listen in
hushed amazement to this horror story from far away.
Finally, Kamala Harris,
California’s new senator, recounts her first 48 hours in the Hart Senate
building, as old timers scurried through the halls for the late night
“vote-a-rama” marathon that culminated with the repeal of the Affordable Care
Act (http://www.rollcall.com/news/hoh/vote-rama-watch-young-brings-reporters-snacks). She tells about her parents who met in
Berkeley in the 1960s, in another era of movements and marches, and then closes
quoting Coretta Scott King: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is
never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.” Do not give up
hope, she exhorts us.
The following Saturday I
joined a small "sister" march in the LA area.
Redondo Beach organizers offered an option for families with children, a
less than two-mile walk, accessible as the organizers emphasized, for little
legs. For old legs too, I thought. The
crowd gathered slowly, women greeting
one another with happy surprise, as if slightly amazed that the event was going
to come off. Morning on the SoCal coast
and only in the high 50s, the hand-held megaphone no match for the gusty ocean
air and women glad for the warmth of a pussy hat.
Discipline from marches
past came back to me as we walk: close up the spaces and don’t leave gaps in
the march, link arms only if there’s danger, signal politely to drivers who try
to exit through the line of marchers. But this is a very relaxed, suburban
group---middle aged and younger. What would they know of civil rights or
antiwar demonstration drill? People seem
happy to be doing something, conversations are lively. Word passed through the crowd that the
organizers here got a permit for 30 people---half way through the march someone
ran by us shouting the count: 1800.
No chants in laid back
beach land or what I miss most, singing---civil rights marches swelled to the
lyrics of black church hymns, spirits rose on the resonant African American
voice. Folk song buoyed antiwar marches;
Woody Guthrie optimism pierced with the scratchy laments of Bob Dylan, the
quaver of Joan Baez, the solo voice as tenuous as the concept of peace. Anthems will come; it’s early days yet.
Meantime, other work continues. Coming up on the LA
January calendar is the annual Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count takes place
from January 24 through 26, a mission to count those on the streets and in
shelters---in 2016 it was year the largest homeless census in the nation. For three evenings volunteers in yellow vests
will head out with clipboards---a metonymy bequeathed to us in Obama’s Chicago
valedictory speech (http://www.theycountwillyou.org/homelesscount).
The tallies provide data to support a tax for services to homeless.
Judy’s mother would be
104 this year, my mother (who finally got political during Adlai Stevenson’s second presidential campaign) would have turned 100. We carry our mothers’
experience and our own, over six decades worth.
Yes, we are still protesting. Believe it.
Read more essays like this one at East Village Magazine online at http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org
