What America needs right now, more than anything else, is a grandma! We’ve always had our Uncle Sam, but today we need Grandma Samantha to wrap her arms around us, dry our tears, bind our wounds, and tell us we’re going to get through whatever lies ahead.
Remember your grandma? She was the one who had the time to sit and listen to you when you were sad or to laugh with you when you were happy. You knew your parents loved you, but they were often distracted by work schedules and financial pressures and all the million responsibilities of raising a family. Grandma gave you the gift of her time. When you talked to her, she made you feel you were the only thing in her life that mattered at that moment.
When you screwed up, your grandma could wrap you in her warm, soft, flabby arms and shed a few tears with you, knowing she was not the one who would have to mete out whatever discipline might be required. She could just be there and feel your pain.
When you had a falling out with a sibling or a cousin, your grandma didn’t take sides; she loved you equally and used the power of her love to arbitrate, draw you back together, and help you resolve your differences.
Grandmas have presence, dignity, gravitas. Your grandma can tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear, and you’ll listen and respect her words. Grandma can bind up your wounds, let you cry on her shoulder, and share the wisdom she’s gained from six or seven decades of life experiences. She’ll show you her scars and tell you when you might be headed down a similar risky path.
You also saw your grandma wrap her arms around your mom and dad a few times when they were overwhelmed by life and tell them it would be okay and she would be by their side throughout any trial life might throw at them. She seemed so much bigger than life, it was hard to imagine that she had her own private pain.
A dear friend wrote to me this week,
Barb, we are at the beginning of the end of our natural lives. We have women friends who are kindred spirits, we have children and grandchildren, goddaughters and students whom we instilled with democratic values. It’s up to us to use our remaining time to work for our loved ones. They need our wisdom, our years of living through hard times, and our “we are over 60 and we don’t give a shit what you think of us” attitude to move them and us to a better place, and to win back what we have lost to the people who ultimately don’t care about us.
Thank you, Bevi, and amen, especially to the “We are over 60 and we don’t give a shit what you think of us” part.
So to all of the women who are in that “We are over 60 and we don’t give a shit what you think of us” group, it’s time for us to unite. You don’t have to be a biological grandma; you just have to possess a grandma’s heart for the needy, suffering people of the world and for those who will be most affected by the dark prospects that lie ahead of us in the next four years. In fact, you don’t even have to be a woman and you don’t have to be over 60. If you have time and energy to spare, join us grannies to shine some light into the coming darkness.
I read an article this morning by Neal Gabler (http://billmoyers.com/story/farewell-america/) about the devastation of what has happened this week. We all feel powerless against large, menacing forces; and it’s easy to give in to that helplessness and do nothing. But fellow Grannies, we don’t have that luxury. We have to spend whatever years remain to us living as if the world depends on us, because it does. We have to be the source of what Neal Gabler calls “trickle-up decency.” We couldn’t prevent the election of a demagogue, we can’t stop him and his evil minions from doing whatever they’re going to do, but—dammit!—we can be decent. And we can show others how it’s done, and we can shed light into darkness.
Decency begins with respect, and respect requires us to look inward before we can look outward. We have to examine ourselves for any shred of prejudice or intolerance and eliminate those ugly attitudes from our lives. And don’t be too quick to say, “Oh, I don’t have any prejudices.” We all have some if we’re honest. Right now, I’m prejudiced against every person who voted to elect Donald Trump as our president. I don’t care about their reasons or what good they thought they were doing for the world. I’m angry, and I don’t want to speak to any of them ever again. Obviously, our country can’t survive if we’re all angry at each other. We must forgive and, like a good grandma, listen to what they have to say. We won’t get anywhere by shutting off communication with any of our fellow citizens, so I for one have some work to do.
Not everyone who voted for him is an ignorant, bigoted, chanting redneck. My neighbors across the street are in their eighties and some of the sweetest, kindest, most helpful people I know; yet they’ve had one of those signs in their yard for a couple of months now. I’d like to talk to them sometime about why they’d have done such a thing; but to be able to have these conversations, we all have to get over our fear of talking about “politics” with each other. Maybe that’s part of the reason we’re in this mess. At a meeting I attended one evening this week, one person expressed that he had been in a funk since the election, and a couple of others commiserated; then one person firmly demanded that we move on to another subject. Perhaps he was right and that meeting was not the time or place, but we need to find a time and place where we can listen to each other with respect.
We can’t trickle anything up if we’re not doing anything ourselves. We no longer have the luxury of trusting the process to those who are “political”; we all have to get political, and we have to begin when there’s no election going on. Tensions run high during a campaign; the time to gain ground is when heads are a little clearer. I’ve seen several lists on social media this week of ways to get involved and places that can use everyone’s skills and passions to keep our country great. Our country has always been great; we don’t have to make it great again, we just have to help keep it great.
I’m going to be in contact with one of my canvassing volunteers who was touched by some people she met in one of the poorest communities in Fort Myers. They didn’t know when to vote or how to vote or where to vote, and they had limited ability to get to the polls. It’s doubtful that any of them were able to vote on November 8. This volunteer and I are retired teachers, so we’re thinking of going to their community center and teaching them how to exercise their rights as citizens. Look around you. Whom do you see? What are their needs? What can you do to fulfill those needs?
Being involved requires being informed. This, too, is no longer an option; and we have to do our homework at all times, not just the night before a test or during the heat of a campaign. Since we live in an age when we’re inundated with information, we must be smart enough to sort through it all and know the difference between what’s true and what is published just to validate one side’s prejudices. I’ve read a lot lately about fake news sites. Come on, we can all be smarter than that!
As an educator, I lament the failures of a system that for the last couple of decades has focused more on high-stakes standardized tests than on teaching students to read the news and to think critically. Figuring difficult math problems and knowing when to use “who” and when to use “whom” are essential skills, but anyone who can do those things yet does not have the ability to understand concepts and apply reasoning to a situation is not an educated person. My grandmas told me, “There are three sides to every situation: my side, your side, and the right side.” The problem now is that we’re too busy defending our own points of view to care about finding the truth.
Like Grandma, we need to be bipartisan. We need to love our neighbors of all persuasions and make unity more important than winning. When we’re united, we all win; when we’re divided, we all lose. Recently, my daughter and I had a long conversation about what makes our relationship work so well; and we concluded that it’s because both of us care more about our relationship than we care about our own egos. We don’t always agree, but neither of us is going to burn the house down just to prove we’re right. As citizens, we’re Americans first; we’re family, and we need to start acting like it.
We also have to include some trickle-up spirituality. If praying is part of your belief, this would be an excellent time to do as much praying as you can. If praying’s not your thing, then teach younger people that we’re all connected in spirit; that’s my definition of spirituality. What hurts one hurts us all; what helps one helps us all. We’re in this together. Part of spirituality, to me, is empathy; and sadly, I haven’t seen a lot of that lately. We have to model the ability to get inside another person’s head and see the world through their eyes.
If we all did that, we wouldn’t have the absurd debates about whether black lives matter or all lives matter. We’d know that all lives matter but that some folks have never been shown how much they matter. I’m an old white woman, and I’ve never been part of the privileged class, but I’ve never doubted that my life matters. I worried about many things when my two sons were teenagers and out exploring the world on their own, but one thing I never had to worry about is whether one of them would be shot by a nervous policeman or armed citizen because of his skin color. Come on, this is not really difficult. You don’t lose anything by giving affirmation and assurance to another human being; you gain. Let your new motto be “What would Granny do?”
Grannies, forget whatever plans you had for that rocking chair! Let Hillary Clinton’s victory be that she has launched an entire army of grandmas who will do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, as long as ever we can. We’re going to set all that good in motion and let it trickle up to hurting people everywhere!
Now, go find someone who needs a hug, someone who needs to be heard, someone who needs a kind word, someone who needs to know that their life matters. Find a place where your gifts can help to give encouragement and hope to those who need it. Do it like the world depends on it, because it DOES! Let your goodness and decency trickle up through the layers of pain and hopelessness so that the generations who will be here after we’re gone will be better for our having lived and will know we cared. “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (I Cor. 13:13). Go find someone who needs your love!