Advice for the Ages |
This blog is in memory of my mother, Nina Naomi. She was a teacher of American History. We were raised to love our country.
Not many women born in 1922 went on to earn a PhD, but she did, studying Native American history, the World Wars and everything in-between. She and my father visited every presidential library and birthplace. As for politics, she called herself an Independent. As far as I know, she voted for FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. I don't know about Johnson, Nixon or Ford. Nothing was knee-jerk with her. While my father was a yellow-dog Democrat, she was too knowledgeable to fall into that trap. She had strong feelings about us dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima and some regrets about Truman. He was a Missourian, however, as were we. She knew his library in Independence, Missouri well and admired him for establishing NATO.
Oh how I wish I could talk to her now. She was never a civil rights activist, but lived long enough to understand the movement. A ground-breaker in almost everything, she would mourn the loss of Federal protection for girls and women who need to terminate their pregnancies. She and I both lived during the time when abortions were illegal in Missouri and knew women whose lives were ruined by the hack jobs available in our state.
One of my mother's history professors was the ex-patriated Chancellor of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, who fled after his country's 1938 Annexation by Nazi Germany. I can just imagine what she would think of Donald Trump's idea of forcibly removing all the Gazans from their devastated homeland and making Gaza a Mediterranean resort. Or what she would think of weakening our military by firing generals. Or Trump's cosiness with Russia. I really can't list all the goings on that would alarm and distress her, knowing history as she did.
But particularly I can imagine her grief at the dismantling of the Department of Education and the siphoning of taxpayer money from the public schools, which she championed. Our local schools ranged between middle and lower-middle class to underprivileged. We all of us, needed every advantage, and the schools were wonderful. They provided.
Well, this post isn't about mindfulness, or nature, or living simply. But since this blog is in memory of Nina Naomi I feel that I have to address the profound grief (and anger) she would be feeling at this strange time in America. Whether she could find hope in history, I don't know.
For myself, I look for hope everywhere, and while not finding it abundantly, never stop looking. One place I find hope is reading Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse on Substack and going from there. Another place is writing, as here. Being with like-minded people, reading, finding consolation in nature and making any small contribution I can. You have ways too, I know. Please share. As so many of us say now, "We're in this together."
In peace, Nina Naomi's Daughter