Dear Friend and Reader,
Just got off the phone with my mother. I left her a message earlier today telling her that if she couldn’t get to the polls for one reason or another, I would drive from New York State to Connecticut to get her to the polling place. While I’m hunched over the mortar and pestle making mustard, she calls me back. First words out of the woman’s mouth:
“I probably didn’t vote for who I was supposed to.”
I ask, “So you voted for McCain?”
“Yeah!” And immediately I could hear the vocal cords in her throat tighten like bow strings ready to fling those famous poison darts of contempt. I said to myself, now…this woman voted for a guy who she didn’t even want to vote for? That she wasn’t supposed to vote for? What exactly does that mean?
The only thing you’re supposed to do during the election is vote for who you want. If your family doesn’t like it, let them not like it and hope they aren’t the majority. It’s that simple. But now I found myself on the phone with a burlap sack of rattlesnakes. Me being the charmer that I am, I asked her, “Why did you vote for McCain?”
“Because if you hang out with a person for 20 years, it means you agree with what they’re saying.”
“Are you talking about Ayers?” I inquired probably not as coyly as I would like to believe. If I bit into a piece of horseradish at that point,В it wouldn’t have been half as hot as I felt right then. Imagine, this woman making her choice based on guilt by association. The first time IВ heard of guilt by association, I was taking a Russian History course and they were talking about Stalin.
“Yes I’m talking about Ayers. And I’m talking about that Reverend Wright. You know he damned our United States of America.”
I said to her, “I think we can all agree thatВ America is in pretty poor shape.” And I thought to myself, What do you think this is, Mom, fucking Zion?
The fact of the matter is, my mother is an example of a being who chooses to stay put in the web of her scar tissue. She doesn’t fight against the Man, because she remembers Kennedy, and calls him ‘her President.’ She remembers her hope for freedom and life getting the back of his skull blown out, a bullet dicing his brains into junk. She does not question the people with Money and Power because she was raised in a situation heavily loaded with Puritanicalism or, to be very blunt, a branch of Catholicism that promotes subjugation.
This is a woman who is afraid to leave her windows open at night because someone will come inside and slit her throat ‘like what happened to that lady in the next county.’ The woman who taught me to question the police is the same woman who just finished telling me that there is nothing I can do to change what’s coming.
“After a lifetime of watching this unfold, you’ll understand,” she says.
It’s important that I prove her wrong. It’s as important to me as it must have been for Uranus (Prometheus) when he stole the Fire of Awareness for the benefit of humankind. My mother would be Saturn at this juncture, weighted down by the limitations of her experience. I hope it works out like the myth, that later on she comes to me and says ‘thanks.’
Now back to the mustard.
-Genevieve