flipflop_diva

When I was a kid, the world was simple. Black and white. Right and wrong. Everything neatly in its place.

Taxes were bad. Big government was bad. Abortions were wrong, because people killed babies because they were having a boy and they wanted a girl. The death penalty was good because bad guys shouldn’t get to live when the people they hurt didn’t. People on welfare were lazy and just didn’t want to work. Only bad girls had sex before marriage.

In sixth grade, my last year of elementary school where I lived, we had a mock election. George Bush Sr. won by a landslide. Only a few people voted Democrat. Our next-door neighbors were two of them. I remember thinking how they didn’t know any better, but it was okay, because we lived in America, and America was great.

In America, when I was a kid, we took a few minutes every morning to pledge our allegiance to the flag. And every Fourth of July we proudly wore our red, white and blue. My parents would take us to watch fireworks, and we’d sit with our friends and proudly and loudly sing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

I never thought about what it would be like to live in another country, because I never needed to. I was lucky to be born in America. I was lucky to live in a place where so many people before me were willing to die so we could be free.

We were special. Life was great. Everything was simple.

Black and white. Right and wrong. Everything neatly in its place.

And then I went to college.

--

I was born and raised in a very conservative city in the middle of Southern California, just outside Los Angeles. Not everyone in the city I grew up in was rich, but most people were.

Growing up, I would have said we were barely more than poor, because that’s what my dad would always insist. But in reality, we were very well off. Not quite rich, but definitely not poor.

My parents paid for my sister and I to go to college. I got loans to pay for grad school, but college they paid for. My parents also bought us brand new cars that they went down to the car dealer to get and paid for in cash. They took us on vacations every summer, to places like Hawaii and Disney World.

Maybe I should have known better. Maybe I should have recognized the privilege I was born into so much earlier than I did. Maybe it shouldn’t have taken going to college for me to open my eyes.

But I was born and raised in a very conservative city with very conservative parents who were friends with other very conservative people. The only Democrats I even knew growing up were our neighbors, and we never talked about politics, because we were kids and we had other things to talk about, like school and homework and what games we should play on hot summer nights and how high of scores we could get on Tetris.

And when I grew up, we didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have cell phones. Social media wasn’t a thing. My parents didn’t even let us have cable TV. We had history books that were approved by our schools and a library where we mostly checked out fiction and friends who looked just like us and not much of a reason to think I should have been looking at other perspectives. Why would I? My parents were the smartest people I knew, and I always thought I wanted to be just like them.

A few days after I turned eighteen, there was a woman registering people to vote outside the Target we always went to. I excitedly gave the woman all my information.

“Republican or Democrat?” she asked when it got to that question.

“Republican,” I said proudly. Next to me, my mom smiled, also proud.

A couple months later, my mom and I walked down the street together. Our polling place for that year’s primary elections was in an old church a few blocks up from where we lived. I stood in line beside my mom and waited for our turn.

When we got to the front of the line, my mom told the woman checking our IDs how it was my first time voting.

“First time voting!” she exclaimed, and the other workers there that day cheered and clapped too.

I grinned, feeling so proud to be part of this thing called democracy.

That day, I voted for all Republicans. Because my parents did and it was what I knew and what they said was best. And I hadn’t thought back then, barely over eighteen and not yet out of high school, that I needed to second guess them.

--

Toward the end of my freshman year of college, a few of my friends and I made a weekend trip to Portland. Our friend Colbie was from there, and her mom had said we could all stay at her house. So we gathered into our other friend Danielle’s car, and we drove the hour or so it took to get there.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe I was expecting her house to be along the lines of the one I grew up in. Maybe I was expecting her neighborhood to be along the lines of the one I grew up in.

Her house was small. Two bedrooms and two bathrooms for a family of six. One car for everyone.

And for the first time, it really hit me.

Not everyone had what I grew up with. Not everyone’s experiences were the same as mine.

Maybe this should have been obvious. Maybe I should have realized this years and years before. Maybe I should have been less oblivious and more self-aware and less selfish.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But I was nineteen years old, away from home for the first time in my life (at a small, private college where most people probably did grow up like I did) and I did finally realize it. I did finally see it.

And that day the first chip formed in the rose-colored glasses my parents had slipped over my eyes the day I was born.

--

That day, when I visited my friend Colbie’s house in downtown Portland, was almost twenty-seven years ago now.

Now, there is nothing left of those rose-colored glasses. Now, like so many others, I am angry and I am frustrated and I am disappointed. In my country, in my state, in politicians who are supposed to represent the people, in my family members who refuse to look beyond their black and white point of view.

Sometimes I want to leave. Sometimes I think it would be easier to pack it all up and just go. To another state. Another country. To some other place where people believe that healthcare is a right and that women can be trusted to make their own choices.

But I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to give up.

Because, in many ways, it would be easy for me to leave. I have a job that I can work from home from anywhere. My husband has a job that he can work from home as long as it’s within the United States. We don’t have to stay in Texas if we don’t want. We could sell our house, get enough money to move, and we could go. To somewhere else, far, far from here.

But I’m lucky. My husband and I are lucky. Because we can leave. Because we are privileged enough to have that choice. But there are a lot of people who can’t. Who really are stuck. Who need people to stay and fight because they can’t do it themselves.

And so we will. Because I believe — because I have to believe — that things can be better.

I was once one of those people. Everything was black and white, right or wrong. But I learned and I saw and I changed. I see so many shades of gray where I used to just see black and white. I see a world that’s complex and hard, where things don’t always go as planned and where people in power make things worse more than they make things better.

I learned and I saw and I changed, and I have to believe other people can change too. I have to believe there are more people who believe what I do than there are not, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

And so we’ll stay. Because we can. And we’ll fight. So my children can grow up in a world that’s better than this one. So someday they can put on their red, white and blue and they can sing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and they can be proud. Proud that in the end their country did the right thing.

At least I hope that will be their future. I want to hope it will be. I need to hope it will be. Because, sometimes, right now, that hope is the only thing keeping me going.

Non-Fiction.

Gratuitous photo of the two little ones I want to fight for.

This was written for

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