I'm an old man, more or less. I've learned something from that, I think.
At age 68, the main thing I've learned is patience. Patience with myself and patience with others. And more important, in terms of where I'm posting this, patient with politics and government. It was not always so.
I became politically conscious and began being an activist way back in the mid 1960s. A lot of people did. I started listening to people like Bob Dylan and learning about the history of protest movements. I had left my sleepy, conservative small town after high school, and suddenly was thrust into a different world.
Two things interested me most in those early days. 1964-65 woke me up to the Civil Rights Movement, and time at a state-run University in California woke me up to reproductive rights issues. The birth control pill was recently available, but the women at my university couldn't get it from the student health center. Something about in loco parentis policies at state colleges at the time. I also discovered that women on campus had a different set of rules, more restrictive and patriarchal, than those for men.
Late in 1964, I dropped out of college, for several reasons, and decided to do one of those cross-country ramblings in a $100 Chrysler New Yorker I bought. My initial route in the spring of 1965 was a west to east southern route. This was pre-Interstate, so the highways went through lots of small places. At one point, I ended up in Selma, Alabama, right at the time when people were gathered to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge on their way to Birmingham. I stayed there for a while, and stood at the back of a crowd of people to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. give his "How Long" speech. I was saddened, embarrassed, and guilty for what was wrong with race relations. Still later, during and after an enlistment in the USAF, I became involved in anti-war activities in the Washington, D.C. area.
I remember finding much frustration in the pace of change. A lot of people found frustration in the pace of change. That hasn't changed. Change is still frustratingly slow to occur.
And yet, change comes. Women gained access to reproductive choice. People became more free to vote, even in the deep south. The Vietnam War finally ended, to be replaced with other wars, of course, but it finally ended. Earth Day happened. People slowly became conscious of the environment and began trying to have less impact. We elected a black man to be President of The United States, something I couldn't even have imagined back in the mid-60s.
Now, I'm 68 years old. Looking back, I can see the changes I couldn't see when I was in my 20s. They are many, and they are primarily good changes. I couldn't see them then, and thought it was all too slow and too unenthusiastic. I was impatient. I couldn't understand why everyone couldn't see what needed to happen. It was frustrating. But, changes occurred. The process was slow, and still isn't complete, but there is evidence of those changes in my own lifetime.
Now, there are still many changes that are needed, and plenty of people who can see the need for those changes. It's frustrating for them (and me, still), that changes don't happen right now, today, or even yesterday. But changes will happen. They will happen because those who see the need for change work toward the change, one election at a time and one candidate at a time.
I've become more patient, I see, as I look back in time. My ideals haven't changed, but my level of patience has. Change happens, but it happens slowly. It appears to me as though that has always been the case. We need to keep pushing for change, even if we are frustrated with its pace. That's the key. If we're right and if we keep pushing, the changes will happen, if history is any guide.
What you do today, or in November, will make a difference. It will help those changes occur. You may have to look back sometime later to see that it worked, though.
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