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katallisonYesterday afternoon, while waiting for the bus, it struck me that my vacation is over. Dammit.
I was raised to be politically engaged, in a spirited and yet genteel way, by my League-of-Women-Voters-local-president mother. Vote, write your congressman, maybe compose the occasional civil letter to the editor. All well and good.
In the late 60s/early 70s, I was ungenteely activist in the ways many of us were back then, with the signs and the chanting and the getting pepper-fogged and all. Which was fun, though exhausting, and also sometimes ow.
In the 80s, I got heavily into politics, on a number of levels. I went to grad school in public affairs, I attended precinct caucuses and got elected as delegate to district conventions, I went to more community-group meetings than I care to recall, I went to endless City Council meetings, I was on a first-name basis with most of the City Council (and was drinking buddies with one or two of them, as well as with the director of the city Redevelopment Agency, and some heavyweight bankers and private developers). I fundraised, I networked, I wrote a couple of policy documents for mayoral review, I brokered loans for minority-owned nail salons and record shops, I broke up fistfights between drunken old-lefties at scummy bars.
Around 1990, I said, Enough. I have had it. I wash my hands of this. I'm passing the fucking torch, and from this day forth, as god is my witness, I'll never sit through a neighborhood meeting again, from where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever.
And for fourteen years, I was pretty much at peace with that decision. I figured I'd done my time, that dues had by god been paid, y'know?
So understand if I am lacking the vim that some of my younger and fresher friends are bringing to the prospect of renewed political engagement. I feel tired, and creaky, and distinctly lacking in much optimism about the innate gratifications of grassroots activism.
But the line that's been going through my head the last few days is one from some old poem of Allen Ginsberg's--America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel...
Fuck. This was not how I wanted to spend my declining years, but events have made it clear that what I want is not on the menu this decade, and so--yeah, wheel, shoulder putting to, got it. Though I'll be just as glad to give the pepper fog a pass this time, thx.
I was raised to be politically engaged, in a spirited and yet genteel way, by my League-of-Women-Voters-local-president mother. Vote, write your congressman, maybe compose the occasional civil letter to the editor. All well and good.
In the late 60s/early 70s, I was ungenteely activist in the ways many of us were back then, with the signs and the chanting and the getting pepper-fogged and all. Which was fun, though exhausting, and also sometimes ow.
In the 80s, I got heavily into politics, on a number of levels. I went to grad school in public affairs, I attended precinct caucuses and got elected as delegate to district conventions, I went to more community-group meetings than I care to recall, I went to endless City Council meetings, I was on a first-name basis with most of the City Council (and was drinking buddies with one or two of them, as well as with the director of the city Redevelopment Agency, and some heavyweight bankers and private developers). I fundraised, I networked, I wrote a couple of policy documents for mayoral review, I brokered loans for minority-owned nail salons and record shops, I broke up fistfights between drunken old-lefties at scummy bars.
Around 1990, I said, Enough. I have had it. I wash my hands of this. I'm passing the fucking torch, and from this day forth, as god is my witness, I'll never sit through a neighborhood meeting again, from where the sun now stands, I shall fight no more forever.
And for fourteen years, I was pretty much at peace with that decision. I figured I'd done my time, that dues had by god been paid, y'know?
So understand if I am lacking the vim that some of my younger and fresher friends are bringing to the prospect of renewed political engagement. I feel tired, and creaky, and distinctly lacking in much optimism about the innate gratifications of grassroots activism.
But the line that's been going through my head the last few days is one from some old poem of Allen Ginsberg's--America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel...
Fuck. This was not how I wanted to spend my declining years, but events have made it clear that what I want is not on the menu this decade, and so--yeah, wheel, shoulder putting to, got it. Though I'll be just as glad to give the pepper fog a pass this time, thx.