Empowerment Epidemic

Courage has always been contagious. In Biblical times, there was a man named Nachshon, unremarkable in every respect, who took the first step into the water before the Red Sea split. After he got his feet wet, the entire Israelite nation followed him into the sea, a miraculous event we now celebrate at Passover. Courage is still contagious. You can see it spread like an unruly virus through a room full of otherwise ordinary people determined to craft a response equal to the dimensions of the outrage we all feel. The anger and disbelief launch an older woman out of her seat at an anti-Trump mixer organized to introduce all the scattered progressives in the neighborhood to each another. "I'm from Swing Left," she says. "We're gonna take down John Faso in the New York 19." "I'm from Bridge," an African-American woman tells the crowd. "We're working on Safe Communities, keeping ICE out of our towns." I'm feeling it too and even though I'm not an imposing presence, indeed shrinking with age from my full height of five feet, I jump up and turn to face the standing room only gathering. "I'm Susie Kaufman from Stockbridge. We need to get our Democratic congressman, Richard Neal, to do a town hall in the Berkshires. We have something to say and we expect him to listen."

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of anything. But this is different. The miasma of mid-century Europe hangs over us, spectral and threatening. A storm is coming, our nightmares tell us. Complete with storm troopers. The sense of foreboding and the pressure to resist impacts everyone and filters down to the most seemingly inconsequential local situations. At the community center, where remarkably I have been taking a senior women's exercise class for well over a year, there is discontent. The young woman who leads our class in the winter is about to be replaced by an older guy who returns from Florida in May and expects to resume his teaching gig. We don't like his tasteless jokes and the way he singles people out for praise and criticism. Vulnerable seventysomethings have developed sore shoulders and lower back pain because he doesn't seem to know what he's doing. We petition the director to keep our female teacher in place and it works.  Speaking up has caught on. It's all the rage. The more you do it, the more you do it, and the more you do it, the more other people are influenced by the example of your bravery.

The same is true for writers and performers. Suddenly, there's an explosion of local talent, people reading, delivering monologues, storytelling, making music. At first, they're so frightened I can hardly hear what they're saying. They stand in front of the audience hunched over and whispering, hoping it will all be over soon. But now I see countless people just marching out to the edge of the precipice, raining their art down on us, an act of sublime generosity. Some of it is tender, reflective, but some of it is propelled by the energy of the fury. They are reluctant rockets of prophesy, these people. Their pronouncements are cutting straight through the swamp gas we are all breathing. Women, in particular, are refusing to play dead. Women flooded the streets of Washington and many other cities on January 21st. They prayed with their feet, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said in Selma. Now it's our turn to shout NO WAY. This is not armchair politics. People are asking each other, what are you doing in the resistance?

The gravity of our situation is bringing people out of hiding, reminding each of us that when the Passover haggadah speaks of slavery, it is both a metaphor and a newsreel. It is a metaphor for our entrapment in self, for our fear and an everyday reality on the ground. Syrians are enslaved, assaulted by chemical weapons, made into pawns in a satanic political game, Trump and Putin executing the daylight play. African-Americans are enslaved, vulnerable to violence on their way back from a 7-11 with a bag of Skittles. Palestinians are enslaved, on this the 50th anniversary of the Occupation. Women are enslaved by panels of men deciding their reproductive future. Pharaoh is ruthless and powerful, but every day a new Nachshon arrives at the Red Sea, casts off her cloak of invisibility and puts her foot in the water. It's an epidemic.

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.