Shaping My Words

March 24, 2013

By Margaret Randall

Page 2

It’s not that I want to dwell on suicide. I don’t feel that it solves any but the most personal of dilemmas. It is an individual choice though, and one I respect even as it often makes me rage and weep.

What I want to write about today is this time in which we find ourselves: a time of such perverted values, sanctioned violence, greed and corruption perpetrated by governments, armies, corporations and individuals; a social distortion so powerful it seems it cannot be stopped. It is a time that has certainly made me contemplate the possibility of leaving, and enabled me to understand why some make that choice.

I confess there are moments when I am glad my generous and justice-loving father didn’t live to witness this world he would have found so hard to accept; and times as well when I myself can imagine the peace of oblivion.

Then I think of my grandchildren.

We have reached a moment in human evolution that foretells an uncertain future at best, and a future that in palpable ways is already here. It is a future that shows its voracious fangs and seems to mock our attempts to pursue a course that favors a culture of life over one of death.

When it comes to climate change, those in power have all but brought our earth to a point of no return. When it comes to war, there are always new ones to wage, and old ones we must continue fighting because our country’s skewed sense of patriotism goes where reason no longer resides. When it comes to economic survival, everyone but the rich and entitled are expendable. Workers are replaced by machines, or by their counterparts in other countries who will labor for less and in worse conditions. Then they are simply downsized en masse because, well, the country is suffering an “economic downturn” (read: recession, depression, what you will). It can’t be helped. Despite periodic exposés, I know those responsible will never be held accountable.

When it comes to shelter, the U.S. is showing the world how corporate interests get away with luring people into buying houses they cannot afford and then punishing them with eviction when they are unable to pay their mortgages. When it comes to health and public education and caring for the elderly, there’s no money for any of that because we’re spending it all on war. And so it goes, in a disintegrating and out-of-control downward spiral. What can we do to break the cycle? Where can we sink our teeth into viable forms of resistance?

Many in the U.S. believe that in our democratic system we can vote our way out of the morass; and that our democracy should be eagerly embraced by peoples everywhere. But to even get on a ballot in our country today one must first be able to raise billions of campaign dollars, and then feel comfortable telling obscene lies about others and making promises impossible to keep. Political interests are such that it is irrelevant to ask if politicians are breaking promises because they are forced to, or out of unadulterated deceit.
I am almost 77, and have only once had the opportunity to vote for, rather than against, a presidential candidate. My exercise of suffrage started with a 1960 vote against Nixon. I am ashamed to say I thought it would be different with Obama; for a very short time it felt good to have finally voted for a candidate about whom I could get excited.

Al Qaeda chalked up a victory on September 11, 2001 far beyond taking the lives of 3,000 men and women, and devastating treasure in its three coordinated attacks. The element of surprise caught the United States off guard, and there are arguments that claim there was no way we could have avoided that aspect of the tragedy.

The other part—ongoing, ruthless, and threatening to destroy everything our nation is supposed to stand for—we brought and bring upon ourselves. I am talking about the Bush administration’s refusal to look at why a crazed fundamentalist faction of Islam would attack us as it did, and that administration’s preemptive declaration of war against a country that had nothing to do with the assault. I am talking about a government’s rash decision to limit personal freedoms. And I am talking about Obama’s continuation of his predecessor’s racist and national security-centered policies, which only deepen the divide between “them” and “us.”

You may be wondering why I begin with a suicide and then offer my hopeless reading of what I perceive as power politics gone mad.

My question is: what can we do? Realistically, what can those of us in the United States who despise U.S. exclusionism, war and the arrogance of nation building, do to end our military’s presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and so many other places where lack of trustworthy news keeps a naïve public unaware of our belligerent involvement?

What can we do to save Medicare, Medicaid, Education, Arts and other social services already compromised and pitifully meager when compared with those provided as rights in most of the industrially advanced countries? What can we do to preserve what’s left of our public education system, and work toward universal health care? What can we do to keep gains such as freedom of dissent and women’s reproductive rights—won through such intense and costly struggles—when they are being eroded each day by legions of Bible-thumping Tea Partying crazies? What can we do so our nation may truly become a place where all its citizens—of all races, genders and ideas—can feel at home?

I link suicide and our government’s grotesquely lopsided value system and set of priorities because, for as long as I can remember, this is the first time I feel a sense of utter defeat about the future. Is checking out a real alternative, be it quite literally as Haydée did or figuratively by ceasing to struggle for a better world and simply contenting oneself with “getting by?”

On the thirtieth anniversary of Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, I was struck by his public reference to the fact that every one of the crimes committed against him by Richard Nixon, crimes that cost Nixon the presidency, are legal today. The Patriot Act has legitimized those crimes and given tacit permission to the justifications behind them, once anathema to American ideals. When this sort of criminality is permitted, indeed encouraged and applauded, where does that leave those of us who have struggled all our lives for justice, peace and tolerance? Where does it leave our world?

It may leave some of us heading for the exit.

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This piece was written by:

Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall (1936) was born in New York City but grew up in Albuquerque and lived half of her adult life in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. When she returned to the U.S. in 1984 she was ordered deported under the U.S. Immigration and Nationality's McCarran-Walter Act. The government alleged that her writings, "went against the good order and happiness of the United States." She won her case in 1989.

She is a local poet who reads nationally and internationally. Among her recent books of poetry are My Town, As If The Empty Chair / Como Si La Silla Vacia, and The Rhizome As A Field of Broken Bones, all from Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas. A feminist poet's reminiscence of Che Guevara, Che On My Mind, is just out from Duke University Press, a new collection of essays, More Than Things, is out from The University of Nebraska Press, and Daughter of Lady Jaguar Shark, a single long-poem with 15 photographs, is now available from Wings. Her most recent poetry collection is About Little Charlie Lindbergh (also from Wings Press).

Randall resides in Albuquerque with her partner, the painter Barbara Byers, and travels widely to read and lecture. You can find out more about Margaret, her writings and upcoming readings at, www.margaretrandall.org.