Sad

Gwen, Linda, and Karen, June 1961

Presidents Day 2025

I took a walk this afternoon while my daughter was working out with her trainer. It was cold as I walked east on Madison Street, and even colder when I turned back and faced west. But I was dressed for the weather — warm coat, new insulated gloves, wool hat and flannel-lined jeans — and both my mood and my body needed the brisk walk, the cold air on my cheeks, in my nose and my lungs. 

Madison Street in Forest Park and the cross streets to the south are my old neighborhood, where I rode my bike and walked to school. As I headed down Beloit, towards my mom's old house, I thought about being sent to school in this kind of weather, walking four or five blocks with a scarf wrapped over my face and pants on under my skirt. Off we went on cold winter days, and nobody thought much of it. School did get cancelled when the temperatures were consistently below zeros, and we had several days off during the Big Snow of 1967. 

Today my walk took me past the old savings and loan building at Madison and Desplaines. It's empty now and it's for sale. I looked through the front window and down the spiral staircase that led to a community room in the basement. I remembered going there on a Saturday afternoon with my dad and my sisters to get the polio vaccine, probably in 1961 when the oral vaccine became commercially available. It was a community event. We had probably brought a note home from school from the public health department sponsoring the event. We waited our turn and eyed the sugar cubes holding the vaccine  lined up on the table. We picked one, popped it in our mouths and crunched it and came back a few weeks later for a second dose. 

Going to First Savings, the first bank to occupy this building, was not a novelty. We went there happily on Saturdays with my dad when he did his (in-person!) banking. Most days we left with small rolls of LifeSavers, offered to us by the guard or the receptionist. More sugar. 

I imagine this easy-peasy polio protection meant a lot to parents. Of course they took advantage of it! Thinking back, I realize that I knew some children who'd had polio, who walked with a limp, whose parents had probably been very scared when they were sick. It was not something I had to worry about with my kids. 

As I was waking up this morning, head still buried in the pillow, trying to zero in on what day of the week it was, the first full sentence that came to my mind was, "I am sad for my country." This is what comes of doom-scrolling before bed. The ironies inherent in a 2025 celebration of U. S. presidents (I'm looking at you, Abe Lincoln and General Washington) didn't dawn on me until later. 

In my lifetime I have seen these United States become a more inclusive place, that arc of the universe bending towards justice. I don't know that I remember the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but I do remember Everett Dirksen, the Republican senator from Illinois who rounded up votes to make it possible. I remember the civil rights struggles, the voting rights act, the gradual changes in the acceptance of the LGBTQ community during my college and graduate school years, and the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). 

When I was a child, my aunt taught a Sunday School class for what we then called "mentally retarded" children and adults. I learned from listening to adult conversations that many of these individuals, who lived with their parents, didn't go to school. Schools for them were far away, or expensive, or unable to take any more students. Decades later, thanks to the IDEA and federal funding for special education, my daughter who has Down syndrome was picked up by a school bus and educated in our local public schools. 

With Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, and SNAP, we've also become a nation that cares for the sick and feeds women, children and families who simply need to eat.

The wrecking ball of the Trump presidency and Elon Musk's DOGE empire are threatening and destroying one thing after another, things government does for the good of all. American media has too many pundits already; I don't need to my bit about rich, narcissistic, foolish white men, their delusions and their resentments. 

But how did we get here? Many Americans go into the voting booth every four years with "throw the bums out" as their decision point. Incumbents lose when people are unhappy about the economy. It's not necessarily a formula for rational governance, although it seems to work well in politics. 

But what's happening in the U. S. right now, what's making me so sad, is the shift in values in our leaders. They don't care, they don't take care, they're not even hypocritical about saying they care. They certainly don't subscribe to the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote that "unless all are free, no one is free." Ever-expanding freedom means freedom from want and fear, along with the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights.

The world keeps changing. Social media, social isolation, polarization, globalization, changes in how the economy works and who it works for — it's a lot. Our brains were designed for making our own little gardens grow. The show of power, the slashing and burning, are reassuring for some, sticking it to people who might take what they already have, or wish they had. But it makes the world less good for everybody.

It makes me sad.