I'm starting a substack blog...
Chance at Life
Beginnings are hard.
A blinking cursor on a fresh blank page can be intimidating for seasoned writers. It’s worse when I’m a shy and retreating person, more comfortable being a wallflower. Not comfortable putting myself out there. But nothing is impossible, people can change even in their old age.
This is an experiment. I’m starting this now because I have a book in publication entitled, Chance at Life. It’s about the regulars in a dialysis unit, who spend their days on life’s edges, acquainted with life’s precariousness.
I’m hoping to build a community of people who love life and life’s questions.
I won’t just be discussing dialysis and end of life issues, but life and spirituality and what it’s like raising a child with 22q.11 deletion syndrome and dealing with the grief when they die.
I also can’t restrain myself from talking politics. These are crazy times we are living in. I know there are many people out there with similar concerns
I’m hoping to post at least once weekly. If you are missing my blog, please email me and remind me to keep me honest
Periods of political violence, social injustice, corruption and incivility are part of our history. We are a nation which has always grappled with notions of white superiority and enforced rigid social hierarchy, often cloaked in fake science (eugenics) and Bible verses from the pulpit.
I just finished an excellent read, “A Fever in the Heartland” by Timothy Egan (2024) about the meteoric rise of the KKK in the 1920s in Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and elsewhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Everyday neighborly folks in small towns donned hoods, burned crosses, and denied even basic rights to Jews, Catholics, Blacks and immigrants. The northern KKK bought their way to power through the purchase of white Protestant preachers and well placed politicians.
But they were ultimately defeated, forced to fade into the background. And civil rights advanced.
Also reading “Devil in the Grove” by Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize Winner of 2012 about rape charges made against four young black men in Groveland, Florida in 1949. The back story of lynchings, police brutality, and the complete failure of the local justice system is mind numbing. But the NAACP, Thurgood Marshall, and the federal justice system fought back. And won. It took years, iconic leaders, and grassroots activism, but justice eventually triumphed.
Social norms changed; we moved forward.
Today is another uprising of hate. Ultimately, I do not think it will carry the day. But history shows us that the embrace of new norms, like the enfranchisement of women, takes time. Not a single woman who started the suffragette movement in the nineteenth century was alive when the Constitutional Amendment was finally adopted in 1919. It took generations of steady, fierce committment.
Whether we are once again able to subdue the intolerance, injustice, and falsehoods of today is not in question. It may not be with this election, but it will happen. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King