Month: March 2025

Life is like an ice cream cone. You have to lick it one day at a time. —-Charlie Brown

I have had a sometimes difficult life, but not one that has been impossible to bear. The trauma of my young father’s death when I was eight still haunts me, but my memories of him are beautiful. They have served me well as a guide to being the best version of myself most of the time. 

After Daddy died my mother rose to the occasion of being a single parent in spite of having to surmount financial challenges that might have broken the spirit of most people. She pushed through every difficultly seemingly performing little miracles with a smile on her face. If she worried, she never showed it to me and my brothers. Instead she taught us how to be grateful for having a sturdy roof over our heads, and food on the table. Much like my father she urged us to take full advantage of education and served as a role model by going to college to earn a degree and serving as a teacher at our elementary school. 

I remember my mama burning the midnight oil studying, writing papers and poring over the bills that she always found the means to pay. I had little idea back then how stressful her life must have been and how it was slowly but surely chipping away at her mental health. I would soon learn the extent of her stress around the time that Americans first landed on the moon when she seemed uncharacteristically sad and afraid. As her symptoms became ever more frightening I had to find help for her and embark on a decades long role of giving care for her whenever her bipolar disorder returned. It was difficult and sometimes horrifying but it also forced me to dig deeply inside myself to find strength that I never believed that I had. 

I adjusted just as I had when my father died and just as my mother had done as well. I was happily enjoying purchasing a home with my husband Mike and raising my two little girls when fate stepped in once again to rattle my optimism. First I picked up a case of hepatitis that knocked me off of my feet for over three months. Then Mike somehow came down with blastomycosis, a deadly fungal disease that attacks organs. While he underwent months of chemotherapy in the hospital I envisioned life without him in case the treatment did not take. Luckily he went into remission and we picked up our lives with optimism and gusto. 

My own education had been delayed by the medical issues of my mother and husband but I was soon back at college enjoying my courses so much more with the maturity that had redefined me. I was certain that I wanted to be a teacher and I threw myself into learning the skills that I would need with a passion. Ironically at the very moment when I graduated there was a glut of teachers in the public schools so I had to change course, a talent that I had been developing from the time that I was eight. I spent my first year in a small private school with delightful students who allowed me to practice being an educator with them. It turned out to be a relationship made in heaven. It was a safe place to make mistakes and start over again and again day by day until I got it right. 

By the following year I was a veteran and ready to work with underserved students with difficulties that made anything that I had ever experienced seem like only a tiny bump in the road. I learned so much about the potential of every single person and how to draw out the talents of young people whose lives were sometimes turned upside down and inside out. I knew that I had been working my way toward this for a very long time. 

My mother’s mental health would keep me busy while I became more and more in love with my career as an educator. I went back to the university once again to earn an advanced degree. I accepted more and more responsibilities while sending my own daughters through college. I became a grandmother and witnessed my husband having a heart attack and then later a minor stroke. Fortunately he survived both and kept going with the help of talented doctors. Life went on one day at a time just as Charlie Brown predicted. 

Now I am officially retired but still teaching students who are home-schooled. My mother died about a decade ago in a beautifully peaceful manner. My father-in-law lives with us now and I share caregiving of him with my husband. My grandchildren are in their twenties. Some have already graduated from college and others are either well on their way to earning a degree or at the beginning of college life. I have an extended family of cousins, classmates, neighbors, coworkers, and former students. I have bad knees and bones but I’m still quite able. I know full well that life is very much like an ice cream cone and so far I have licked it one day at a time.  

Words fail me in this moment. In most cases they flow out of me like a waterfall. Right now I can’t even define my feelings which jump from disgust to anger to deep sadness to unremitting determination. I have witnessed a debasement of my nation by a vengeful bully who is using his office to be a spiteful agent of hate. Donald J. Trump is revealing in real time how petty, ignorant and childish he is. He is demonstrating his hatred for the United States of America and he is using the tactics of a childish tyrant to destroy decades of hard work that began with our Founding Fathers in 1776.

February 28, 2025, is a day that will live in infamy. It is the moment when Trump showed the entire world what a horrible human being he actually is. He let us all know that his approach to life is that of a mobster who is willing to lie and cheat to get what he wants. Trump lured the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to the Oval Office with the promise of a financial deal that was always in reality about staging a public ridicule at a press conference. Zelensky was ambushed by Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, and the quietly complicit Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

In a tirade unworthy of the President of the United States, Trump and gang pounded on Zelensky with allusions to card games and with taunts and lies. It was perhaps the most disgraceful breach of diplomacy and honor that has ever occurred in our nation. It befouled the dignity of the Oval Office and in only a few minutes sent the message to the entire world that the United States of America is no longer to be trusted.

I need not go into the details of the encounter. We all saw it and heard the sordid comments of Trump, Vance and Hegseth. We listened to their insults as Zelensky held his ground. It was a tirade from the so called leaders of our nation akin to rants from Adolf Hitler that we have watched on the History Channel. It’s crudity and implications have sent me and people the world over into a sense of disbelief that our nation could become so foul. 

I found myself wondering if the United States of America would even exist today if during the American revolution George Washington had been berated like Zelensky. After all, things were not looking so good for the patriots who were fighting the advanced British army. They had less funding for their efforts than the king’s men. They had less training for their soldiers. It seemed unbelievable that they had even had the temerity to stand up to the king. Only about a third of the people in the colonies were strongly in favor of the war. Some literally left for safer places. Others tried to live their lives as though the battles were not even happening. Things did not bode well for Washington and his forces but the revolution was fueled by the Declaration of Independence and a belief that the people of the thirteen colonies deserved to live under their own democracy, not bound by the vagaries of the king whose only use for them was to fill his coffers. 

I thought of Abraham Lincoln and his unwillingness to allow the United States to fall even when the Confederate army was winning battle after battle. I thought of his resolve that “the government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth.” He saved this nation from extinction even when his cause seemed hopeless.

I wondered how we Americans would have reacted if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had told Winston Churchill to face the facts that Great Britain was not going to win the war against Hitler. How much shame would we have felt if FDR had suggested that Churchill surrender?

I thought of all of the people who have lost their lives in pursuit of democracy in our own country and I felt horrified that Trump chose to humiliate the one man who is standing tall in the fight for his nation’s independence. In my mind I was screaming for members of the Republican party and those who voted for Trump to finally realize the terrible mistake that they have made. The sound of crickets nearly broke me but the courage of Zelensky reminded me that our freedom has never been free. Great men like him have had to fight to keep our own republic intact over and over again. I felt ashamed that somehow we Americans have allowed Trump to infect our country with his pettiness and ignorance. I wanted someone in that room to rise up in defence of what they surely know is the right and just thing to do.

I am still in a state of shock. I have cried. I have felt betrayed not just by Trump but frankly by those that he fooled into voting for him. I now know that we have difficult days ahead but I will speak truth and do whatever I am called to do to protect the people of our nation. I will live with the hope that this moment has galvanized the American people to demand that Trump be finally held accountable for the many treasonous things that he has done. There is no excuse for his traitorous behavior nor for his henchmen who sit looking at their hands while he tears down all that we hold sacred. I will not rest until the damage that Trump has inflicted on our nation and its reputation in the world is undone. I will also hold firmly to my support of President Zelensky and Ukraine. I know a great man when I see one.

I refuse to fold, to look away or run away. Our democracy is injured but it is not dead. Things have fallen apart but the center will hold. The resistance is growing and we are living history. We have a chance to make a difference and that is what I choose to do.