This week’s post is a bit different, a lighter lift for those of us who are Feeling May in a big way. MAY, Y’ALL! IT’S SO MUCH! Read to the end for some real inspiration.
The hypothesis is simple and doesn’t require the whole essay I wrote about it yesterday:
I need to find and emulate ordinary, non-superhero justice role models.
It’s critical that we celebrate giants like MLK and Greta Thunberg. And also it’s just as critical that we not fall into the Superhero Trap, the belief that justice is the job of only a few professional activists, people with the right temperament, the perfect set of skills and knowledge, and the vocational calling to full-time justice work.
As ever, the table lens helps. My favorite meals aren’t those where one frazzled woman labors for two days with equal parts hope and resentment, refusing all offers for help, and then finally sits down halfway through dinner, sweaty and vacant. My favorite meals are the ones where we all, together, chop and cook and clean-as-we-go while we listen to music and drink wine and eat cheese—and then we all, together, sit down at the table and drink more wine and eat pasta and pie and talk for hours, and everybody serves everybody, and everybody is the grandmother saying “here, you want more?”
We don’t get to an abundant crowded table if we don’t all help. But we can’t all help if we presume that being a five-star chef is the only way to pitch in. SO, on this site I’d like to profile some ordinary people doing imperfect but good table work. Today, a brief and delightful example.
The remembrance below is written by Becky Owen, herself an ordinary hero we’ll study at some point. Miss Kate, the irascible grandmother in Becky’s genteel Virginia family, is exactly the exemplar I need on these pollinated frenetic May days when I adore the sun and trees and hate absolutely everything else.
Who are your non-superhero justice role models? Who in your life (or reading, or social media feed) is doing table work—not perfectly, but well? As a whole, or in little bits and pieces? Would they let me interview them? I am, as you know, not kidding even a little bit. WE NEED THEM. We need to know how people like us are helping build, extend, and tend the table. (Whatever “people like us” means, whatever categories don’t come to mind when we imagine justice heroes. White people? Shy introverts? Soccer moms? Math nerds? Grumpy grandmas?)
Without further ado, Miss Kate:
My maternal grandmother, born Catherine Sheppard in 1877 [and called Miss Kate], ranted and raved and was thought a man-hater and crazy. She also spoke of the Lord’s will with certainty and intimacy. In the 1940s, she worked her “Nagasaki strawberry patch” with a hoe and picked the berries in the hot Virginia sun, one hand on her back, the other moving leaves quickly, gathering the berries. She called the work her penance for her nation’s war crimes. The money from the berries went to a girls’ school in Japan. She wanted women to lead the world. In that berry patch, she explained to me that mothers could no longer send their sons to war. One of her sons had been killed at Normandy, the other wounded. She thought women might find a better way.
...
At an Easter dinner, with fifteen or so gathered family members, Miss Kate proclaimed that no difference existed between the Kremlin and the Pentagon; both were under the dominion of the devil. The following silence was so deep and long that I thought for years the Kremlin and Pentagon must have to do with sex.
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[Later] this woman, soon to be a hundred, also told my puzzled but fascinated four-year-old that men might control the world, but they could not control her mind.
They SURE CAN’T, and NEITHER CAN MAY.
For real, whom should we profile here? Love you; we’ve got this!
Member discussion: