Where the Saviors Are
"K-I-D!" Coach Murphy bellowed from the pool deck at swim meets when I would ask him how our team was doing. "Don't WASTE my time with that. Go swim your heart out and get me a BETTER score."
So I'd refasten my junior-sized goggles, swing my arms back and forth like I saw the bigger kids do at the starting blocks, and try to get Coach a BETTER score in my next event.
It was, in hindsight, a pretty useful ethos: Don't sit by waiting for somebody else to make it better; go make it better yourself.
Recently, former Democratic Congresswoman Nita Lowey died. She was the first female chair of the House Appropriations Committee, a woman whose grandmotherly-ness belied a true boxer for what she believed in. "She can make you smile while you’re bleeding," Republican Henry Hyde said of her. "We call that the perfumed ice pick.”
Of that perfumed ice pick, current Republican Chair of the House Appropriations Committee Tom Cole wrote: "Nita didn't wait for history - she made it."
Appropriations is Congress-speak for funding.
Of course we want history to unfold just-so. Of course we want the score to be in our favor. But that outsources responsibility to others to make the history, to bump up the score.
The question I get the most these days is "Will we get through this?" And the answer I give is, "Yes. And we have to make it so."
What that looks like can cover the waterfront.
Not long ago, an elderly relative of mine whose memory is unspooling left the house in her pajamas and wandered two miles in frigid early morning air. A man headed out for the 5am shift saw her, called the police, and then when she wouldn't come stand in his warm garage, brought her a lawn chair and blankets and waited with her as the sun rose.
Not waiting for history. Making it.
Rebecca Solnit wrote about a group of women standing in the rain outside President Kennedy's White House protesting nuclear testing. One woman said she felt so foolish, like their effort was futile.
Years later, that same woman heard Dr. Spock - who had become a prominent voice in the anti-nuclear testing movement - say that what got him engaged was seeing a few women standing in the rain at the White House. If it meant so much to them, Dr. Spock thought, he should give it a second look. And all of it contributed to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Not waiting for history. Making it.
Every time we defy that part of ourselves that thinks, "Does calling my Senator, going to this protest, picking up this litter, running for local office (more on that here!), making music even matter anymore?" we aren't waiting for history.
As poet Alberto Rios wrote:
Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.
Coach Murphy was orphaned during the Great Depression and raised by extended family. He knew loss. And he knew rebirth. You cannot have the latter without the former. So when he told me to stop wasting his time asking the score, to go get him a better score, he was in effect saying:
You got more agency than you realize, kid. Don't wait for history to happen to you. Go happen to history.