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July 12, 2005
The Slow and Steady Fire
One unusual side effect of my own personal aging process has been a greatly increased ability to understand Carly Simon songs. I noticed it first a couple of months ago when I was driving down the highway thinking 'bout my Orange One and "Loving You's the Right Thing To Do" came on the radio. Then a few weeks later I heard "Haven't Got Time for the Pain" and thought about how ever since I've known CR, I haven't had time to feel that body angst that afflicts almost all women. Well, it happened again.
This evening I was driving down the highway after a meeting with nurses and I was listening to the "Coming Around Again" album... you know, the one that was featured in that excellent movie Heartburn by Nora Ephron. The song "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of" came on, and for the first time I thought I got it. I've always fast-forwarded through the song before because on the face of it, it's about marriage, and how women should try to look at their husbands differently when they get bored and wonder if the grass might be greener elsewhere. As I have never been married, I didn't think the song had that much to say to me.
But tonight, as I was leaving a meeting where nurses came together to take the first brave step towards organizing a union, I finally got the song.
I finally understood because instead of thinking of it in the context of marriage, I thought about it in the context of my organizing work. There are times when I get frustrated with the seemingly glacial progress of organizing workers, and when I despair of ever seeing a better day. Yet, at these moments when I have the great honor and priviledge of helping nurses take one small amount of control over their work lives, I realize that while my passion for my work has grown and changed over the years, sometimes flaring up, sometimes mellowing out, it remains a slow and steady fire. The process of organizing is by defintion person by person: you don't move mountains with one stick of dynamite, you move them one little rock at a time. The campaign I started tonight is tiny: looks like just 26 professionals, the smallest I've ever done. My last election was 1200 RN's! But it doesn't matter: organizing workers is one of the most pure forms of transmission of the life force that I have ever encountered. As the hockey player said in The Cutting Edge (a movie that people who love me should study like the Bible), "There are only two things I do really well, sweetheart. And skating is the other one."
I get cynical. I get downtrodden. I get to despairing and my co-workers and I sit around dreaming up booths that would be featured in a Festival of Futility. [Envision: Sisyphus station: Contestants roll a very heavy boulder up a hill. Just as they reach the top, it falls back down to the bottom.] We have had hard times and we have had good times. But like Billy Joel so famously said, "I took the good times. I'll take the bad times. I'll take you just the way you are."
My passion has changed so much over the years that for awhile I thought its flame had gone out entirely. I was willing to put aside my beloved organizing career to go do the OTHER thing I really, really believe in, and that was fundraise for the Mprize. I often reflect that I am extremely blessed to have more than one cause to which I may passionately devote my energies. I am also blessed that I can continue to work hard as an unpaid volunteer for the Mprize while I pursue my full-time passion at work.
Being a part of a movement that is moving so slowly that at times it appears to be caught in a bad supermarket line is great preparation for doing CR. I often say that organizing means mimimal return for maximal effort, but if you don't make the maximum effort, you get no results whatsoever. I come at any endeavor with the attitude that I will have to work very, very hard, and may see few results immediately, even in my lifetime. I am not kidding when I say I need radical anti-aging biomedicine to see my life's work come to fruition. I really mean that. I will pour out my heart and soul in organizing 26 workers, while millions remain unorganized, for the time being. But to do otherwise would be to do nothing at all, and I can't live with that. I have to do what I can, in the here and now, while I wait for better days.
CR is a lot like that. We know it won't buy us the radical postponement of age related disease and disability that we want. It will, we believe, buy us some years. And we get to have a lot of fun with hazelnut oil in the meantime. But we must do CR if we are to make it to see the better things.
Every month, my $85 Three Hundred membership payment comes out of my bank account. And I miss it. I don't immediately see the results from my contribution. But I am conditioned by my organizing work to expect to put in a whole lot before I ever get anything back. And to be willing to put in everything I have to give with no expectation of ever seeing the return. The young organizers who expected to see results right away burned out years ago, right after they figured out that no one would be standing on a chair with a sign that says "Union" like Norma Rae. (Norma Rae, by the way, is a double name, as is common in the South. Her last name was not Rae. She was Norma Rae Webster. Mrs. Webster, to you.)
The high moments keep us going. When I read a chapter of the my angel's writing about the life-saving biomedine that is to come, my faith is restored and I can chop another bunch of salad greens as I eagerly await the coming of the day of triumph. When I see nurses reach out and grab the power that is their right as human beings, I feel the familiar flare of passsion, the slow and steady fire, burning bright again.
"July 12th," said the nurse who organized today's meeting as she signed her union card. "May it live in infamy."
Posted by april at July 12, 2005 10:57 PM