“History…isn’t something that’s ordained impartially or fixed in postion- it’s whatever people decide is worth repeating over and over.” Ellen Cushing
I read the article in The Atlantic, just before leaving for the No King’s Protest.
Written by Ellen Cushing, The Women of Avenger Field, is about the women who volunteered to fly planes during WWII. They were called WASP’s.
They never fought in combat, but did everything else “ferrying aircraft, testing planes, transporting cargo, training new pilots.” When the war ended, they were mostly forgotten, except by each other. They were never officially in the military so they couldn’t pursue a career there and weren’t able to get jobs flying commercial planes.
It was only 30 years later in the 1970s, after many battles, that they received benefits that other military personal did. In the 1990s, a few of the remaining WASP’s established a museum dedicated to them in Texas.
Now the Trump administration is once again trying to forget these women (along with so many other parts of our country’s history).
“At least a dozen pages related to the WASP’s and other female pilots had been removed from Air Force websites”. As a precaution, Corynthia Dorgan, the archive WASP’s expert at Texas Women’s University said “she and her colleagues had pulled as may PDF’s of government webpages about the WASP’s as they could,”
“You do little things, Dorgan said, in order to protect the truth. You do your best to tell the story you care about in a way that will make people want to listen, in the moment you are telling it.”
I was so angry after reading this article. I felt it deeply and personally.
In my own family growing up and as a adult, I experienced being taken advantage of and dismissed in a similar way that I felt is happening once again to the WASP’s. I’m not a war hero, but I sure felt their pain. It took me most of my life to be able to show my true self. And the thought of having that taken away, is unbearable.
I didn’t want to bring this anger with me to the No Kings Demonstration. So I told Jon about it. Talking about it, being heard, understood and being known, helps. I also cried. I let the tears that came from deep inside of me flow.
It’s like expelling a poison in a way that doesn’t harm anyone else.
When I got to the demonstration, I found a place next to a girl, whose sign read I’m 12- I Know Better, who was with her mother. She was quiet and serious. It seemed to me that, even at her age, she knew what was coming. I saw another generation of women who might have to go through the same thing.
Once again I felt like crying.
Then I heard the shouting. A man was standing in front of one of the women demonstrating and they were yelling at each other. The man was walking along the line trying to provoke the demonstrators.
I was thinking about how I wanted to react to him, I knew I didn’t want to get angry. So when he looked at me, I just smiled at him. That felt good. I stood my ground without getting angry.
Soon after that the woman who was walking behind the man, gently took his hand and said they should go. She was so tender with him, that I was able to see him as just another person. Someone who was loved and cared about.
I was so pissed off at the first demonstrations I went to last year, at the time I was ready for a fight. I yelled back at the people in the cars shouting at us and giving us the finger. So I know how the woman yelling at the man felt, because I felt the same way.
But then I guess I have to admit that I know how the man felt too. He angry like I was, only about something different.
The longer this goes on, the more I can see that anger is debilitating for me and empathy works better for me. And although I need to let myself feel my anger and release it, I don’t want to put it out into the world around me. I don’t believe it makes things better.
I’m determined not to let the people in the current misogynistic Administration get to me every time they do or say something hateful. Mostly because it’s not good for me, but also it’s just what they want. Like any bully they are looking for a reaction and a distraction from the cowards they really are.
It felt good going to the No Kings Demonstration. Getting to have my say in this way. Yesterday there were over 300 people there. Not as many as in the big cities around the country, yet a lot for this small, very Republican, Upstate NY town.
This No King’s Protest is the one that gets all the attention, but there are people who stand on the same corner in Greenwich NY every Saturday protesting the Trump Administration and their policies.
They are the ones making their voices heard over and over again, hoping that this is the history that will be remembered.
