Citizen

 

 

At sixty-six, I had gotten very used to my life.

Not in a bad way. In a relieved way.

My husband Marc and I had a good life. A middle-class life. Predictable, routine, sometimes even boring, which at this age I had come to appreciate more than I ever did when I was younger. Coffee in the morning. Meals at regular times. Bills paid, more or less. A house that felt lived in. A husband who is kind, steady, and regimented in ways that used to amuse me and now mostly comfort me.

Marc is seventy-three. He likes order. He likes things where they belong. He folds towels neatly, keeps track of what needs doing, fills the car with gas before it becomes urgent, and notices when I’m worried even before I say anything. There is something deeply loving in the way he moves through daily life. Not flashy love. Dependable love. The kind that makes a life feel held together.

And I was happy.

Or maybe content is the better word.

Either way, I wasn’t looking for upheaval.

But little by little, the television stopped feeling like something I watched and started feeling like something that was creeping into the room with us.

At first it still seemed far away. Awful, yes, but far away. Another family detained. Another cruel policy. Another story about leaders so openly corrupt it was almost surreal. They didn’t even seem interested in hiding that they did not care about ordinary American people. Not seniors. Not children. Not working families. Not anyone outside their own circle of power and greed.

Then things started landing closer to home.

Was Social Security under threat?

Was Medicare?

Marc and I are not destitute, but we are not wealthy either. We are people who have worked, planned, worried, adjusted, and tried to do the right things. We are people who feel it when groceries jump. And groceries had not just jumped, they had practically doubled. Without ever making some formal decision about it, we found ourselves eating two meals a day instead of three.

Not because we wanted to.

Because that’s what made sense.

That’s what people do when life gets more expensive and no one in power seems remotely interested in how ordinary people are supposed to live.

And then there were the families.

Families who had been in this country a long time. Families who had committed no crimes. Families who worked, paid taxes, raised children, took care of elders, built lives here. And I was seeing them ripped apart with no due process, no fairness, no humanity. Just taken apart like they were paperwork, not people.

That got to me deeply.

But what pushed me over some internal edge was when two American citizens were killed while exercising their First Amendment right to protest.

That chilled me to my core.

I remember sitting there with my hands in my lap, looking at the television, and feeling something shift in me. It wasn’t just anger. It was something heavier. The realization that if I kept watching all this and doing nothing, then I was participating in a way I didn’t want to admit.

Not because I agreed with any of it.

But because there comes a point when staying home and staying silent starts to feel too close to complacency.

I told Marc I thought I should go to a No Kings rally.

Even saying it made me nervous.

I was scared. I told him so. I said I was too old for this kind of uncertainty. Too old to put myself in harm’s way. Too aware of how hateful some people are. Too aware that even people with legal authority can hurt groups of people and call it law and order. I was scared of violence. I was scared of chaos. I was scared of doing something that felt bigger than the small, careful life we had built.

Marc listened.

That is one of the reasons I love him. He never rushes to talk me out of my own feelings.

He said my fear made perfect sense.

Then he told me that for him, there really wasn’t a choice.

He said he could not think about his Jewish relatives only a few generations back, people who knew firsthand what it meant when governments started sorting people into categories of worth and threat, and imagine telling them he had stayed home because he was afraid or uncomfortable. He said he could not look past family in the eye, even figuratively, and say that he had watched a would-be authoritarian leadership rise and had chosen not to rise against it himself.

Not at seventy-three.

Not now.

And hearing him say that reminded me so clearly why I fell in love with him.

Not because he is dramatic. He is not.

Because when it matters, he is passionate about doing the right thing.

That night I lay in bed thinking about all of it, and my mind went back to my childhood.

I remembered being about twelve years old in 1972, sitting in my grandmother’s living room. My mother and grandmother did not usually get along. They could argue about almost anything. But one thing they absolutely had in common was a belief in fighting for civil rights and women’s rights, and in fighting for a full and free life.

My grandmother was seventy-four then. She told me how important it was to fight for the right to live fully and freely. She told me a story from when she herself was a child, about twelve years old, living in New York. Her mother took her to the New York City suffrage rally in Union Square on May 21, 1910. More than ten thousand people gathered to demand the right to vote. Even as a child listening to that story decades later, I could feel the importance of it.

My mother would then jump in and talk about the many times she had protested for women’s rights. She often said, “The personal is political.”

I didn’t fully understand that phrase when I was young, at least not the way I do now. But I do remember how embarrassed I used to be when my mother took me to protests. I thought it was silly. Mortifying, really. All those adults carrying signs and chanting and caring so much in public. I wanted no part of it. I wanted normalcy. I wanted to blend in.

And now here I was, all these years later, understanding those women in a way I never could then.

Understanding that they were trying to hand me something.

The next morning I told Marc I would go.

On the day of the rally, I was nervous from the moment I woke up. I got dressed simply. Comfortable shoes. Light blouse. Sunscreen. Sunglasses. I made a sign, didn’t like it, made another, and in the end chose the plainest one.

NO KINGS.

That was enough.

On the walk there, I was alert in that unpleasant way fear makes you alert. I noticed every overpass, every parked truck, every person who seemed a little too still. I hated that this was part of the calculation now. I hated that going to a peaceful protest required wondering whether you might get hurt.

But when we arrived, what I saw first was not danger.

It was people.

So many people.

Older people, younger people, couples, families, veterans, teachers, people in wheelchairs, people with handmade signs, people handing out water, people helping each other find shade. I saw a lot of gray hair, which comforted me more than I can say. I also saw very young people, and what moved me was the feeling that we were all there for the same reason. Not because we were the same in every way, but because we understood the moment.

I held tightly to Marc’s hand.

And then something happened that surprised me.

I felt more alive than I had in years.

We sang. We made friends. We laughed. And it wasn’t light, empty laughter. It was the kind of laughter people share when they are relieved not to feel alone. I remember feeling a kind of mutual respect between the older people and the very young. We were not invisible to them. And they were not naive to us. We all understood that we were there because we cared what kind of country this is and what kind of country it becomes.

At one point, a young person thanked us for being there, and that touched me deeply. It made me realize that age was not disqualifying me from this moment. In some ways, it was part of why I belonged there.

As I stood there, I thought about my grandmother. I thought about my mother. I thought about all the times I had once found women like them inconvenient or embarrassing because they cared so visibly and so publicly. And I realized that what I had mistaken for fussiness or overreaction when I was young was actually moral courage.

By the end of the rally, I was tired, sun-warm, thirsty, and clearer inside than I had been in a very long time.

On the way home, Marc asked me how I felt.

And I said, “More like myself than I have in years.”

That was the truth.

Nothing was fixed, of course. The corruption had not disappeared. The cruelty had not evaporated. Our groceries would still cost too much. Social Security and Medicare were still not things I felt I could take for granted. Families would still be afraid. The country was still in trouble.

But something had changed in me.

The distance between screens and streets had closed.

And once that happened, I could no longer pretend that watching was enough.

I had stepped into the larger human story that the women before me had tried to teach me about all along.

And strange as it may sound, standing there with my husband among all those people, I did not just feel politically engaged.

I felt deeply, personally alive.