By Jon Henes
The day after Thanksgiving of this year I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s Disease. For more than a decade, my mom battled Alzheimer’s Disease with all of the grace and dignity she could muster as it unmercifully stole her away from me and my family. I am still trying to cope with her loss, a loss that created a hole inside me or possibly revealed a hole always present that my mom kept hidden and protected while she was with me. When the COVID-19 pandemic enveloped our country, I was grateful that my mom had passed away a few month before as I don’t know how my dad — my mom’s faithful caregiver — would have been able to navigate his responsibility for my mom in this environment. (If anyone could have done it, it would have been my dad.)
I think about my mom everyday and, since her death, I hear her words, voice and lessons more clearly and strongly than ever. On this day, I find myself thinking about my mom even more than usual as I watch with grave concern as the President of our country unconstitutionally invades our cities with federal agents in military uniforms to harass, kidnap and harm peaceful protestors exercising their constitutional rights as those very rights are being violated by the people who took an oath to protect them. I think about my mom today more than usual because I watch with admiration and inspiration as The Wall of Moms (https://thewallofmoms.com) ascended on Portland with yellow shirts and risked physical harm to protect the protestors from Trump’s federal invaders only to be tear gassed themselves. These moms — like all moms — are heroes and it will be these great women who help us take back our country and save our republic.
My mom was a student at Cornell University in the late 1960s and was committed to civil rights. When I was young, my mom’s focus and passion was women’s liberation and some of my first memories were going with her to “women’s lib” meetings. If she were sitting with me today, she would be so proud of the Wall of Moms and she would be so disappointed with our current President.
She would be asking “how can he care so little for human life as more than 140,000 Americans have died and so many of those deaths can be linked to his poor leadership, lack of empathy and pathology?”
She would be asking “how can he look the other way when there is intelligence saying Putin is putting bounties on the heads of American troops?”
She would be asking “how can the President of the United States be inflaming hate and racism rather than being the moral leader of our country explaining that we have a systemic problem that only will be fixed when white people look in the mirror and acknowledge that systemic change needs to take place?”
She would have cried watching George Floyd being murdered as he lay on the ground with a knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds and she would be asking “how can this be happening when we fought so hard to have our country not just talk civil rights but walk civil rights?”
She would have cried watching federal troops with masks and shields tear gassing women and she would be asking “how do I get a yellow tee shirt and stand arm and arm with The Wall of Moms to protect the rights and bodies of protestors and to fight against the tyranny we are witnessing right in front of our eyes.”
While I am disgusted and afraid and horrified of the images on TV every day of the President testing out a federal militia to invade our cities while, at the same time, setting the stage to question the legitimacy of election results through his continuous and dangerous lies, I am confident that the real America — the America we all aspire for it to be — will prevail. And my confidence is strong because the moms are now taking over and taking control — and I know the strength and resoluteness of moms.
