by Nadia Bolz-Weber in The Corners (thanks to Mary M.)
If you are also fending off despair brought in by the news cycle, I wanted to share a quick story with you:
Betty Reid Soskin at the Makers conference in Feb 2018
In Feb of 2018, I attended a feminist conference at which the collective anxiety was so thick it felt like it had an actual viscosity to it.
But then 97 year old Betty Reid Soskin took the stage– a woman whose great-grandmother was born into slavery, a woman who during WW2 worked on the home front as a file clerk in a segregated union hall, Boilermaker’s A-36, a woman who decades later was instrumental in making sure the whole story of all that was told at the Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park near her home– and who then became the oldest working national park ranger giving tours there in her 80s and 90s. That is to say, Betty has seen some stuff.
That day on stage in 2018, she was asked:
how do you stay strong,
how do we keep going,
what are we to make of this horrible mess of a time we live in?!?
But when Betty spoke, she did so in a manner I can only describe as “unbothered”.
She said that At 97 she has seen enough to know that in this country we move forward in waves and in cycles.
Some change is immediate, she said, and some takes decades and some is generational and all of it is happening at the same time.
And all week I’ve thought about Betty’s wisdom and unbothered-ness – I’ve thought about what she said but even more, how it felt when we heard her say it.
It felt like she gave us a collective Xanax. It felt like hearing from a prophet.
There was something else that Betty Reid Soskin said that day:
Most of the real truths have been learned in retrospect I’ve never anticipated them.
There was something about the honesty and humility of this that struck me. Check out more about Betty here – where you can see an amazing film about her and the home front effort in Richmond, California.