Too Soon Old, Too Late Shmart - Figuring Out What's What Before Last Call

Vicki Brandt was a lifelong progressive, a veteran of the Freedom Rides, the march across the Pettus Bridge with Martin and Ralph, Bull Connor's ax handles and attack dogs all the way to the gender spectrum. 

 

She had done everything possible to right the American ship of state, turn back conservatism, Republicanism, and MAGA anarchy.  She was at the barricades for Black Lives Matter, was pimped out in falsies for transgenderism, stood in all-night vigils in front of the White House for climate sanity, and protested on the National Mall with her sisters in arms for abortion rights. 

What more was there?  What more could there be?  And more importantly, how much more could she give?  She was not young anymore, and although she still had her wits about her, the years had taken their toll.  Always looking for a place to sit, elevators, salt-free food, and people who spoke loudly. The elder years were trying. 

Yet when called upon, she was there.  She arranged soirees at her home to celebrate mixed race artists struggling to find their voice and, musicians following in the footsteps of Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. 

 

'I am a ho', the first verse of LaShonda Washington's poem Ghetto Bitch, was her appeal for recognition and esteem, and 'but I ain't yo ho' was her defiant rejoinder. 

'I'm not sure where Vicki got her', said a classmate, 'but she sure tells it like it is', summing up the sentiments of the crowd of elderly progressives who, like Vicki, could simply not retire and move to Florida. 

LaShonda was clearly a fish out of water, out of her element, reeled in from the ghetto to bear witness to Vicki's crowd.  She did her black thang, was given bus fare back to Anacostia having legitimized the group's commitment to the black cause, and was folded back into the projects never to be seen again. 

Vicki kept this up nobly - black ghetto queens, gay men from Dupont circle, Salvadoran leaf-blowers, and Montgomery College (MK) instructors in environmental science. 

Point being that even in her dotage Vicki Brandt held the line; and even though her soirees were sparsely attended and the CVs of the speakers of decreasing currency, she never faltered. 

Until one day she looked into the mirror and realized that she had few years left on earth, and here she was dancing to the same, outdated, misfiled, and cranky tunes. It was not a pretty picture.  Without the mirror she was still pigtailed, braless, freckled, and available; but with it she shared space with the Grim Reaper who every morning crowded her out more and more. 

If she was being honest with herself, the black man did not need her.  Decades of hammering about racism and social justice had just encouraged a culture of entitlement, walkin' around money, no-show jobs, welfare, and under-the-table, affirmative action hires.  Anacostia if anything was worse off than when the whole thing started back in the Sixties. 

The transgender was nothing but a confection, an item on the progressive wish list.  The idea itself had not existed except in psychological treatises on genetic anomalies and Greco-Roman sculptural fantasy.  Climate change had not happened, and the Armageddon-like forecasts beginning with Al Gore not only had not come to pass but were invalidated by the increases of ice in the polar regions, unusually cold winters, and moderate-to-weak tropical storm systems. 

In other words, all she had fought for, sold her soul for, compromised her whole life for had come to naught. Progress was a fiction, a fantasy, and impossibly credulous notion. 

It is hard for anyone at Vicki's age to come face to face with the truth.  Al Gore had titled his crusade, 'An Inconvenient Truth', and now decades later the moniker was even more appropriately applied to race, gender, and ethnicity.  It is an inconvenient truth that the gender spectrum is nothing but a fictional, confected, idealistic, ignorant fantasy; that the black man is not Nature's Own, the rightful heir to the top of the pinnacle of human society, that the waves of illegal immigrants are neither asylees nor refugees, but opportunists, that capitalism has always been the mechanism of prosperity. 

To keep banging on about gender choice, the native, irreplaceable, incomparable value of the African diaspora, the coming climate Armageddon, and the corrosive nature of the free market, is just whistlin' Dixie.  Progressivism was not about intelligence but belonging.  What were those demonstrations on the National Mall if not feelgood jamborees?

'Given enough time, liberals always become conservatives', the old saw proven and demonstrated again and again, was not appropriate here. Yes, Vicki saw the febrility and hypocrisy of highly touted progressive notions of diversity, equity, and inclusivity; but dismissal of these ideas meant that the baby was to be tossed out with the bathwater.  There was no way to accept the fantasy of black superiority, the God-given rights of asylees, gender subjectivity, and the inevitability of climate Armageddon without emptying one's soul. Without the canon, Vicki was nothing. 

'Oh, God, why have you forsaken me?', she said as she looked for one last time into the bathroom mirror.  How could he have left her, a faithful Christian soul, to the wolves?  Her life with Martin and Ralph couldn't possibly be erased so easily, tossed aside as if it never existed let alone had no seminal importance.  How and why had God let the black man suffer decades more indignity, oppression, and dishonor?

Yet amidst all these noble thoughts, she couldn't rid her mind of the dysfunctional mayhem of the ghetto, black men in gangs raiding stores, overturning cars, killing thousands in a hail of automatic weapons fire.  The image of the black man stuck in the forefront of her mind was not King, Abernathy, or the princes of Negritude but a hooded, gold-grilled, shirtless urban criminal.  

Gay rights was distilled to an image of naked, S&M butches training their bitches in leather halters.  Bernal Heights lesbians were reduced to e-boots, flannel shirts, blue hair, and Suburus. Latino migrants were lined up for San Francisco soup kitchen handouts.

'If the rule you followed led you to this'. Anton Shugur, a character in Cormac McCarthy's book No Country for Old Men, 'then of what use was the rule?'; and so it was that Vicki had to ask herself the same question.  With far fewer years left to live than years already lived, she had to square her life with that notion.  

 

She was now an aged empty vessel, a silhouette, a stick figure about to disappear.  While some would remember her for having fought the good fight, she would be put into the ground indistinguishable from the billions of well-meaning but incidental souls who had preceded her. 

A younger, more agile person might well say, 'Fuck it', turned the corner, and live happily with other possibilities, even those contrary to those previously held; but an aged crone like Vicki could not do that and was saddled with the inconvenient truth of having given her life for nothing. 

So, Vicki figured out what's what before it was too late; but the discovery was not the pleasant, uplifting one she had anticipated.  Some people make good decisions and others bad.  If there was any final understanding it was that one had to live with one's decisions, period.  

Vicki did not go conservative and join the legions of bright, blue-eyed young things parading up and down Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to the Trump White House; but if the truth be known, she thought about it. One's time left on earth should never be wasted, no matter how disappointing the past hours and days had been. It was time to pull herself together and...

Here she stopped.  She had no clue whatsoever.  Progressivism had taken her heart and soul, leaving her with little, not even hope, reconciliation, or redemption. 

'So be it', she said to herself in the bathroom mirror.  'So be it.'  What else could she say?