Extreme Measures When Quacking Is Not Enough - A Progressive Woman Dreams Of The Sixties

Belinda Harper was getting on in age, not so old as to be forgotten, but with enough bark missing that it was time to act.  The world had not improved much since the halcyon days of yesteryear, especially with Donald Trump in the White House but there was still time to ratchet up the machinery of justice and forge forward.

Yet the great progressive movement of recent years had fizzled.  It's not that it burned itself out, but that its presumptions never amounted to much.  Climate change, the cause celebre of her era was outed as hype. The seas had not risen, temperatures either hovered around normal or dropped below, and there was no increase in the catastrophic storms, and the Antarctic was gaining ice. 

The black man, supposedly the answer to the world’s hopes, remained mired in poverty, crime, and dysfunction in miserable inner cities.  The gates of the southern border had been opened wide to asylum-seekers and refugees, but simply gave a ticket to ride to welfare seekers and  gangbangers.  Gender realignment, the most outlandish presumption of them all, went baroque, and tricked out men in drag became poster boys for a more inclusive sexuality.  

The stock market boomed as Wall Street investors juiced up the economy, gave the AI revolution legs, made employees flush with retirement money. The Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalist jamboree turned out to be as starstruck as No Kings!, the idea that the sitting president was plotting a palace coup to uproot democracy and replace it with monarchy and a succession of kings. 

Economists talk of sunken costs - investments so significant that even when the purpose for which they were intended has turned out bust, those who counted on success just dig their heels in.  Throwing in the towel would mean they were wrong all along. 

This is where Belinda was now.  She had spent the better part of her life fighting for social reform, so many hours on stinking Freedom Ride busses, so many more in dingy basements plotting overthrow and planning for a new age of peace, harmony, emotional well being, and universal justice.

Worse, she clambered out of those cellars and joined the above-ground progressive movement, years in miserably paid jobs in tacky non-profit organizations dedicated to creating a more verdant, accommodating, inclusive world.

Her very youth had been spent without showers.  Sex had been no more than rutting.  Romance had been dismissed as bourgeois fantasy, a comic book dream; and tossing around with Isaac X on a flimsy cot at 432 N Street was little more than human interest. 

She marched, she protested, and she assembled only to see every one of her hard missions come to nothing.  Sales of Ford F-350s, the pigs of the highway were booming.  Sales of E-vehicles became stagnant and on the verge of desultory. What university wanted to scrape the bottom of the barrel in affirmative action and end up dumbing down the student body and losing millions in alumni donations? 

The few and far between success stories of immigrants let in by the former president were overshadowed by the Minnesota, New York, and California scandals where illegal 'visitors' scammed the taxpayer out of billions in fake day care centers, senior transport services, job training programs, and drug rehabilitation vocations.

What could she do?  She couldn't possibly pull up and watch her hard-earned reforms simply go down the drain.  She had to do something, but what?  Her goody bag was empty. 

H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and all their clones were dead and gone, imprisoned, exiled. The takeover of Columbia University by Mark Rudd and his student radicals is only a footnote to history. Columbia now, the throes of violent anti-Semitism finally put down, is a shadow of its former progressive leadership. 

The leaders of Black Lives Matter - heralded as the new black avant-garde- are all in jail for fraud, corruption, and misuse. Antifa January radicals have been outed as thuggish frat boys

All that is left of progressivism is cant. Conservatism, always considered a retrograde, anti-social, fascist movement is back. Smoke and mirrors, fooling most of the people most of the time while she and her colleagues can only wail like Cassandras, shrewish women hating men and all they have done.

'Let's pack it in, Belinda', said her comrade in arms, 'and move to Florida'. The most fascist state of the fifty, palms, beaches and prejudice? but the metaphor was clear.  Didn't girls just want to have fun? Or at least let their hair down after so many years of penury and pain?

'Absolutely not!' replied Belinda, speaking for sunken costs rather than commitment. Showing the white flag would mean that all those years of righteous anger and protest meant nothing at all.  If there was even a flicker of hope that the marvelous ideals of the past could be revived, she would be the first at the barricades. 

Isaac X - now and for many years Isaac Rosenbaum, had left the Movement many years ago.  Enough was enough - his rabbinical training kicked in after only a few years in the basements of the East Village, he straightened out, went to Harvard Business School, and became a successful securities analyst and then investor at J.P. Morgan Chase.  

They had met again quite incidentally - paths, as dissimilar as any two can be, can cross. There are occasions and venues where the most unlikely partners listen to music or verse together 

Belinda felt shabby. Isaac was the model of Wall Street prosperity - well groomed, impeccably dressed, with a confidence bordering on hauteur but carried neatly - and she was still in Mother Hubbards and sensible shoes. 

'Are you still...' Here, Isaac stopped, searched for the right, most polite and considerate way of asking whether or not Belinda was still flogging the same horse, riding the old plug nowhere but back to the stables...'busy as ever?' 

Belinda noted the pause, thanked him silently for his demurral and consideration, and went on to more neutral topics. Yes, he was married, living in New York, three children, 'helping to run things' at J.P., he said with modest reference to his senior executive position. 

He had been her lover those many year ago, but what he had become was the enemy, and here he was out in the open, bully proud as he could be, dashing and confident, a man she could fall for if it wasn't for his occupation. 

It was Isaac who indirectly cut the tether that bound her to her progressive past, that kind of strange, unexpected epiphany that comes out of nowhere but shows you the light.  They would never see each other again, but that in itself didn't matter.  Maybe the cut of his suit...

In any case, Belinda did indeed what her colleague had suggested and 'packed it in'.  Never a big earner her portfolio was meager, but pumped up a bit by dear old childless Aunt Mary who had given her everything.  

In the old days she would have refused such capitalist gains, but now in her new skin, she was thankful for it, replaced the picture of the old lady on her dresser and moved to Florida.  Yes, Florida of all places; but the new Belinda was not about to live in some rainy Humboldt County group yurt.

She convinced herself that she had not become conservative, that she still held fast to progressive principles.  It was just time to turn the reins of protest over to the younger generation; and so what if it looked like she had become right of center.  

Her inner self was unbowed; but as she grew fonder of the weather, the easy beach-going vibes, the Free State mentality, and the growing crowd of similarly liberal refugees, she had to admit that things were indeed different.  The smarmy basement past was just adolescent folly.  The climate, the black man, the immigrant? Sunken costs were not what they were cracked up to be.