I sleep on it, feeling vaguely disturbed—and wake up angry, arguing. It was all glib, too easy, a dream of La-La Land. Dreaming alone won’t make a better world. A voice in my head shouts that the need for justice is urgent, we don’t have time to dream about it; we need to act. We’ll have to be determined, get right down to brass tacks, make it happen.
It was drilled into me, as a child, that fighting for justice means risking your life, on the front lines. These were lessons from extreme times: the Spanish Civil War, resistance against Nazi occupation. These were lessons about fighting without respite to right intolerable wrongs. It meant seeing comrades taken, hearing of their execution. It meant your own capture perhaps, solitary confinement, torture. Escaping, possibly, but barely. And not wholly whole.
Fighting injustice, I learned, would interrupt and scar everything else. It was an irreversible, binary choice. The standard held up to my porous young mind was stark, uncompromising. But who says those times have passed, that the need for justice is not so extreme now? Who can say that?
I saw Origin, the 2023 film based on Isabelle Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. And there it was. All those images of the horrors humans inflict on other humans. Anguished faces. Acts of horror that distort the perpetrators into monsters, horrors themselves. Such horrors are still being perpetrated today, and they must be fought.
All I can say about a better world is this.
A world where nobody’s need is ignored.
Nobody, no being, is ignored.
Those other thoughts arising from an evening’s contemplation of a better world, they scare me. Equal access has long been a dream. But it’s a dream that led from Communism (as in communal living, “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” — how lovely—to the purges and other abominations of Stalinism, Maoism. “Equal” so easily becomes another calculation, another hierarchy: equality defined and determined by whom? The U.S. Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal [emphasis added]. It was written at a time of slavery and expropriation of Native American lands.
And what about the quest for open doors—open borders, both geographical and personal? Surely, a border wall is an abomination. But no walls and no doors at all? Doesn’t that assume there will be no storms and no droughts? Doesn’t that presume that nobody is broken? That nobody’s mind or body is shattered—perhaps by illness, perhaps by suffering—so they teeter out of control, dangerous to self and others? That everyone and everything can be trusted? It’s been argued that boundaries are good. Of course they are. But I mean more than boundaries. I am asking for realism, for the kindness of realism.
Let us imagine that all man-made injustice has been removed—now that would be lovely. But I think that would not create a languorous paradise. Hardscrabble living would go on, subject to Nature’s implacable laws. There would still be pain. There would still be choices to make. Dr. King said, “I have a Dream.” But his dream encompassed continuing struggle, the perpetual quest for balance and justice.
That dream is true and real; it is art and it is beauty. We are not smoking opium. We are awake and alert, we notice, we attend to needs as they arise. We know when the door needs to be closed – and sometimes locked. My utopia demands sharp attention. Realism, the kindness of being attuned to one another. Alert.
And then, then we could be generous and joyous. We could sing and dance and celebrate, and be ready to deal with what is needed. In my better world, we would laugh more, take more time to be joyous. We would also cry more, and we would cry together. Stronger together with open eyes.
Author's Comment
We are living through difficult times, the world over. We have a choice: we can fight each other over our share of the pie, or we can support one another. We are entering an election season that will test our fundamental beliefs. It feels urgent to me.
When Tave wakes up alone in the hospital, she barely remembers the car wreck. Far from home, dazed, and despondent, she struggles to face the challenges of her new paralysis—all while worrying about her partner, Les, also severely injured in the accident, now cared for by her homophobic parents who refuse to allow contact. In rehab, Tave relearns life skills and comes to recognize that her future will be completely different from what she’d imagined.
Where will she live? How will she find the help she needs? Can her friends rise to the occasion? Or will she be forced to move back in with her mother, putting up with endless talk of faith healers? Her one beacon of hope is Beth, her physical therapist. But Beth’s relationship problems with her own girlfriend push her toward overinvolvement—and risk damaging both her career and Tave’s recovery.
A story of a spirited young woman gradually discovering her inner strength, and finding a new community, this novel challenges readers' preconceived notions of disability.
For more about the author: www.barbararidley.com.
Available from Bookshop, Amazon, and your local independent bookstore.
Rae Dumont, 75, is a physician and a family therapist. She is now turning all those years of experience into words that speak of resilience, of being a woman, mother, partner—of the flawed journey we must make toward becoming good enough. She is awaiting publication of her first novel, Like an Oil Slick, which deals with the devastating impact depression has on an entire family when it has been ignored for too long.
L. Maristatter has published fiction on the Saturday Evening Post website and poetry in the online journal Defunct. She holds both a BA and an MA from Arizona State University, and is a member of the Author’s Guild, the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and Realm Makers. In 2022 she published her debut novel, Tiny Tin House, through NiffyCat Press. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking and gardening.