The Soul of an Activist

Every day, my mother Vera took the bus downtown to the factory where she spent eight grueling hours manipulating the heavy machines that were used to make fine sweaters for people who could afford them.

In the summer, sometimes, the temperatures soared into the thirties and the heat made her swoon, but she was forced to carry on for what anyone would consider a laughable salary. On those steamy days, she boarded the bus home in sweat-soaked and cheap polyester clothes she bought at KMart. 

I was 16 and in high school when my mom took that job. Because she worked shift work, she left a freezer full of Swanson concoctions for me to make for dinner. I came to detest frozen food, particularly the processed mystery meat that was lauded as "real" beef and turkey and slathered with gravy full of salt and sugar.

Vera took that job after my grandparents died and we were forced to move into an apartment in city. 

It was a long way from the farm where I spent my formative years, a magical place where I could go out and pick a snack of peaches and cherries from the tree branches, or pluck a handful of peas, using my nails and fingers to open up the pods. After my grandparents died, mostly everything I ate came from a can, a box or a bottle, warmed over then tossed down my gullet before my tastebuds knew what was happening.

My mother came home from the daily grind exhausted, and often angry. When she was on the day shift, she couldn't wait to sit in her easy chair, inhale a pack of cigarettes and chug a dozen bottles of Labatt Blue. She would often talk to me about work, poking the air with her cigarettes, lighting one after another. Man she hated her job, and her boss, that "God damned Dick." 

I would sit across from her, on the couch, and listen to her, and have a few beers myself, even though I was hardly drinking age. The brown liquid went down smooth, and eased the tension, and I was grateful. It wasn't easy being your mother's shrink. But I also knew it was far worse being her, a woman who had to take a back-breaking factory job in her mid-forties.

After a few years of complaining about the aptly named "Dick," my mother got involved in setting up a union at her factory. She took the risk of losing the only job she'd had since she married my dad in her twenties. But she'd had enough of the bullshit, the horrible conditions, and the unreasonable pay.

I was so proud of her. 

I saw my mom as a real life Norma Rae, a heroine of the working class, who took all her rage and bundled it into action. Unfortunately, the story of Norma Rae, played by Sally Field in the movies, wasn't my mother's reality. It was a romanticized version. The union didn't do much for my mom; it got her paid a few sheckles more but nothing really changed. Vera spent more than 15 years in that job before she was finally placed on disability after the knitting machines won the battle and busted her back. 

There was no pension for Vera, only a sad existence in a subsidized apartment, and she was bitter until the end of her life. But for just a brief moment in time, my mother became the hero of her own story. She grew an activist's heart and soul. 

Like most people, my mother became an activist not because of some kind of altruism. Her activism came from the personal pain that she felt for decades. She didn't choose to be part of the activist movement; she was called to it out of a sense of moral outrage, a feeling that unless she did something, things would only get worse for her and her co-workers.

Vera wasn't an educated woman, but understood Einstein who once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. 

And so she chose to act.

I am my mother's daughter. Because of her bravery and tenacity, I became a lifelong activist, a spear carrier for the downtrodden, the left out, the disenfranchised, the illiterate, the hard of hearing, the cancer-ridden firefighter. In my youth, I worked for the Liberal Party under Pierre Trudeau because I was inspired by the rhetoric of the time: preserving the social safety net, universal health care, employment equity, and creation of programs that lifted the spirits and circumstances of people in this country.

I was, and still am, a true believer in justice for all. Unfortunately, I didn't find my voice in the Liberal Party, or in politics, which has become a place for people to get enriched, grab hold of power and air grievances. I parted ways with politics nearly 30 years ago, and I've found that any foray back into that world leaves me dispirited and angry.

Like my mother, I got no real personal benefit out of activism. At 64, I am basically sitting at my mother's table with no pension, no real job, and so sense that the future will get better for me, or anyone else. It's a bad place to be, sitting on the couch, feeling your activist soul withering while the forces of evil weave their tentacles throughout our society. 

The good news is that the spark that lights an activist soul is never really extinguished. 

Sometimes it takes an event, or an idea, or an outrage.

Sometimes, it takes one person who touches you in a way you haven't been touched in a long time. 

That person is my daughter, Marissa, who has taken up the family torch and become an activist for the Black Lives Matter movement. She asked me this week to look after my granddaughter, Kennedy, while she and her husband Jeff went off to the protest in downtown Ottawa. 

I never saw Marissa as an activist before. She didn't march, or join a political movement, or scream to the rafters about causes. But for years, she's been quietly working behind the scenes, with Jeff, on a number of issues affecting women and minorities. She is becoming a leading voice in the fight for fairness and equity in the workplace, and is supporting Jeff in his quest to empower Francophone youth in our community. 

Watching her walk out the door yesterday, I caught a glimpse of my mother, not her sadness and anger, but her determination to right the ship. 

Marissa has become fearless in her activism, as my mother was, and as I was once. 

The difference is that her activism does not come from anger, as my mother's did, it did not come from sadness, as my activism did.

Her activism comes from a place of pure love. 

She is our legacy.

The torch has been passed to her.

P.S. Please watch this amazing video by Marissa's husband, Jeff.