When to Leave

First published in April of 2018 in Mason Valley News as an opinion column by Quest Lakes.

When I was about 10, I began reading everything I could get my hands on. Finding books was hardly a challenge because my mother was a librarian and my father kept an enormous home library and spent his evenings reading, often suggesting titles that I might like.

I recall staying up late, reading “Nicholas and Alexandra: An Intimate Account of the Last of the Romanovs and the Fall of Imperial Russia” and feeling perplexed and unhappy to discover what became of the Romanovs. At 10, I did not understand how anyone could execute children.

A little later, Seymour M. Hersh’s “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath” appeared on our bookshelves and it was then I began to wonder about many things I had and hadn’t been taught. I began to think about omissions in my social studies text books at school and what else might be missing and why.

Then I read “The Diary of A Young Girl” by Anne Frank and another set of questions was added to the previous set. Why did everyday people participate in a plan for genocide, whether by silently going along or by actively participating? What were they thinking as authoritarianism became the norm? And another question plagued me throughout my teens: why didn’t the rest of those in the Nazi’s crosshairs get out of the region in time – people of color, people who were gay or disabled, etc? Of course I learned later that many did try, and as an adult I came to understand that it’s no easy thing to leave one’s country, one’s home.

I wish I could say that as the decades went by these questions plagued me less because war, and poverty, ethnic hatred, misogyny, racism, homophobia and xenophobia nearly disappeared.

But over the last few years, I’ve had no choice but to go back to those questions that first occurred to me during childhood. Our free press is being reinterpreted as Lügenpresse (lying press). There’s a growing disdain for higher education and the arts, with a surprising percentage of Americans saying higher education is actually harmful rather than helpful. There’s an increasing entanglement of religion and government, and an alarmingly open penchant for white nationalism among some. My friends and neighbors are being mislabeled as lazy, perverted, criminal and worse by some of our nation’s elected officials.

As a child and teen I would’ve identified now as the time to get out. But as an adult, I see that now is the time to stay and defend everything I’ve loved about this country.

First published in April of 2018 in Mason Valley News as an opinion column by Quest Lakes.