Amazing Grace

Five years ago, for half a school year, I taught American history - from the First Nations to the Dred Scott Decision - leaving me with a fresh awareness that remains to this day.  

Fascinating, teaching history to at-risk high school students, kids whose authority contacts are parole officers, not parents.  If  I'd been taught history the same way I was a zillion years ago, I would have presented a strictly European-American version to predominantly African-American & Hispanic teens.  A challenge that thrilled moved changed me.

A few days ago, as we walked through the Warminster Shop Rite, John picked up a $2.99 dvd from a bin of yellow-enveloped, cut-price films.  

It was Amazing Grace.  

I looked at the movie, then at John, not quite believing my eyes.  He had no idea what he was holding, it was just the first at hand.  

In spite of being about English history, it was a film I'd shown my students.  It's the story of William Wilberforce.  For 18 years, he marked the opening of parliment by introducing a doomed-to-fail bill outlawing the slave trade, a bill that flew in the face of Great Britain's most powerful economic interests.  For 17 years, it was voted down.  The 18th time, in 1807, it passed.  It passed because of his sheer determination & committed energies & unflagging purpose.  

It made absolutely no sense that Parliment would ever disregard financial interests to pass a wholly ethical moral right bill.  Still, it happened.

For all of my adult life, I wondered if - had I been alive in the 1930s - I would have spoken out about the largely known but ignored events in Germany, even if it meant friends turned away from me.  Over the past six years, I've had the unexpected opportunity to do just that.  

After teaching that scant half year, it's been impossible for me to get past the realization that our nation is founded on great ideals, but established on the backs of slaves (plantations in the south, shipping magnets & slave traders in the north) & expanded by obliterating the rights of the very people who were here long before Europeans.  Who stood up to protest, refused to turn a blind eye? Would I have been one of those, or one of the countless highly moral, totally blind others who simply made them matters of no interest?

Watching the film tonight, the parallels between the two of us are unmistakeable.  Wilberforce fought an uphill battle with his hands shackled in the grip of a largely disinterested citizenry.  In working to overhaul how America approaches elder care, I am fighting an uphill battle, my hands tied by softer cords, but just as restricting.  

The way our country currently provides for the aging, the ill, the injured & disabled - especially the aging - is not done from any blatant disregard for olders or dependent others, but because it is what the powers that be, great & small, deem necessary for society to remain highly functional.  That makes as much sense to people today as maintaining the slave trade to keep Britain mighty did 200 years ago. 

By all accounts, Wilberforce was a man possessed.  The odds of success mattered less to him than the cause.  Eighteen years of introducing the same bill, 17 years of seeing it voted down.  He had a vision, he - and others - believed the time was right, if he had the fortitude determination grit to push on.

John Newton, the former slave ship captain who became a preacher & wrote Amazing Grace, says - "God sometimes does His work with gentle drizzle, not storms. Drip. Drip. Drip."  

Making a genuine change in America's elder care culture won't happen with a mighty wind, fierce rains & great flashes of lightning, but through a gentle drizzle - drip drip drip.  This corner, then that, everyone who feels the call doing everything he or she can.   When enough of us keep doing that, year after year after year, the drizzle will swell into a flowing stream then a rushing river & finally a swollen flood of change.  

Which brings me to another line from the film, this time from William Pitt the Younger - "We're too young to realize certain things are impossible. Which is why we will do them anyway."  

The same is true of older age, after time & experience show us that the impossible happens all the time, if people hold on long enough to the impractical irrational outrageous for it to become accepted adopted ordinary. 

It took William Wilberforce 18 years to abolish the slave trade, to convince Parliment that what is right sometimes has to take precedence over what is convenient.  How long will it take me - and others - to convince America to toss out the convenient elder culture for the right responsible humane?