Independence Day, 2065

It is the year 2065; I am the granddaughter of one of many who fought in the last century for the personhood of women and children in the United States. This was a difficult and complicated war for my grandmother, because it involved exposing so many practices that went on behind closed doors the public was deliberately made unaware of, or laws were passed in the wake of tragedies that lawmakers of the time failed to recognize were taking away what Constitutional rights existed before and during the early days of the millennium.

What didn’t exist in the previous century was the enforcement of individual rights for women and children. In the Constitution, the word ’person’ means and had been acted out in the practice of law and government as ’household’. This meant most women and children had no individual rights when actual protection was needed under law. Because so many people were not aware of this or didn’t go through something knowingly where their personal rights or survival were at stake, only those who sought protection as a last resort for their safety or the safety of their children found out at the worst possible time that the result they expected from what they knew as law often rendered an opposite result. It was Alice in Wonderland or the Twilight Zone, only real, and unimaginable to anyone who had not gone through it themselves.

The mentality of the public, shaped by media, government, and organizations who stood to continue gaining from keeping the public thinking differently tried to make my grandmother and her contemporaries look like they were only acting for themselves. In the public eye, according to the media, what happened to them must have been from something they did wrong or was a ‘mistake’ that didn’t happen very often. To make things worse, when my grandmother was my age, the United States remained the only other country besides Somalia (which had no government) not to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The practices that affected my grandmother and the children of those like her did go on in other countries, though in others, they didn’t.

Then after the events of September 11, 2001, The Patriot Act practically took away all Constitutional rights, allowing those in power to control the lives of people in the country more than ever. The president at the time had been quoted as wishing he could be a dictator; this was as close as he could get to accomplishing that, and the damages from the act and other practices affected anyone who wasn’t wealthy for generations. Many children, women, and others who were struggling without help died from negligence or abuse, while the root causes for the deaths were covered up and those responsible were not made accountable.

It was mostly men in power and women who were uninformed or supportive of those men without their own knowledge or who thought they were benefiting from such support (unknowingly or otherwise at their expense) that carried out the damages without a second thought or conscience for the consequences of their actions. They remained unexposed until my grandmother with others like her came together after their children had lost their childhoods to these practices for so many years of ’legal’ manipulation at what was called a ’tipping point’. Families and those who could reach those in government and the media who had integrity and a conscience began to listen, and investigate just how many people had actually gone through the same thing. It was too many to ignore. Children had died or been abused in many ways for so many years it threatened the stability of the country to continue to turn a blind eye to what had been happening. There were people who went to prison for knowingly allowing the practices to continue or assisting in the continuation of how things had been because money had been involved as an incentive for so many, when children and their mothers were regarded as property under the practice of law (not to be confused with written law itself, which mothers thought when they needed protection would be followed).

It was at about the same time that women who wanted to be with women and men who wanted to be with men were given the right to marry each other, as well as a half century of resolution toward women being compensated for the same work the same amount of pay for their own living and the lives of their children that were given to men for many decades. This also affected their ability in how much they could provide for their children if they chose not to be married or seek the support of someone else in the home. The family composition at this time had permanently changed; married couples with children were no longer the rule, yet those in power acted as if anyone who did not embrace or aspire to the former ’ideal’ were not worthy in general.

Today, because of my grandmother and those like her who came together at a critical part in history, I can get an education, earn a living, be with who I want or not, and have a child if I want without being afraid that someone will take them for no reason and write things that aren’t true in a ’legal’ document so they may profit from ’selling’ children as property at women’s expense to wherever the money is coming from. My father was one of the children who were silenced until they were of ‘legal’ age to tell others in their own voices.

My grandmother always said she had learned her values from her grandfather, a Native American, who respected the rights of others regardless of whether they were rich or poor, and was honored in his community for the achievements of his life. Women who did the same weren’t given recognition because of the ’patriarchal’ society that rare men like my great great grandfather were able to do some good in. My grandmother never forgot the example of her grandfather, and I will not forget hers. She didn’t know she could not enjoy with her child, my father, the rights I now have because of their sacrifices until she needed help under ‘law‘. She spent the rest of her life so that my father and our children would not suffer further. The world still isn’t perfect. Because of people like my ancestors, more of us may survive in peace as well as prosper much earlier in life, and the damages to the planet from previous generations will continue to be reversed as my generation makes it their priority.

Apologies for the unplanned hiatus, the family saga will continue as promised during the next post. Happy 4th.