100 Things I Want To Tell My Children And Grandchildren, #36

We’re going to be OK.

As I sit here at my computer reflecting on our world over the first six months of 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic, the political, religious, and social divisions that are tearing our world apart, I feel guilt and fear. Guilt because I know I am partially to blame for why we are where we are right now, and afraid because I fear I’ll die before we can fix it. 

But those feelings are fleeting, because this isn’t our first rodeo. Earth, America and I have seen rock bottom before and survived, and we will do it again.

My personal grit was inherited from my mom and dad. 

Way before I came along my Dad was a very successful businessman in Oklahoma, but lost it all during the depression. The story goes he gave everything he had to the starving families in Chickasha, Oklahoma. And when he had no more to give, he packed up and moved to Dallas where he open a grocery store (pictured), then to west Texas to become a successful contractor building roads to the oil fields to supply fuel needed during WW II. When my Dad died, there were more than 100 funeral sprays from people all over Texas, and so many “covered dishes” there weren’t enough surfaces in our house to hold them all. In a little town with less than 1,200 people, that speaks to how respected and liked my dad was.

When my mom’s father deserted her and her mother, and her mother was subsequently committed to a mental institution in San Antonio, my mom was raised by her grandmother on a farm north of Dallas. When her grandmother died, as a young teen, mom (pictured) went to live with her uncle, a Judge in Dallas, where she met my dad. She dropped out of school and moved to west Texas with my Dad, where over a period of 29 years, they married (twice, with a short-lived divorce in between), had five kids, and went broke and recovered several times. Mom went back to high school at the age of 40, after having five kids, and completed her college degree – something few west Texas women did back then.

When my dad died mom had to sell everything to pay off all the loans owned for large construction equipment, leaving us nothing. We lived in a tiny little house on less than $300 a month, which we wouldn’t have had if mom hadn’t completed her college degree and become a teacher. 

My low point came when the father of my children and I divorced. I though marriage and love were forever, and I thought I’d never recover, but I did. We all did.  

Our nation and world have grit too. We’ve recovered from civil wars and world wars lasting decades, cancer, many financial devastations, and other pandemics. 911 banded us together as a nation to fight a common enemy, and the COVID-19 pandemic could have had the same effect, but instead it became politicized. 

It seems everything has become so much more politicized and emotional since the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. I've never see so much anger and hatred. We seem on the verge of another civil war, but the battle lines won't be geographic, they'll be political. I believe we are being manipulated through social media, to incite hate, fear and division, and to break down the American bond, to overpower us. 

But just as my mom and dad rose above their challenges, I rose above mine, and our nation and world have risen above many, but not all their challenges, America MUST wake up to the fact that “United we stand, Divided we fall”. 

It may take a while, and more pain and suffering, but we’re going to be OK.