Editor’s Note

When I was younger, my mother called me a martyr with a sense of disgust and shame that I had not yet realized could be attached to the idea of being a martyr. She slammed the door in my face and left me to think about how I had disappointed her.

Her husband heckles at me and insists that my idealistic visions will wear off with age and I will eventually come to my senses and accept that the way things are is just the “way they are.” And I have allowed him to metaphorically hit me over the head with a mallet and knock me down in size.

Once when I was working an eight to five job, one woman dreadfully admitted to a group of middle-aged women around the office lunch table that her young son wanted to be an artist when he grew up. She dropped her head in shame and sacrificed it to the lunch table altar of laughing goddesses of unfulfilled dreams.

A small part of me, one that unfortunately still exists, believes in this social condition that actually discourages people from finding the part of them that makes them unique and then, in turn, helps create the diversity and the very lifeblood of this country. But then, in my few moments of clarity and thought free of the judgment of others, I remember where we would be as a country without those individuals who had that blood pumping through their veins.

Women would not be able to vote, own anything at all, get an education or, goddess forbid, shop for their own clothes without the actions of a few radical women in the 1920s; African-Americans would still have separate drinking fountains and otherwise still be treated as some sort of sub-human class of citizens if it were not for so-called radical civil rights leaders during the 60s; working men, women and children contributing to the United States economy would still be passing out or dying at alarming rates from working conditions if it weren’t for grassroots and often-times risky intervention and the organization of labor unions. Social change has not happened and will not happen in a complacent society, and rights were never and will never simply be granted to individuals while the individuals within the society go along “with the grain.”

During those times in history, we, as a country, did not and still cannot count on lawmakers to know what’s best for each individual and create change that will best benefit the people, when they too are humans with egos and natural instincts of self-preservation of the comfortable lives they have built for themselves. Lawmakers and government officials do not sweat, bleed or cry with the society they govern. Government does not nurture humanity in its focus of balancing the budget, creating trade agreements with foreign countries, creating weapons of mass destruction and then selling the recipes to unfriendly nations or managing plans to secure the world’s resources for the sake of our unyielding consumption. And the list goes on. Cultivating and fostering humanity somehow never works its way onto the government’s “to-do” list.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I cherish the fact that I am in the United States and was not, rather, born a girl in a country where my anatomy is cut from my body and I live in constant fear that I will be beaten. In fact, it is because I am in this country that I can even write any of this without the fear of having my hand cut off or being stoned to death.

But I also believe that I should not take this privilege for granted and gain a sense of complacency that allows me to believe that because things “are the way they are” and always have been in my lifetime does not mean that they always will be or have to be that way. What’s that terribly overused cliché? If you don’t use it, you lose it. So I chose to be a martyr, a radical, a liberal, a freak, an artist or any other dirty word anyone could possibly throw at me. And I will choose to ignore anyone who has told me over my lifetime that I am too much of an idealist and that I will eventually calm down. The moment that I calm down is the exact moment that I lose myself as a creative and unique individual and cease to be part of the lifeblood that makes this country, and this world, a beautiful place.

–Suzanne DeZeeuw