I am a Baby Boomer, as is Donald Trump, as is Hillary Clinton, as is Bernie Sanders. So my memory stretches back to being a child in the 1950s and carries forward from there.

Here are some things I remember in rough chronological order (but not always): Women's choices

he tranquility of the '50s exploded in a number of ways. We had enjoyed years of rebuilding our lives after WWII, but we also sent troops to the war in Korea. There were undercurrents

in society that we either missed or ignored, and soon the '60s exploded with the assassination of President Kennedy, the Vietnam war and civil rights battles.

T  Fundamental changes were taking place in other areas of our society as well. Birth control pills became available for the first time, and as women, we finally had the freedom to plan our lives,

no longer totally controlled by our biology. I remember when abortion became legal, and women were no longer dying from unsafe, terrifying, back-alley procedures. Abortion didn't quietly disappear simply because it was illegal. 

My generation was the first to benefit from this. It didn't mean we all chose something other than a traditional family life. It just meant we could choose.

 Today's generations have even more choices. There are infertility

treatments that didn't exist in my day; there are new ways to create a baby, to carry that baby for nine months, to give birth. And there are new methods of adoption. Women today have a range of choices that run the entire spectrum of questions about having a baby, and I have to think those same choices benefit the men involved. It doesn't mean we don't have to fight sexism. The old battles must still be fought. But the freedom to develop in whatever ways we choose remains.  I love my country for this. 

 The "other"

rowing up, home was the white-bread world of California suburbs in the East Bay Area. Our parents employed a black maid who commuted a long distance to our home several

times a week. Yet if a black person from another country came to visit and that person had a foreign accent and an education, he or she was praised to the skies. My parents used words indicating a bias against Jews, yet took us to a neighbor's bas (bat) mitzvah to learn tolerance and respect. They also welcomed my father's colleagues, who were Sikhs, into our home. I still cringe when someone mistakes a turban-wearing Sikh for a Muslim. I remember anyone seen as "exotic" receiving more credibility than plain old American people who didn't have the accent or the foreign credentials. Yet my mother supported the Christian Children's Fund, and made a point of involving us kids. It took me years to realize the contradictions between my parents' words and their actions. I'm not sure they even realized.

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Diana, age 3-1/2; John, about 3 months.

Still, it aroused my curiosity about the world. We had people from different cultures, races, religions and nationalities in our home on a fairly frequent basis. It aroused my curiosity about the world, and I'm quite sure it played a role in my desire to travel. 

I love it that I've always had the freedom to travel. here are people in some countries who cannot travel to other cities, let alone overseas. There are other who do travel, but are under restrictions and monitored closely. I was incredibly

lucky to travel internationally at the age of 19, taking university classes aboard a ship.T

 We were part of a program called "World Campus Afloat," now "Semester at Sea.” From Los Angeles we sailed down the west coast of South America, through the Strait of Magellan, up the east coast, across to French Northwest Africa and through the Mediterranean basin, finishing up with stops in Portugal, The Netherlands and Great Britain before sailing home to New York. We visited 15 countries in four months. It was educational in unexpected ways.

Twice, in struggling countries, young people tried to shove a baby into my arms, with a plea that it be raised in America, where life was so much better. At 19, I hadn't known the difference. 

When we got to one or two of the countries on the itinerary, we were cautioned that we would likely be followed by secret police. The year was 1968. We were.

 I learned a lifetime lesson in Dakar, Senegal. When I stepped off the ship I found myself surrounded by a sea of very dark people - me, with blue eyes, blond hair and very pale skin. Suddenly, beyond my will, I was afraid. I was now part of a very conspicuous minority, highly vulnerable because of my race and my coloring. I already felt vulnerable because of my sex. When we were docked weeks earlier in Punta Arenas, Chile, people came up to feel my hair and the hair of a blond friend, because they had rarely seen such pale looks before. They thought we must be Dutch, from South Africa. In Senegal, I didn't know if that's what people thought. In Senegal, for the first time in my life, I felt an almost primal fear for not looking like everyone else, for being completely surrounded by "the others."

Then came the lesson. Five of us hired a taxi driver to take us out of Dakar and into the countryside, away from tourists. We hired him for the full day. We got to see areas where it was taboo to take a photo of a person, because that meant you were stealing that person's soul (with the advent of today's selfies,  I often think they had a point.). We paid him $25 for the entire day, a goodly sum in that place at that time. At the end of the day, he stopped the taxi outside a walled village and told us to wait there. We were not to get out. It was blisteringly hot.

We must have waited in that cab for a good half-hour. Finally, the taxi driver came back out. He had a gift for us: three eggs. Those eggs were probably the only protein his family had for that day, that week, maybe that month. He'd obviously had to negotiate for them. I kept those eggs in our cabin on board ship until we finally had to throw them out. I was no longer afraid of being a conspicuous outsider in Senegal. I was never again afraid of the "other." But the memory is stark and I think of the black men here who have to be afraid out of necessity. I hate it that we must fight civil rights battles all over again, but I am grateful that we are not barred from the news. We cannot “unsee” what is happening in our society. Despite the onslaught of bad news, this gives us a chance to work on our own communities. 

Supporting the troops: the country learned. remember living with my in-laws in 1969-70 and watching the Vietnam war on the nightly news. It was the first televised war. I was pregnant.I

Their son, my husband Jack, was stationed in Southeast Asia. I remember wondering if my unborn baby would have a father; I wanted to join the protesters, but felt it would betray my husband if I did. Jack had enlisted, but I hated the war.

His parents, 4-month old baby Diana and I went to pick him up at Travis AFB when he came home. Maybe 200 skeletal-looking kids slowly disembarked from a giant C-130 and walked toward a silent terminal. It was silent because there was only one other family besides ours there to greet them.  

   Years later, when my son would return home from deployments to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and South Korea, Diana and I would travel to Salt Lake City to greet him. We joined many other cheering families with balloons and flowers, waiting to greet their own loved ones. It was always a whole cheering squad that took over the terminal. I love it that our country learns. The wars are no less horrific than they ever were, but we have learned to support our troops.      

 

Senegal, 1968

Jack in Thailand

John and Angela Hubbell

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Becoming independent

hen Jack and I divorced in 1977, I had no credit rating. Women were not considered to be separate entities from

their husbands - not financially, not legally, nothing. The jobs I'd held and the years I'd put in meant nothing to the outside world.  I had to start over from scratch to build a financial identity and some financial stability and credit.

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I like being in charge of my own credit rating; I like having my own money and a room of my own, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf. I love these freedoms finally granted to women in this country.

   

Naturally I looked for a full-time job after graduating from college. However, I was a single parent and we were in the middle of a recession. The first three jobs I had were all eliminated because of that recession. In addition, I was increasingly worried that I would be fired if I were to leave work for things as "mundane" as going to my kids' soccer games, orchestral concerts, or parent-teacher conferences. (Those are sarcastic quotation marks.) I started my own business as a result. A generation later, I made the same choice so that I could have the freedom to spend time with my grandchildren.

Entrepreneurship is a tough road, not for the fainthearted. But I had the freedom to choose that route. Today, millennials are asking for and getting flex time at work. They are helping to create a more humane workplace, and I love that. 

 

AndrewBrandon - Christopher

I am grateful that I don’t live under communism or any kind of dictatorship

traveled as a publicist with the Missoula Mendelssohn Club to Germany, Poland and Latvia on a concert tour four months before the Berlin Wall came down (summer, 1989). Crossing

under the wall from West Berlin to East Berlin was like something out of the WWII movies we had always seen. One member of our group took pictures at Checkpoint Charlie as we were leaving Berlin. Her camera was confiscated, the film pulled out and exposed. We had to go through a second passport check.

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 Later on that same trip, as we tried to exit through the north Poland border - and were not allowed to - I stowed the gift of wine some friends had given me in bushes by the side of the road, afraid of what might happen if we got inspected again. There was a valid fear traveling into communist countries or countries living under a dictatorship, where authoritarianism, nationalism, and isolationist policies were the order of the day; where neither citizens nor outsiders were trusted and everything was monitored.

 

I learned that in some other countries, children are funneled quite early into careers that are considered best for them or for the country, without the child having an actual choice. I became more aware of class systems and felt grateful to live in America, where I was free to get whatever education I wanted. 

That's not to say it's so easy anymore with students going deeply into debt. When I taught at the university level, I had students holding down two or three jobs, often with families at home, and I taught at least one homeless student. We do have problems to fix. Still, our choices about education, especially as women, are not dictated to us before birth or as toddlers, and this is good.

During a break on our three-day bus detour, 1989

Graduation day at the University of Oregon was a family affair. June, 1980.

I love our national parks. n severely crowded countries there is not a chance to get out into vast landscapes or any kind of wilderness. If we don't stay

in touch with nature, we lose an enormous part of ourselves and our souls. Equally as important in our current day and age, we lose an understanding of how natural systems work. Only by leaving them alone can we learn how the systems of the earth work together to nourish each other, and also nourish us. We are all too aware of over-development. How we use the land and the water has become of paramount concern, and we need to continue to learn from the lands we have set aside and preserved.

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I love it that I've always had the freedom to speak out.

Even as I publicly fought the military's use of the experimental, highly dangerous and mandatory anthrax vaccine on our service members, I took on a job working for the Montana Air National Guard on a project in north central Montana. The Air National Guard is under the auspices of the Air Force, so the trail led straight back to the Pentagon. I did a full disclosure, as required by my professional organization's code of ethics (the Public Relations Society of America, prsa.org). The answer from the Pentagon? "Just tell her to keep the two projects separate. Otherwise, she's fine." I was quite relieved for the confirmation that the First Amendment is alive and well. In fact, one of the officers on the project privately thanked me for the work I was doing on the vaccine.

Guns and Police or several years I trained law enforcement personnel in Montana in media relations and crisis communication. Even before the internet and social media, cameras with long lenses

were trained on everything they did. FI learned about community policing and what law enforcement professionals face from an exceptionally fine officer, former Missoula Sheriff (and former Police Chief) Doug Chase, now retired. I went through Missoula's excellent Citizens Law Enforcement Academy. There were a few minutes when photos of what these folks have to deal with were too much for me to take

Lake McDonald at Glacier National Park, Montana

But Missoula was a community where you might easily live next door to your local judge or sheriff or police officer. We knew each other. Officers volunteered in the high schools, and stood a cautionary watch in the parking lots when the final bell rang as a reminder to keep the high energy in check. The sheer good that community policing can do became obvious. I am grateful that community policing has spread and pray it becomes the norm. Even large cities are made up of small communities.

Because I remained single, I asked my law enforcement friends what I could do to protect myself, and explained that I hated guns. I didn’t want a gun in the house, and didn’t want to be trained to shoot. They said if I had a gun it was more likely I would be the one to be shot rather than some intruder anyway, and they recommended bear spray. I took their recommendations seriously, and still do.

The reality is that, as a woman, I am far more likely to be injured or killed by someone I’ve known and heretofore trusted. That’s the reality women live with all around the world. But I refuse to live in fear. I prefer to talk calculated risks when I do take risks. There’s no calculation in the world that will convince me I must own an AR-15 for my protection or the protection of anyone living in or visiting my home. That’s assuming hordes of people are going to threaten me at my home, necessitating the need for a high-powered rifle capable of killing a lot of people very quickly. Hogwash.

We all know our society has problems with the combinations of guns and mental illness, guns and impulse control, guns and drugs, guns and the spread of fear and anger, guns and sheer carelessness. Guns are too convenient and too easy, for children as well as adults. We don’t seem to be done killing each other yet. Until we are done, until we have a collective will to opt for a kinder, more intelligent society, this is going to continue. I say “more intelligent,” because the stupidity of killing law enforcement officers who are trying to protect your right to protest against law enforcement boggles the mind; the stupidity of carrying a loaded gun in your purse where you toddler can easily reach it and kill herself boggles the mind; the stupidity of reaching for a gun to solve a dispute over a parking space boggles the mind. Guns take enormous personal responsibility, intelligence, and common sense. Those traits are certainly missing in too many people. Are we not done killing yet?

Is there something I love about my country in this? Yes. As I referred to earlier in speaking of the fear that black men must necessarily adopt, I am quite glad we cannot escape knowing about what’s happening. I am glad for the free flow of information. We cannot hide from these problems; we can no longer pretend they aren’t happening. Will we act?

I am grateful that this country has always allowed people to immigrate here.

My Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors arrived in 1732 and fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. My English grandfather arrived as recently as 1903, escaping terrible poverty in London's East End to eventually become an American success story. The gift to us has been immeasurable.

Both families left their homes in Europe and traveled thousands of miles across the sea to

escape poverty, injustice, coerced religion and a lack of freedom. What they found here, what they contributed to here, was an inclusiveness and set of

freedoms that formed an experimental society. It wasn't perfect; it isn't perfect. My ancestors and grandparents benefitted from racism, I don’t think there can be any question about it. They were of white European stock, and although they worked hard all their lives, there were probably doors that opened for them and didn’t open for others.

One of my first jobs in the ‘70s after moving with my husband and two small children to Oregon was at Harry & David Bear Creek Orchards in Medford. I worked in the payroll department, and processed the checks for the Mexican orchard workers as well as for those of us who worked inside, sheltered from sun, rain and wind. The discrepancy in paychecks was startling to me.

After some months, I asked one of the orchard managers how it was that the migrants picking the crops earned so much more than we did inside. His answer is as appropriate today as it was over 30 years ago. They get paid by the number of pieces and number of trees they pick, he said, and they’re very fast. They are motivated because they have families back home to support. What about any American workers, I asked? Do they get paid the same? I can’t get any American workers to pick the fruit, he replied. They won’t do it. They think it’s beneath them.

We’ve all read how this story repeats itself in agricultural communities across our nation.

Prejudice remains against immigrants who look and speak differently than my grandparents did. When I remodeled my home several years ago, most of the construction crew was Hispanic. A neighbor called them lazy, said they would simply sit around doing nothing. I’ve never believed that, because they did an excellent job, on time and on budget. Today, a Hispanic crew works on my yard and they’re great. I had to urgently tell them to stop working one day when they showed up in the middle of a hailstorm and set about their tasks. (A footnote: at my cottage on the coast, a retired logger, a rather grizzled white guy, maintains the yard. He’s another amazingly hard worker and kind person. They come in all colors, you know?)

Across the back fence lives a family from Romania; next door lives a family from Ukraine. It’s delightful to hear the laughter of their children. These people aren’t “the other.” I don’t know how or when they came to this country, but I know they add a lot to the neighborhood. I like to think they are enjoying the same freedoms which enabled my ancestors and grandparents to realize their own American dreams.

My English grandfather, Charlie Wiggs, sold sheep-shearing equipment throughout Montana and Wyoming via stagecoach in the early 1900s. That's him in the darker suit.

 There are still tragic exceptions. 

've worked on projects on Native American Indian reservations, first on the Flathead Indian Reservation just north of Missoula, and later on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in north

central Montana. Again, I learned lessons about the "other." I learned Native Americans are often thought of in the extreme, ether as noble savages or as drunken degenerates who can't build decent lives. The ones I was fortunate enough to know fit neither extreme. Economic development and education were important to them, and their commitment to the betterment of their people was more than impressive.

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 I developed a deep respect for the work being done on the Flathead Indian Reservation, one of the most progressive reservations in the United States. However, during a puzzling lull in my first project there, I happened to speak with a new acquaintance, an Oglala Sioux from South Dakota. He recommended patience, and suggested that while I was waiting for the lull to end I read "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," by Peter Matthiessen. The book is an account of the 1975 siege at Wounded Knee, and it changed my life.  Even if only 10 percent of that book was true, I thought, I no longer recognized the country I was living in. The second time I felt that shock was when I learned about the Pentagon's decades of medical experiments on our troops. I read the book, and when the tribes were ready to work again, I went back with a new understanding. I learned a deep respect for tribes still living in abject poverty. The decades have not erased the memories of being slaughtered, or the effects of having their children shipped off to white schools in order to erase all signs of an Indian culture and language, or the forced sterilization of their women as late as the 1970s. I learned the humiliating dismay of facing so much prejudice means that for many young Native Americans a future is unimaginable, often even more unimaginable than it is for African Americans. We have confronted what we did to African Americans. It is openly acknowledged and despite the continued presence of deep prejudice, there are doors which have been opened. Not so with Native Americans. We still don't talk about it and still don't afford it the credibility it deserves. One result is that for too many young Native Americans, suicide seems the only option. Yet the tribes don't quit. They search for ways to make things better while incorporating their traditional values and customs, and they are often managing it (see the Buffalo People video below). I miss the sound of drumming, its heartbeat rhythms, the chanting of prayers. I miss the visual and rhythmic pleasure of watching the grass dancers and jingle dancers. I miss the Native American sense of humor, at once dark and warm, and the genuine sense of hospitality offered. In Poland, people say, "When you have a guest in the house, you have God in the house." The Native Americans I've known feel the same way. I miss those "others." The Salish Kootenai Pow Wow, 2015 (2.04 minutes) The Buffalo People of the Fort Peck and Fort Belknap Indian Reservations, Montana - 2014(14 minutes)

 I am grateful that I live in a country where the first people lived with a more laterally-organized society, rather than a hierarchical society. I am grateful I could be here to learn about the concept that all is one. As we run out of water and other natural resources, the fact that everything is connected and one system is becoming readily apparent.

Once again, I am grateful I live in a country where the internet is not restricted, because these issues and causes now receive a wider audience, and people can be informed about them. The free flow of information is a good thing, not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a threat to despots and tyrants.

The flow of information is one of the first things cut off when a country is put under authoritarian rule. Free speech is curbed.  I've been in countries where people are punished for speaking out, and criticizing the government lands people in jail. A lot of people have. My experiences are not unique or new. I’m just comparing our freedoms with others, and our intellectual freedoms are a big part of why I love my country.  The mix of opinions and the varied sources of information are what we're all about in this country. Somewhere in all the rhetoric, insults, fear and arguments there are still answers. There are still ways to compromise. There are still pathways, hidden though they might be at present, toward a better future. 

Americans have always been part of a "can do" culture.ight now, too many of us seem paralyzed with fear and confusion about how to move forward. That fear leads us to seek simplistic solutions. We seek someone who is strong,

who can provide authority and order in a world of chaos and fear, with answers that we cannot see for ourselves. We want a big, strong father to take care of us because we feel we can no longer take care of ourselves.

R The media have a huge responsibility in spreading the contagion of fear, of course. Fear sells stories. How many times have we heard "Could this happen to YOU?" about even the most innocent moments in life? Fear and scandal rate more clicks, more eyeballs, more views, and thus more money. Channel that fear and scandal into entertainment, and the result is that war, betrayal and death become the primary options available for TV viewing. We are told it's what we want, that Hollywood is only responding to audience demands. The news producers tell us the same thing. Meanwhile we learn not to trust each other, and we become more afraid while increasingly numb to the carnage. We forget that genuine freedom is a lot of hard work. It takes an enormous amount of personal responsibility. We forget that democracy is always a messy affair. There is nothing neat and tidy about it. The number of choices we have can be completely overwhelming. I am one who will not go into a new box store unless dragged in, because the sheer volume of products and choices is more

than I can handle. I would be happy, for example, to have just two choices for a laundry detergent, but I am sure that would be un-American.

I also don't want to choose between as many as five or six Congressional candidates running for the same office. It seems like just too much work to research all of them and come to some kind of educated conclusion. But that would definitely be un-American. I have a responsibility to be an active, informed citizen if I want to help keep the freedoms I so cherish. It's not all up to the men and women of the armed services. It's up to all of us. I have a responsibility to speak out and redress the government when I see a wrong done. But I want to correct the wrong, not tear down everything I see. I have a responsibility to get involved. I know that if you want to clean your house, you actually have to be inside the house. Public opinion can move mountains, but I don’t want to destroy that mountain in the process. It takes much more work to build than to protest and tear down. There’s a reason these are all clichés and platitudes: they’re all true. The fear so many of us are going through stops us from being innovative, and we have always been an innovative people. 

ood grief, we put a man on the moon. We invented penicillin. We have home computers, tablets, iPhones and Androids. We have, in the palm of our hands, more information about

the world than we can possibly absorb. G But fear makes us mentally sit down, our backs to the wall, stupefied, waiting for someone to tell us where to go and what to do. It stops us from thinking for ourselves. It leaves us feeling powerless and helpless. A helpless and powerless people forget their strengths and just get angry. They forget their ingenuity and intelligence. They forget they once believed in each other. They let fear spiral them down into anger and finger-pointing, and in their frustration and helplessness they give into the tendency to blame the "other." Anyone who panders to that fear and that blame has their attention. Maybe, they think, the answer is to somehow withdraw and hide. We know the world is completely interconnected, and there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. But let us withdraw and hide, and attend to only us. We are hiding, father – please come and rescue us.  We live in America. We have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to redress the government for its wrongs, and freedom of religion. That's all in the First Amendment, you know that.  We have freedom to be educated, to work, to own property, to control our own lives. We can move to another state, move overseas, live where we want. We can walk in vast open spaces and deep peaceful forests that developers can't touch. We can vote. We can speak out and make our voices count.

I love my country for these things. I love that it has grown so far beyond the conditions that existed when the Founding Fathers first set pen to paper. No, we are not at all free from racism, from sexism, from economic problems, from violence, from war and its waste of so many precious lives. We are not free from terrorism, home-grown

or otherwise. We are not free from fear of the "other," from prejudice or from the growing coarseness of public dialogue. And we are not free from the changes taking place in the earth itself, no matter the cause. And yet - I have to think that the Founding Fathers were trusting us to think for ourselves when they wrote the documents they did. In their day, there was still slavery; women could not vote or own property; and the insults that flew between Adams and Jefferson are the stuff of legend. But they had to know that in making freedom of speech the law of the land - in making the freedom to redress the government for its wrongs the law of the land, - they were opening the door to interpretation and change. They were trusting us to handle that. They trusted they were talking to an educated citizenry, not people who had tuned out. They trusted the citizens of this country to be grownups.

Make this country great again? It is already founded on great concepts, great perspectives and great ideas. The ways in which we’ve put those into play have resulted in huge changes in our society, and change will continue. Things will not hold still; we will not be going back to some idealistic, simpler time when life seemed easier. Those simpler times were not actually so simple; they masked a lot of problems that we didn't look at back then. We have to look now. We know now. And we have to trust that we can still be the innovative "can-do" nation capable of thinking for ourselves, trusting each other again, and creating new paths to a better future. We have to be grownups.  This is not a country that was built on fear. Let's not give into it.