Blog September 3, 2022

I am an inveterate obituary reader. Why? Because they are short biographies of people important enough to rate an obit in a paper like the New York Times. Frequently, they contain little stories about these people that I never knew. Most of all because they usually contain some wisdom that I can share with others when I wrote speeches. Or teach a class. Two recent examples of wise advice gleamed from obits:

Dorli Rainey became the face of the Occupy Seattle Movement when a picture of after she was doused with pepper spray and rinsed with milk appeared in papers around the country. As she said at the time, “this is what democracy looks like.” She was 84. In an interview with the Guardian in 2012, she said “People say to me, “Are you crazy? Why don’t you just retire?” she responded, “I can’t. I have to keep on going because there’s so much work to be done. I just don’t feel like sitting at home and letting the world fall apart.” (The New York Times, August 25, 2022)

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich who died this week, said something very similar to Ms. Rainey. According to The New York Times obit, “Ms. Ehrenreich’s anger at inequality remained unbated late in life.” In a New Yorker interview she said, “We turn out to be so vulnerable in the United States. Not only because we have no safety net, or very little of one, but because we have no emergency preparedness, no social infrastructure.”

Again, from the Times’ obit, she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world. “The idea is not that we will win in our lifetimes and that’s the measure of us, but that we will try dying.”(The New York Times, September 3, 2022)

I share these excerpts because I think that these are two women who, through their actions and with their words made a difference and inspire me to keep on trucking. As Ms. Rainey said, “this is what democracy looks like.”