The above correspondence was produced by my mother, by whom I am impressed constantly, but currently for her probably new knowledge of the less than three shortcut for virtual love.
Lately we are bombarded by politics, though I was enthusiastic about the current presidential race as early as well, let's not kid ourselves, as early as January of 2001. When I watched the second George Bush take office as sleet poured down over an already dismal ceremony in D.C., I literally became sick. By the time I got back home to Frederick, my temperature was right around 102 degrees F and my head was throbbing. I was anxious then, about what the president might do to divert the country away from core domestic issues and from genuine concerns about national security, and I remain baffled by the unraveling of these past seven and a half years. These times have truly been an exercise in patience and perseverance for me, as someone blessed with the opportunity to go to school in an age when the United States invades multiple countries in which that option is not made available to the poor and especially to the female.
Now, however, after a year of non-stop campaign hype/hope and 7 plus more years of school, I am partially free from the world of the classroom, as I work full-time with mental health programming in Baltimore city as a part of my masters' field placement. Here, in the liberal, idealistic world of public health, I considered naively, and just for a second, that I could be free of political thoughts. Maybe I am - in the legitimate sense. When I walk into a work site, and the staff are all people from a Baltimore community so close-knit in geography and culture, they're free from certain pretenses. There's not much of a clinical veil around this health care system, and much less of some kind of clinical ego. But structured care? Not so much either.
Quality mental health care is fortunately injected into the system, but unfortunately, not without introducing politics into the mix. This politics comes in the form of beneficence of course, in donor grants that aren't meant as a permanent form of funding, in contracts that may bind people's loyalties a bit too tightly to their business commitments, and in people's well-meaning personalities and emotions, which are necessary and inevitable, but which complicate a system's politics and blow them up in a whole new way.
And perhaps why I perceive politics, where I could chose to see the relatively staggering success of these grass-roots initiatives and community-centered services, is because I am critical, and I will always be critical beyond all intervention. Yes, there are street politics very much at play, and beyond that, there is the immovable divide between those working on the system (the researchers, civil servants, etc.) and those working in it. But what I could see are people given hope by what is, instead of every potential logistical nightmare down the road which might take that hope away from them. I do see it, day-to-day, and it makes me smile fleetingly to be around these small miracles as they pass me by. But in my criticism of the system, I also see a fear in myself, that one day, far too soon, I will get caught up in an agenda that forgets the bottom line: I am here for people, not for a field placement, and certainly not for politics.
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