Without Hope, Change is Impossible


I wrote this on my blog on the Democrat & Chronicle pages. Since I know the reader-interactive pages are not google-able, I am also posting it here. This is about a 48 year-old Iowa farmwoman, who as a freshman at the University of Iowa had much to teach me as a graduate student.

One of the people I learned much from in graduate school in Iowa was Juanita. No, she wasn't Hispanic, she was Norwegian. Not sure exactly how she came by that name.

At the time she was 48, the mother of six children, and, like her youngest daughter, was attending the University of Iowa as a freshman for the first time. She came from Worth County, just south of the Minnesota border: a farm woman who "signed her life away" at age 18 to her high school sweetheart and his farm -- after exacting from him the promise she would attend college after the last of the six children they agreed upon left home. (All six of her children either had completed B.A.s or were in various stages with them -- in subjects ranging from business to biology to clinical psychology to music.) She waited 30 years to fulfill her other dream. I say "other" dream because she loves farming, too. She is incredibly articulate and wise. ("Incredibly" only to a dumb city slicker like me.)

Jaunita said she had a special reason now to go after her education -- her people were hurting, and she wanted to help. Worth County was in a depression she said -- in many ways more a psychological depression than an economic one.

I met Juanita at one of the series of programs on Central America. She spoke up at the end of one saying she could identify with the peasants in Central America. She said independent American farmers are being dispossessed of their land, their culture, and their dignity by multi-national agribusiness corporations. She said some day those corporations will, like OPEC, hold the world hostage for higher food prices.

Eventually I interviewed her for a feature story I never got around to finishing or publishing. The paper copy of the draft is somewhere in my files, and I don't have the time to look for it now.

But one of the things she told me that stuck with me was this: it may very well be that you won't win what you are fighting for. But if you give up, you are a goner for sure. As long as you are still fighting, you haven't lost.

I bring up Juanita now because I keep hearing so much in these pages about how bad the city is and how hopeless the cause. But I thank God for all the people who, like Juanita, have not given up. Because the moment they do, all is lost.

I don't know what happened to Juanita. I'm certain, though, that she graduated and went back home to do what she could to address the problems her people were facing. Maybe it wasn't enough. But whatever she did, gave something back. She gave hope.

Without hope, change is impossible. As long as people keep harping on how terrible things are, all they do is encourage hopelessness. Hopelessness ensures not only that things will go on the same: they will only get worse.

Call me Pollyanna, or as someone else in the forums did, call me "Mary Poppins." I don't give a rat's patootie what people call me.

I will never give up hope.




Posted: Fri - March 21, 2008 at 10:50 PM          

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