I was working on a debate for US History about suffrage last night, and looking over a passage that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott wrote; the Declaration of Sentiments. To us, the idea of women being so inferior is so foreign and old-fashioned. I, for one, really can't imagine living in that time period. It's just so different from what we have today. That got me thinking about what we DO have today, and how different things might be in just a few decades.
So I abandoned my homework, and raced to the computer, where I wrote this.
My mom has always told me that
our history is important for us to learn about, because it shows us why
we are the way we are today. If it hadn’t been for the Revolutionary
War, we’d all be eating crumpets and drinking tea, she says. If the
Civil War hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have to weed the garden because
we’d have a slave doing it for us, and only half of the states would
still be around in our country. If it hadn’t been for the suffragists, I
wouldn’t have the right to vote in ten years, and the Civil Rights
movement is the reason it’s okay for me to be friends with Joey, the
African-American boy who lives down the street. Everyone in the world
would probably belong to just one religion, and my moms wouldn’t be able
to be married and have me. It’s crazy.
I can’t imagine what it
would be like to live back in the 20th and early 21st centuries. I
definitely can’t imagine what life was like before then, when pioneers
were moving west and had no idea what was out there. To be honest, even
the idea of going without electricity is kind of scary. Whenever the
power goes out, the candles and flashlights seem exciting at first, and
then I just wish that I could have my lights turned back on, and my TV
working again. By the time they do, it’s usually just been a few
minutes, but it feels like hours. My mama told me that I would probably
be a lot more used to it if I had never had electricity before, and
that’s the way a lot of things were back in the olden days, before
everyone had rights.
My parents grew up in the 2000s, and
believe it or not, the idea of a girl and another girl dating back then
was scary to most people. My mom went out with a girl in her class when
she was in eighth grade, and her classmates started whispering and
making fun of her. When my grandma found out, she grounded my mom for a
week while she “thought about her problem,” and then she brought her to
church twice a week so she could be healed of her condition. The other
girl got kicked out of her house, and had to go live with an aunt during
high school. Every time I hear that story, I start to cry, because I
can’t even think about something so awful happening to my mom. Mama had
it easier. Her parents were nicer, and told her that they would love her
no matter what. Still, her friends and people on the Internet were
always telling her how messed up she was.
I did a report on the
Great Recession for school, and I got to go to the library and look up
unemployment rates and the stock market numbers and all that cool stuff.
Back then, it was a big deal to have a black president, and there were
books on that, too. I checked out a really fat book called The Pride
Movement, and it was all about what people did to legalize marriage for
all people. It also talked about what society did to those people, and
that part kind of scared me. It’s so ridiculous that a gay person would
ruin your society and idea of marriage. I didn’t even know that there
was only one type of marriage back then until I read that book.
I
read my report aloud to my class two weeks later, and a lot of them
were really surprised, too. Carlos, who’s from Honduras, frowned when I
talked about how kids were turned away at our border. Tara, who was born
a boy, looked really sad when she heard that transgender people were
disrespected and viewed as being creepy. Some kids laughed out loud when
I said that people used to only think that Santa Claus was white. A lot
of kids raised their eyebrows when I read aloud what I wrote about how
teachers could bring guns to school and just carry them around. And all
of them were shocked when I told them that marriage wasn’t legal in the
whole country back then. My teacher just got married to a guy from
Alaska last month, and he nodded and smiled at me when I announced the
date of complete legalization.
I might be only in third grade,
but I’m so glad that I live now and not thirty years ago. I can’t
imagine life for those people. How did their society work? How did they
get up in the morning and go about their days, with all of the awfulness
that went on? I know that we have problems now, but at least we have
freedom. If I had a time machine, I’d go see my moms when they were my
age and see what they were like, but I don’t think I’d want to stay
there. It’s just like when the power goes out. I can’t imagine living in
a world without the lights turned on.
