• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Denial

I was born into a time of great promise, transition, and change. I am an African American woman raised in an upper-middle-class-but-Bohemian-leaning family. Having grown up in an integrated environment, I chose my friends looking beyond skin color or religion, and I dated across color lines. I went into an idealistic government volunteer program after college. I enjoyed shocking others with the complexity of who I was, and by my refusal to fit into a box or behind a label.

Then I began to wake up to the poor choices that my country was making and the consequences of those poor choices to the lives of individuals, and the future of human life, on this beautiful planet.

Like a woman who finds a lump in her breast, I felt it first as a growing apprehension. I had enrolled in medical school at Howard University, the oldest traditionally Black institution for higher learning in this county. As a “twenty-something” marriage-age female, I found myself isolated from my Black peers and confused by the lack of “quality” Black men at my college. Where were my socially progressive and radically thoughtful peers? All my medical student peers seemed interested in was how much money they could make. It was in my second year, when I did a special rotation at the public hospital across town, that I found all the brilliant, beautiful, politically active men that I expected to find at the University.

They were in the prison section.

The shock of this observation broke through my denial, and launched me into the next phase.

Anger

My anger was directed against “the system.” I stepped up my personal political activities intended to subvert that rigid racially and class-segregated system from within. I married an Irish-Catholic man and had two children with him. While working as a physician, I made myself available to marginalized and disempowered groups as much as possible. My anger was a powerful engine, fueling my work and fueling it well.

Something else was creeping into my political consciousness: environmental awareness. I had read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, that troubling and inspirational work by the marine biologist who advanced the global environmental movement with the book’s publication in 1962. In Silent Spring, Ms. Carson asked questions about potential connections among the increased rates of physical deformities in marine creatures lower on the food chain, pesticides, human cancer risks, and potential ecological catastrophe. Her decision to write this book emerged from her own experience of breast cancer. As a physician, I could not ignore the connections I saw between environmental toxins and the breast cancers, brain tumors, and leukemia in my patients. As I cared for those living with and dying from environmental toxins, I began awakening to another unhealthy aspect of being American—our lack of deep spiritual belief and connection.

My definition of “environmental toxin” expanded from literal to figurative. Frenetic levels of stress contributed high blood pressure, and heart attacks. Socially supported addictions of workaholism, poor nutrition, and intense consumerism connected to the high rates of anxiety, obesity, and depression. I began to see how unhealthy the lifestyle of a “successful” American truly is.

I can look back now and see another emotion, festering beneath the anger, that I did not see at the time. That emotion was fear.

Bargaining

At age thirty-five I looked around me and saw that, despite my personal political attempts at change, life in America looked worse than ever. During this phase I would wake up to some new insight and bargain my way back to complacency. Did my country actually have an election (or two) stolen? Well, I would become a serious tax resister, and that would allow me to continue to speak my conscience, counterbalancing the nightmare of my country’s growing fascism, increasing heartlessness toward developing-nation disasters of AIDS, famine, religious wars, and despotism, and the pervasive American denial of