Her Fighting Spirit: Protest and Pride

The other night, as I was walking around our neighbourhood, I was sad to see piles of dead bees that had clearly been killed by insecticide sprays. We have been lamenting the lack of pollinators in our garden this year as well as reading about the decimation of the US bee population in general, so seeing this occurring in our neighbourhood was pretty upsetting, to say the least.  As a renter in a Condo complex, though, I felt fairly powerless to do anything about it and simply noted the occurrence and went to bed.

 The next morning, over breakfast, I mentioned what I had seen to the family. The adults expressed dismay and the same feeling of powerlessness I had felt when I saw the bee corpses. The J-Rex didn't say a word.

After lunch, the J-Rex asked for a popsicle for dessert and, me being the awesome mother that I am, I gave her the last cherry-flavored one from the freezer. She ate it and then proceeded to wash the stick, grab some scrap paper, scissors, and a pen and sat down to construct something.  I asked her what she was doing and she said simply, "Making a sign for the protest," and continued with her work. 

When she was done, she had created the smallest protest sign I'd ever seen, with the message, "Save Our Bees!"

The J-Rex then grabs her bee hat - saved from the bee festival she went to in the spring - and asks me if we can go on our protest now.  What? This wasn't some pretend thing? She's serious? Now?

So, off we went, to walk the neighbourhood with her tiny little sign.

"We have to save Mother Earth."

A bit self-conscious at first, I had to push myself to join in on her (very loud) chant of "save our bees!" I looked around, worried our neighbours would see us and think us crazy or worse, disruptive, and found myself relieved that most of the neighbourhood was still at work. When we did see one person and the J-Rex shouted to him the reasons for our protest (in an impressively thought out and well spoken way), I saw him trying to avoid eye contact with us and was grateful the clouds chose that moment to empty, giving us the perfect excuse to run away from this non-confrontation.

I told the J-Rex how proud I was of her for taking a stand on something she believed in but felt like a total hypocrite for my own internal reaction: what happened to that girl I used to be? The one who was passionate and feisty, who went to the WTO protests, the World Conference against Racism, and so many local actions I can't even remember them all?

First, it was burnout - doing too much and never seeing any changes... Then, it became the fear of any adult with a family that relies on them, the fear of persecution or retribution combined, terribly, with the fear of being ineffectual.

With everything that's happening in our country today, I am ashamed to see that I have become...an armchair radical. As I raised my voice to chant with my daughter on our mini-march, however, I realized that is something I can, and should, change.
  
I watched the J-Rex imagine, plan, and complete her first protest with more pride than I could express and, in her innocent passion, she reminded me of who I was and who I would like to become again.