I’m Lea Ecker.
I’m a concerned citizen.
I worry about the fate of my country.
Just talking to my friends is no longer cutting it for me. I need to speak louder. Every day, every news report, I get more and more angry. I get more and more fearful. I wonder what has happened to the country I grew up in.
Straight up, I’m telling you I’m not a President Trump supporter. I can’t be and I’ll tell you why.
I grew up in what would be called a blue-collar family. My mother worked in a factory all of her life. When I was a kid it was a knitting-mill. Not quite as bad as the one Sally Fields portrayed in Norma Rae (1979), but it was hot, the air full of floating bits of cloth fuzz, and the women working the sewing machines earned their money by the piece. Piece work. Sew as many shirts as possible, by the dozen, mind you, to earn the minimum wage offered. You could sew more, if you were very good and very fast but the bosses made sure to set that minimum pretty high.
Then, when I was a teen, the garment factory went out of business. It was cheaper to go to the South, remember Norma Rae? Where the wages were even lower and there was no union to protect the workers. So, she went to a factory that made steel mop buckets and wringers and had U.S. Government and major medical facility contracts. This was a Steel workers shop, part of the United Federation of Steel Workers. At one point she was the Union Steward. Another time she was elected president of the factory’s union. I was proud of her. She only had a 10th grade education.
My father, step-father, actually, but he was the only father I’d known, was a laborer. That’s a union, too. Think of the guy in the holes they’re digging for building basements. The guy carrying loads of bricks for the stonemasons. The guy pushing asphalt around on a road construction project. The hardest, heaviest, most manual job in the construction industry. He spent time as a union steward as well. He had an 8th grade education.
I was the first in my family, ever, to graduate from high school. There was a sister and 4 brothers behind me so there was no money for college, even though I was in the top 10% of my class. I joined the Air Force instead. It was the end of the Vietnam War and no one made a big noise about joining the military back then. There were quite a few from my class who joined one branch of service or another, but it was kept pretty quiet.
I spent twenty years in the Air Force, retiring, like my Air Force husband, as a Master Sergeant, an E7 for those that know about these things. We’d had a daughter, and she joined the Air Force too, after she graduated.
While I was still in, I attended college classes. A perk, if you will, if a person had a schedule that could be finagled around to allow it. It took me thirteen and three-quarters years to get my bachelor’s degree. I was the first one in my family to get a bachelor’s. Before my degree, my second brother managed an associate’s before he had to quit and go to work. So I was first again.
After retirement I went to work at a major computer company. I was promoted several times and due to the stress of the job, retired when I was just 48. That’s right. I retired at forty-eight years old. Not sick. Not broken physically. Just because, through careful money management, and both my husband’s and my military retirement, we could retire. Not high on the hog, mind you. But we’d saved our money and were careful and now, I could volunteer. I grew a huge garden.
We moved to Arizona from upstate New York.
Up till this point in my life I really hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to politics. I voted every year, even in the tiny, local races in off years. In New York I was registered as a Conservative. I never voted a straight party ticket. I always looked at the people running and made a choice based on who seemed to be the best person for the job.
Then 2015 rolled around.
The Republican primary looked like a goat rope. Those of you who were in the military know what I mean by that phrase. This guy, a supposed businessman who lost more money than he made, was running. No way, I thought. All these stories about how he stiffed his contractors, defaulted on his loans? No one is going to elect this failure. He made fun of people. Called them names. Made a mockery of any sort of bipartisanship. Then the stories about his infidelities, then his misogyny, came out. In many cases, in all of these issues, his statements were recorded and played back. He denied all of them, despite what we could clearly see on video. Talk about gaslighting.
More and more people flocked to his cause. I kept saying it was a joke. No way people were backing him. But there they were in video of his campaigns. Cheering as he mocked the disabled. Cheering as he called other candidates childish names. Hooting and hollering when he made absurd claims about doing one thing or another. Red hats became all the rage.
On the day after the election, I was gob-smacked to hear this clown had won the election!
So now, over two years after the inauguration, things are even worse. I swore, when I was 18, to protect and defend the constitution of the United States. I did so every 4 years after that until I retired. I do not regard my oaths to be finished just because I retired from the military. Something has to be done. The current President has said and done things that are not only cruel, misogynistic, self-serving, and both narrow-minded and close-minded, but also traitorous. It will come out. It will all come out. His and his family’s dishonesty, unscrupulous connivance, lack of ethics, impropriety, collusion, and perhaps, outright thievery are noticed. The President breaks federal laws as though there will never be a reckoning.
It’s up to each person that has any bit of moral fiber to be heard. This is me, speaking out. So many things are coming out. So many things are being said by this President that it’s hard to keep up. Outrage exhaustion is a real thing but I’m not giving up. People should be treated with dignity. Education, childcare, and healthcare should be available and affordable. The working person of the country should be able to earn a living wage without having to work 3 jobs.
All of this was real in the 60’s and 70’s. Let’s bring it back. That’s what will make America great again.
