I Said It Then… I Say it Now
Slogans That Still Resonate
If you are a person of a certain age, you probably remember saying some of the following in the late 1960s or early 1970s:
Make Love Not War
Power to the People
Do your own thing
Right on
Don’t Trust Anyone over 30
Tell it like it is.
Women belong in the house … and the senate.
Keep on keeping on
Some of these slogans may sound silly to us today as we age into becoming seniors. Certainly, we have to trust people over thirty. We are those people. Lately, many of us don’t trust people under thirty to keep us safe from COVID-19 by following the basic rules. But many of these slogans still ring true to me.
“Tell it like it is” has morphed into “no fake news.” Of course, what you consider fake news might be diametrically opposed to what I believe are lies. Still, at some level don’t we all want a Walter Cronkite to tell it like it is? Sadly, many of us still believe we are being deceived by those in authority that don’t tell us the truth. We long for the time before so many believed there are alternate truths, which is not the same thing as thinking those in authority are lying to us as they did during the Vietnam War. I guess I am still surfing the Internet and reading newspapers I trust to find voices that “tell it like it is.”
From 1969 to 1971, there were a total of 11 women in Congress, one senator and ten representatives. This was during the same era when I embraced the slogan “Women belong in the house … and the senate.” Ironically, it also represents the time I transitioned from the work force to becoming a mother and a stay-at-home mom. But even during those years I spent at home with three young children, I longed for more women to have political power and to represent issues that mattered to me and other women. Happily, the current Congress includes the most women ever, 24 female senators and 119 women serving in the House, for a total of 143. While things are moving in the right direction, we still have a long way to go until we achieve parity. Thus, I still stand by that slogan as well.
