Last month’s political primary TV ads were mean, misleading and inaccurate. Rifles, threats and Socialism!
Socialism? Is socialism truly a problem in America? What is socialism going to do to our day? Will it affect our work ethic? Our Sunday dinner? Our belief in the divine? Our giddiness at finding typos? Our allegiance to the Kansas City Chiefs?
If Trella Laughlin had owned a semi-automatic rifle, or a slingshot, she might well have aimed it at her TV to spray those fear-mongering ads all over her living room. Then she would have swept them out the door.
Trella Laughlin died last month of Covid. It’s one of those deaths, just like all the others, where we didn’t see it coming because we didn’t think about it. She was our favorite political squabbler. She leaned toward socialism but landed squarely on being more concerned about tyranny than anything else.
Trella was eat up with making life easier for underdogs. She fought for the rights of those who the big dogs wished would just go away, people who didn’t vote like or look like them. She once came into our office and said that identifying any being by gender puts a preconceived thought in our heads about who that person is.
Mighty right.
The United States used to be the most exciting nation on earth simply because we helped underdogs. When WWII started, our soldiers wore surplus WWI uniforms. Men went to battle in the South Pacific wearing wool because that’s what we had in storage after the war to end all wars, didn’t.
Because of a European tyrant and an attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans quickly and completely devoted themselves to protecting this country. Black lesbians wired B-17s and straight white men flew them into battle. We didn’t judge or argue with others, we relied on and appreciated them.
People worked together. That’s all. They didn’t move in with each other. They left each other alone or they became friends, and they didn’t shoot each other because they didn’t agree on outlooks, diets or lifestyles.
I wish Trella would walk into this office right now so we could ask her to donate to our cause – tunic like t-shirts for women that say, “Property of the U.S. Government.” She would laugh, cuss, and her eyes would cloud up because of the injustice. She would say people aren’t born hateful, they choose it.
In a 2020 Ms. magazine story about her activism, Trella referred to herself as “shy.” She really was shy, but also a branding iron. She would’ve turned livid red regarding this administration giving a thumbs-up-thanks to Joe Manchin, who traded his vote for more pipelines. She would bellow and bluster about anyone who deliberately stored national security documents in a home safe.
Trella co-founded a women’s community in Madison County because she was so worn out by all the bad decisions men kept making about other people’s lives. When she realized that she knew nothing about living off the land, she read books about how build a garden, how to build a barn, and how to achieve political fairness and equality. She created her farm from instructions in Mother Earth News. She rode to speaking tours on horseback.
She also realized that separation wasn’t her deal. It was too hard for her to exclude good people who weren’t women. It offended her spirituality to not include others because they didn’t think like her. She understood that it takes more than a village, it takes a planet to believe that impartiality and commitment pair well together.
When we printed a few memories of Trella several weeks ago, one of them had a typo. We saw it the minute the paper was delivered. It was in what John Rankine wrote, the first paragraph. “Trella died of complications from Covid,” is what John wrote. But it printed, “Trella died of complications from Trella.”
We checked our document, our files, our galleys, and our website. They all had it right. It was only wrong in the print edition.
Perlinda and I looked at each other and said, “Trella did that.”
It’s like she was here all along.
IN POLITICS, BEING DECEIVED IS NO EXCUSE. – Trella quoting someone whose name she couldn’t recall