So I have been moping around ever since the election - trying to find a little perspective and some inspiration to get back up and fight another day. I spend a great deal of time on the road so I get to hear a lot of what people are saying in a lot of different places. In spite of the fact that I am surrounded by Pharma folks most of time, I have heard mostly dismay. Pharma as an entity, obviously, had an interest in seeing Georgie and his cronies take back the WH, but most of the people we work with are from somewhere else. The people from somewhere else are largely dismayed.
Our foreign clients are largely dismayed, too.
But today I was on a flight back from a conference in Philly and everything came back into perspective. The end of the trip started out routinely enough. There were delays and frustrations and I came dangerously close to a decidedly unpopulist moment when I realized that the airline had messed up my transfer.
And I was sitting there waiting to get off the plane in Dallas when the stewardess came on the intercom and asked us all to sit back down. She said "there is a soldier escorting another fallen soldier and we would like to allow him to get off first". This was on an American Airlines flight. I fly a lot of American flights - am on the road 48 weeks out of the year - and I had never heard an announcement like that before.
So here comes a young seargent down the aisle. I had seen him in Philly. I watched him walk out on the runway before the flight and was wondering what he was doing. I think I knew in the back of my mind but the idea of them sending home one of those soldiers on a commercial flight seemed very unreal to me. But they did. And there he was. Sitting way in the back of that flight and walking all the way up the aisle by himself.
We have been going back and forth about whether the bil would be heading back or not. Now we know that he is. This summer. The orders are signed. We are going to spend another year waiting for him to come home. We have already had this year.
I watched that young seargent walk down the aisle. I thought about how I have been losing my resolve. I thought about all the other young seargents were flying home this week with a fallen soldier and I realized that the time for sitting around and feeling sorry for myself is over. The stakes are getting infinately higher every day. I am not a grrl that gets emotional over things, but I found myself struggling to control my emotions watching that proud young man walk past all of us pampered corporate types. When we said that it was the most important election of our lives, we were right. It was. And every election that comes from now until we get our country out of the hands of these bastards is going to be more important still. We haven't seen anything, my friends.
So if you get discouraged, just think about what happened today en route from Philly to Dallas. A fallen soldier rode home in the hold of an American flight and we all sat and watched his seargent walk down the aisle to escort him the rest of the way.
As of today, I am officially re-engaged.