Tag: Emma Tai

Surviving Amnesia

God! How I love WebMD! This online ingenious, comprehensive, and reliable health and medical source has saved me from many time-gnawing trips to the Emergency Room.

Last week I found myself at the bus stop on State Street near the Hilton Hotel with a “Netroots Nation” Convention credential swinging from my neck. I have no memory of the previous four hours. Zilch. I’d planned to attend the Netroots Nation Convention at the Hilton; the swinging credential assured me I’d at least registered.

Are you thinking I may have experienced an alcoholic blackout? Nope. Those days are long gone. I haven’t had a drink in forty-five years. Arriving home around 9:30 pm, I dove right into my laptop and searched for “lost memories”, which returned a description of something I’d hoped hadn’t happened to me: 

“Losing time, or having large blocks of time for which one has no memory is a symptom of Dissociative Identity Disorder. Sometimes a person will lose so much time that they “wake up” in an unfamiliar town or place. This is called Dissociative Fugue.

Uh-oh. That sounds like the multiple personalities portrayed by Sally Field in the horror movie, “Sybil”. I’d hoped I didn’t murder anyone, or go to some stranger’s hotel room whilst in a fugue state. I searched further—typed “sudden memory loss”:

“Transient global amnesia, TGA, is a sudden loss of memory. It’s an alarming but harmless condition. Symptoms usually last for hours and then memory returns. It has no lasting consequences. Doctors aren’t sure what causes it. It’s more common in people over 50 and with a history of migraines.

Whoa! That’s me! Thank you WebMD and for the good news:

“TGA …is not caused by a neurological condition like epilepsy or stroke. With TGA, you remember who you are and recognize the people you know well.

Netroots Nation’s mission is “to bring together online citizens across America, inject progressive voices into the national conversation, and advance the values of justice, equality, and community in our nation’s politics.” Their annual convention in my hometown came at the right time for my aging activism. Chicago had just elected a progressive, smart, kind-hearted new mayor, Brandon Johnson. I believe with my whole heart that within a few years, Chicago will be a role model of common solutions for all American cities. At the convention, I’d hoped to replenish my quiver’s rah-rah-cis-boom-bah that had fizzled since Mayor Johnson’s inauguration. 

In the late afternoon of the TGA incident, I planned to attend an event in the Waldorf Room, “Solidarity Across Differences: Organizing When We Disagree.” There’s no evidence I was there. But I was somewhere. My little black-and-white pocket notebook has three new quotes in my handwriting:

“There’s a collective out there that wants to shrink the hope of the possible.” Emma Tai, Director United Working Families—the grassroots organization that helped elect Brandon Johnson

“Chicago is a town that’s gonna show the world what the future looks like.”  Randi Weingarten, President American Federation of Teachers

“Safety is not blue lights.”  Brandon Johnson, Chicago Mayor

My iPhone displays several close-up photos of Mayor Johnson giving a speech, two selfies at the food table, and one selfie with Heather Booth a long-time political activist from Washington, DC. With the exception of the food table, these are exactly what I would have photographed, had I been in my right mind, proving once again how competent my online doctor, WebMD, is. 

“…in TGA the patient cannot acquire new memories but otherwise can function normally; personal identity is retained…”

Whew! What a relief; between the notebook inscriptions and my photos, I have proof I acted my best self, and confirmation I had all the symptoms of an episode of  TGA, Transient Global Amnesia.

Do I feel safe? Absolutely. Dr. WebMD tells me there’s rarely more than one occurrence. And no one has come forward to tell me I acted like Sybil.

At least not yet.

Listen to the Women

Listen to the Women

Our mythological mother, Eve, plucked our heads from the clouds and planted our feet on the ground when she told Adam, “we need to eat that apple to get insight into human nature so we know what we’re up against.” 

Some people dismiss, even deride women’s intuition. Perhaps this wrongheadedness is a subconscious backlash to colonial times when women were burned alive for their bewitching claims of divine truth-telling.

Three Chicago iconoclasts are standouts in demonstrating their feminine intuition and consequent leadership: Dorothy Day, Ida B. Wells and Emma Tai.

Emma Tai? 

Sagacious Democratic strategist David Axelrod praised Paul Vallas for his “brilliant” single-issue strategy during the 2023 Chicago mayoral campaign. Vallas pounded out one violent crime message after another. But, fortunately for Chicago, that was not the winning strategy.  

As the chief organizer for the progressive Working Families organization, Emma Tai honed her skills over the last ten years in grassroots campaigning, winning seats in Chicago’s city council. Conventional wisdom blinded moribund pundits into believing Vallas’ money and endorsements were a path to victory. They underestimated the tenacious Emma Tai—and never saw Brandon Johnson coming.

The losing Paul Vallas campaign outspent the winning Brandon Johnson campaign two to one. 

“I knew if we won, it would only be because of organizing our ground game.” Tai said. “Our people were on the doors, and the Vallas people weren’t on the doors. We had a door-knocking program across all fifty of Chicago’s wards. On election day, I felt confident that we’d left it all on the field.”

Dorothy Day wrote about and advocated for the poor and oppressed all her life. In the 1930s, Day, a pacifist, established the Catholic Worker Movement, to aid the poor and homeless. She continually  fought patriarchal systems in the workplace, politics, social structures, and the Catholic Church. She wrote uncompromising pacifist articles for the Catholic Worker, bucking the Catholic doctrine of just war theory. In 1951, the exasperated Archdiocese of New York ordered Day to cease publication or remove the word Catholic from her publication’s name. She did neither. 

Then in1983, a pastoral letter issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, noted her role in establishing non-violence as a Catholic principle: “The nonviolent witness of such figures as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King has had profound impact upon the life of the Church in the United States.”

 In 1892, Ida Bell Wells, born into slavery during the Civil War, published an editorial in the Memphis Free Speech refuting what she called “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women. If Southern men are not careful, a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

Violent white backlash drove her away from the south and eventually to Chicago. One of her lifelong pursuits was exposing lynchings of Black men. White suffragettes ridiculed and ostracized Ida because she openly confronted those who ignored lynching. Nevertheless, she continued advocating for women’s right to vote. 

Her passions drove her to found The Chicago Conservator, the first Black newspaper in Chicago; establish Chicago’s first kindergarten for Black children; help found the NAACP; found the National Equal Rights League calling on President Woodrow Wilson to end discrimination in government jobs; organize The Women’s Era Club, a first-of-its-kind civic club for African-American women in Chicago; help organize the National Afro-American Council, serving as the organization’s first secretary; found the Negro Fellowship League, the first Black settlement house in Chicago; organize the Alpha Suffrage Club to further voting rights for all women. 

The U.S. government placed Wells under surveillance, as a dangerous “race agitator”.  She ignored this threat and wrote a series of investigative reports for the Chicago Defender on the East St. Louis Race Riots. She then founded the Third Ward Women’s Political Club to help Black people become involved in Chicago politics.

 At Thalia Hall in Pilsen, reporter Laura Washington asked Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson who his advisors would be when he sits in the mayor’s office.

He turned to the audience, looked around, paused, smiled, and answered. 

“I’m going to listen to the women.” 

Smart move, Mr. Mayor.