Read Online With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Christine Quinn
Ads: Link
her medications, if I had never shown impatience, or if I had been less demanding, she would have survived. That idea plagued me at college and for many years afterward.
It was part and parcel of my attitude toward myself. On the one hand, I was an energetic leader and a world-class Bantam, but on the other I was not very good at my studies and still overweight. And I was drinking a lot and vomiting a lot. However, I also knew that if I threw myself into an activity, any activity that mattered to me, things would feel a lot better. Maybe I was just keeping with my family tradition. Think of my mother, ill with cancer, putting on theme birthday parties; or me in high school pulling out all the stops for Sports Night; or my father—despite the burdens of having a sick wife, an elderly mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law living at home—working on the picket line when his men were on strike.
Activity. It was the way of my family, and Trinity was where I discovered my passion for activism. Not that politics was a new interest for me. I was fascinated by it as a kid. I remember wonderful times when I was in my teens, over dinner at my friend’s house, when I’d go toe to toe with her father over current events. He was very conservative, and for the most part I managed to hold my own.
I paid close attention when my father talked about his union work and about Democratic politics. His membership in the union guaranteed medical care for our family. If we hadn’t had that insurance, my mother’s medical expenses might well have bankrupted us.
He gave me two reasons why he was a Democrat. First, he’d say, “Because they met us at the boat.” By that he meant the Democrats were there for his family when they came over from Ireland (because the Democrats were—and are—for immigrants). And second, he’d say, “FDR saved my life.” He believed deeply that FDR’s policies saved his family’s lives in the Depression.
I was eager to get involved in such a way that I felt I was having an impact. At the time, there was a big movement on college campuses across the country to get colleges and universities to pull their investments out of South African companies and any companies that did business with South Africa because of that government’s apartheid policy. It was an important international movement that helped bring an end to a totally discriminatory government. We got the Trinity student government to pass a resolution urging the college to divest, and a shantytown was set up on campus to represent the shantytowns where South African blacks were restricted to living. Trinity students slept overnight in the shanties. I was so proud to be a part of this effort and felt I was making a difference in some small way.
T he best discovery I made at Trinity was that I could do internships through ConnPIRG, an environmental and consumer protection group (founded by Ralph Nader) that watches out for people’s interests and “stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten our health and safety, our financial security or our right to fully participate in our democratic society.”
I signed up for every internship and activity I could find and did volunteer work, especially on environmental issues. This work was magical to me. It showed me the amazing strength of people coming together and organizing. It fueled a lifelong belief in the unstoppable power of government and citizens working together. I was assigned to work with a woman who lived a half hour or so from Hartford. Every Saturday we’d knock on doors in her town, surveying residents to document the impact of chemical waste that had been dumped there; it was similar to what had happened in Niagara Falls, New York, where the Love Canal neighborhood was built on top of a toxic waste dump. So we were going door-to-door in her town to try to replicate what had been done at Love Canal, where the government had designated the contaminated area a Superfund site so it
It was part and parcel of my attitude toward myself. On the one hand, I was an energetic leader and a world-class Bantam, but on the other I was not very good at my studies and still overweight. And I was drinking a lot and vomiting a lot. However, I also knew that if I threw myself into an activity, any activity that mattered to me, things would feel a lot better. Maybe I was just keeping with my family tradition. Think of my mother, ill with cancer, putting on theme birthday parties; or me in high school pulling out all the stops for Sports Night; or my father—despite the burdens of having a sick wife, an elderly mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law living at home—working on the picket line when his men were on strike.
Activity. It was the way of my family, and Trinity was where I discovered my passion for activism. Not that politics was a new interest for me. I was fascinated by it as a kid. I remember wonderful times when I was in my teens, over dinner at my friend’s house, when I’d go toe to toe with her father over current events. He was very conservative, and for the most part I managed to hold my own.
I paid close attention when my father talked about his union work and about Democratic politics. His membership in the union guaranteed medical care for our family. If we hadn’t had that insurance, my mother’s medical expenses might well have bankrupted us.
He gave me two reasons why he was a Democrat. First, he’d say, “Because they met us at the boat.” By that he meant the Democrats were there for his family when they came over from Ireland (because the Democrats were—and are—for immigrants). And second, he’d say, “FDR saved my life.” He believed deeply that FDR’s policies saved his family’s lives in the Depression.
I was eager to get involved in such a way that I felt I was having an impact. At the time, there was a big movement on college campuses across the country to get colleges and universities to pull their investments out of South African companies and any companies that did business with South Africa because of that government’s apartheid policy. It was an important international movement that helped bring an end to a totally discriminatory government. We got the Trinity student government to pass a resolution urging the college to divest, and a shantytown was set up on campus to represent the shantytowns where South African blacks were restricted to living. Trinity students slept overnight in the shanties. I was so proud to be a part of this effort and felt I was making a difference in some small way.
T he best discovery I made at Trinity was that I could do internships through ConnPIRG, an environmental and consumer protection group (founded by Ralph Nader) that watches out for people’s interests and “stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten our health and safety, our financial security or our right to fully participate in our democratic society.”
I signed up for every internship and activity I could find and did volunteer work, especially on environmental issues. This work was magical to me. It showed me the amazing strength of people coming together and organizing. It fueled a lifelong belief in the unstoppable power of government and citizens working together. I was assigned to work with a woman who lived a half hour or so from Hartford. Every Saturday we’d knock on doors in her town, surveying residents to document the impact of chemical waste that had been dumped there; it was similar to what had happened in Niagara Falls, New York, where the Love Canal neighborhood was built on top of a toxic waste dump. So we were going door-to-door in her town to try to replicate what had been done at Love Canal, where the government had designated the contaminated area a Superfund site so it
Similar Books
