For readers unfamiliar with North Carolina’s Moral Monday protests, here are some links:

Huffington Post

NAACP (Forward Together/Moral Monday)

News and Observer article

In a nutshell, our local politics are currently appalling and getting rapidly worse.  Education, health care, immigration law, reproductive rights and marriage rights have all been under the gun…  so to speak…  while in fact, it’s now legal to take concealed weapons to playgrounds.  Grrrrrr.

So the NAACP has organized a core team of clergy people from many religious traditions, and collected around them a legion of allies with a wide range of passions and concerns, and together they hold massive protests at the State Capital every Monday evening.  The idea is to be generally disruptive and draw media attention to these issues, but while strictly following the respected rules of civil disobedience.  Each week, out of the thousand or more protestors, 50 – 100 people volunteer to civilly disobey until actually arrested.  After many Mondays, we feel confident that these brave and generous people will be treated gently and released as swiftly as possible, to wait for their court dates…  while new volunteers are trained by the protest leaders to take their places the following week.

Ordinarily, protests are not really my thing.  I don’t like loud crowds, even gathered for a good purpose.  And I have mixed feelings about the political rhetoric, even used for a good purpose.  I’m wildly and deeply impressed that the leaders have managed to rally so many different factions and bring them together to help each other – teachers, doctors, immigrants, gay couples, men and women, black and white, Baptists and Jews, and so on.  On the other hand, while I was there someone tried to get me to wear an anti-voucher sticker on behalf of the teacher’s union and I had to politely decline, because actually I think vouchers and charter schools are a good idea.  It was awkward, because despite the very wide range of issues being represented, there was this underlying assumption that being liberal, we all agree on all the items on the table.  And I don’t, so the whole thing makes me uncomfortable.

On the other hand, they just closed the last remaining clinic where a woman can safely get a legal abortion. Abortions are still legal, and they don’t think they can change that law, so instead they just shut down all the clinics.  It makes me sick.  I mean, the girls had a friend who got pregnant in the 8th grade.   EIGHTH GRADE.  She was a victim of very suspicious circumstances and her family, if they’d known, would have thrown her out onto the street.  Thank God her little 14-year-old body decided it couldn’t stay pregnant, and she never had to face this awful, heartbreaking decision.  But even typing this I’m starting to cry thinking how hopeless her situation would be now, with no options and no safe choices.

Ok, now this is turning into a political rant.  I have to edit.

Anyway…

The point here is, if your mom is getting arrested, you go to the protest.

I am really, really proud of her.  And I was scared to tears the whole time.  I think she was scared too, at first, but by the time the volunteers were settled in the capital building and rest of us had been asked to leave, she really seemed ok.  She was with a “buddy” and knew several others there.  And she’d been trained.  And it was week 12 – the police certainly knew that the protest would be peaceful, and everyone knew what to expect.  But still.  You don’t ever really know, right?

I felt like I had to make excuses for why I wasn’t getting arrested.  “I’m not allowed to,” I kept telling people.  “I’m waiting to adopt and my adoption agency said not to get arrested.”