Editorials

As one of the smallish number of surviving members of the pre-boomer generation, I was encouraged to memorize poetry in elementary school. This verse from Longfellow’s Psalm of Life stuck with me, even though almost everything about it went out of style in the many decades since I was in Grade 5:

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

First, of course, it needs to be de-gendered: “Lives of great ones all remind us…”

Then, rhyming? Surely not. Another aspect of poetry that was not only abandoned but almost forbidden in my lifetime. Though, thanks to rap culture, rhyme is once more appreciated in some circles, so let it be.

Then there’s that moral. Poems seldom have morals anymore, especially not like this one:

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

In other words,it’s a thoroughly old-fashioned poem, expressing an obsolete optimism not often seen in this modern world of woe.

So why did it spring to mind when I got the text message telling me that Margy Wilkinson had died?

Because she exemplified everything that the rest of us can only aspire to. Wherever she was, whatever was happening around her, she was “up and doing”.

She and her husband were what might be called radical royalty, if that wasn’t such a contradiction in terms. The savage red-baiting their respective parents encountered in the pursuit of social justice in the 1940s and 1950s was memorialized in the obituaries Tony and Margy wrote for their mothers, both of whom died in Berkeley. 

In her adult life, Margy responded time and again to situations where her remarkable focus and energy made a big difference. She was arrested with the Free Speech movement as an undergraduate. She participated in the varied manifestations of the reform movement originating in the Communist Party of the USA which began as the Committees of Correspondence. As a UC Berkeley employee, she was an organizer and official of her union. When the Pacifica Foundation’s boat threatened to sink, she jumped in and rowed like crazy. 

When her Southwest Berkeley was threatened with predatory gentrification (a struggle that’s still going on) she was a founder of Friends of Adeline, and led the neighborhood support for the Here/There encampment on BART property. 

She seldom missed a Berkeley City Council meeting, and when the Council was poised to do something dead stupid, she let them know the error of their ways in the nicest possible way. She liked the clean-up spot at the end of Public Comment, catching anything others might have missed. 

And that’s just the big stuff, the heavy duty political action. 

But also, she excelled at the small stuff, the things that add grace notes to life. 

Of her various UCB jobs, she told me that the one she loved best was supporting the marching band. 

For my birthday last January she gave me a mason jar of her Seville orange marmalade, with a note on the label telling me where she got the requisite sour oranges (from a neighbor’s tree.) I’ve been saving mason jars to give back to her, since making marmalade is an achievement to which I could never aspire. 

And there are many more small stories, too many to tell here. Her many admirers have told them in all sorts of media already, and there will be more. (Send yours to news@berkeleydailyplanet.com if you want.) 

Time again to reprise that moral: 

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait. 

That’s advice for the rest of us that Margy’s left behind. 

I don’t know which is harder, the labor or the waiting. 

It turns out that healing the world, to which she aspired with all her heart, will take more than one lifetime. 

One of Margy’s last Facebook posts was a picture for Emma Goldman’s birthday, with this quote: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.” Not only must we continuing pursuing justice in Margy’s honor, we must try to do it joyfully, a particular challenge in the 2020 turmoil. 

So here’s a little music—sing along or dance to it, with clean hands at the proper distance from others of course. And then, let’s be up and doing, with hearts for any fate. Margy would have expected no less from us.