Gates

I remember Watergate well. In May 1973, when the televised hearings began, I was about to graduate from high school, and I watched some of them on my family's small black-and-white television. My freshman year at Smith, the hearings continued, and for an hour here and there I would gather with other young women in the living room of our house and watch as Howard Baker asked, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" I had kind of a crush on Baker, as I did with the fictional Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck) and Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy, on Law and Order. It's the kind of lawyer I would have been, crusading, righteous (at times a little self-righteous?) and yet detailed, exacting and hard-working. It was a grave disappointment to me, when I finally worked as a paralegal, to find that there didn't always seem to be a "good guy." I knew I could never represent ("re-present") the bad guy, no matter how much I understood our legal system's rationale for it, and I did not follow my pioneering lawyer grandmother into the field.

Bits of these characteristics have oozed out into my life in interesting ways. Answering letters at Time Magazine, I checked and double-checked my research for accuracy, making me a little slower at getting through piles of World and International mail than I probably should have been. And in my community college teaching of writing and research skills, I underscored correct citation of sources almost ad nauseum. When a final paper was subsequently handed in with plagiarized material (and I was able to locate the original source), my first inner reaction (I am sorry to say) was, "Gotcha!" I was terribly sorry that the student had made that choice, but I couldn't let them think that was an appropriate way to go through life, misrepresenting things. I guess I never understand...it takes as much energy to do things right as to do them wrong. Why not just do it right?

So we appear to be going through another "gate" or series of them. OK, after that week away from the media, I'm semi-riveted, and little "Gotchas" are going off in my head. But I have studied the law of attraction just a bit too long to fully engage with it all. I think this is all happening as a death throe to the idea of duality and conflict and "good vs. evil." What is a post-duality/evolved/visionary woman to do right now? Just persist. I think we stay informed, but try as hard as possible to keep using our positive gifts of beauty, love, wisdom and healing. In the new paradigm, I'll bet there is no "Gotcha!"