SKYE stephenson

As we look ahead to a new year rising, we can be sure that it will bring change at many levels. By this, I mean nationally. For the United States, writ large. Because, of course, our individual health in never really just individual. It is also impacted by the state of our society and our nation, to which we also contribute through our own actions and beliefs.

For several days, as I reflected upon what to write in my last healing column of 2024, I considered sharing personal experiences of when I lived (twice) in authoritarian states. Experiences that prompted me to think and study a lot about democracies, and how they can, and sometimes do, breakdown.  I even taught a course on this subject at a university in California for a few years, in an earlier chapter of my life.

But then I chatted with my husband about whether this is really a topic for a healing column in The Monadnock Shopper. We both concluded that, probably, no.

However, early this morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise rosy pink in the sky outside my bedroom window, I had a dream. I was sitting at a very long, rectangular wooden table with many people seated around it. I was in one corner. Next to me was a Latin American man of an indescribable age. His long, striped poncho reached almost to his knees.

He looked at me, and said, “Tell them you were the first person at Wellesley College to major in Latin American Studies.”

Then I woke up.

It is true. Back in 1976, when I entered Wellesley College, I had already decided this would be my major. And while they did have a Russian Studies major, and a Chinese major, and a European major, they did not, back then, have a Latin American Studies major.

It was not easy to get my proposed major passed through the proper academic channels. At one time, a professor on the committee even asked me why I would want to study a region like that. Meaning Latin America.

Nowadays, Latin American Studies is a popular major at Wellesley College.

A decade or so after my stint there, I would sometimes receive Latin American Studies majors from Wellesley at the study away program in Chile I then ran. When I told them that I had been the first one to major in Latin American Studies, they couldn’t believe it. They thought it had always been a popular major.

Change can be like that. It is never linear. Just like the growth of our children, change at an institutional and even national level typically happens in fits and sputters. And just like our own children, sometimes there are testing periods when something new is being tried out that may, or may not, work well. In either case, we hope they (our children, an institution, a nation)_ will ultimately learn and grow from the experience.

The main reason I declared a major in Latin American Studies is because of what I learned one afternoon at a café in the Rambla district of Montevideo, Uruguay, where I was an AFS exchange student. At that time, 1974, Uruguay was, uncharacteristically, under a dictatorship. A small country of around three million, Uruguay was the first nation in the Americas to have social security. Its people are predominately middle class, and well educated. And traditionally very democratic.

But now I had discovered our teacher had been disappeared because he refused to salute the Uruguayan flag in the classroom, as a protest for the military intervention. We were discussing this upsetting news at the café.

That was when I asked, in the best Spanish I could then muster, “Why did the democracy get toppled by the military last year? I don’t understand.”

My best friend, Adriana, looked hard at me. Then she said, “You really don’t know?”

I just stared back.

“It’s your country’s fault,” Adrianna told me, bluntly. “Your people were the ones that trained our military in counter insurgency, and gave them weapons. Don’t you know about the School of the Americas?”

This was news to me.

My friends shook their head, and smiled a sad sort of smile. “You are pretty naïve Skye,” they said, in unison.

Carl Jung made famous the idea of our shadow. A part of our unconscious we repress because it does not fit the ideal of what we want to be, or think we should be. And he maintained that until this shadow is brought into the light and dealt with psychologically, we will not be a whole person.

Or a whole nation, perhaps.

-Published in The Monadnock Shopper News, Dec. 4-10, 2024