My Aunt Margaret: The Last True Liberal

In a few days, Americans will go to the polls to decide one of the most critical and caustic presidential elections in our nation’s history.

I just wish my Aunt Margaret was still here to see it.

To break it all down.

She’d have been ready, of course. She would have done her research, watched all the debates, weighed the candidate’s positions.

She would have thought long and hard about her decision.

And then she would have voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Not just because Biden is the right choice for the nation’s future, but for another reason.

Margaret was a Liberal. She wore the badge proudly, all her life.

She would have listend to Trump, given him his chance.

And then rejected him.

And in this most politically divided era in our nation since the Vietnam War, when conservatives have dug deep into their quivers to target the left with such insults as snowflake, libtard, lazy, thin-skinned, PC and elitist, Margaret would have stood strong.

She knew what the term liberal meant — concepts like living in a pluralistic society, economic equality, racial tolerance and world peace.

She walked the walk.

More than that, she instructed me in many of these concepts, nuanced my way of looking at the world, made me a better person, more liberal, and proud of it.

In 1980, the year I graduated from college, I moved to Washington, D.C. to look for a job as a reporter. At the time, my mother’s eldest sister lived in a high-rise apartment building in Hyattsville, Md. and she offered me her foldout couch.

Over the coming months, my aunt gave me so much more.

Margaret was single; she’d never married, and I think she relished the company. At night, after the dinner dishes were cleared and washed, we’d sit in her living room and talk about the state of things — the world at large and, mostly, American politics.

I was a bit of a tabula rasa, a college-educated work in progress, still naive. So Margaret schooled me. She challenged me with questions about why I felt the way I did, and what I would do if I was in the same position.

It was like a graduate school course in critical thinking.

Back then, Jimmy Carter was her man. A politician with faults, to be sure, he was in the end a decent human being.

Unlike Donald Trump, a political imposter and charlatan who is more unlike that humble peanut farmer than any man alive.

My rationale for detesting Trump was planted long ago by my Aunt Margaret. And how I wish she were here, to parse out all the falsehoods, to compare notes.

I am a proud liberal in large part because of what Margaret taught me, not just through her words, but her actions.

Because she wasn't just my aunt, she was my mentor, my political hero, my best friend.

If Margaret was living today, Trump would have given to the wolf whistle to his noxious rabble.

“Snowflake,” they would have called her. 

And just maybe, “Lock her up.”

How dare they. 

Margaret had a bigger heart, could feel more empathy and compassion, than all of them combined. 

Her name was Margaret Guy, but I called her Maggie.

It was less formal and one of the ways we moved past being mere blood relatives to becoming real friends.

Margaret was 68 then, her career as a social worker cut short by health problems. She was a shut-in, legally blind and unable to walk without a cane, despite several hip replacements. 

Before my arrival, the only face she saw regularly was the man who delivered her daily Meals on Wheels.

In the ensuing months, we spent evenings talking politics — me sprawled on her living room sofa, she perched in a special chair that enabled her to get up and down easily.

Ronald Reagan has just been elected president, turning Margaret’s political world on its head. She thought the Nixon nightmare was over, and now another GOP was in the Oval Office. She worried about the nation.

Margaret spent 40 years working to help the less-fortunate. She counseled juvenile delinquents from the poorest projects in downtown Washington. She did volunteer work and, in the 1950s, helped run a home for teenaged unwed mothers.

Black lives mattered for Margaret long before the phrase became a political slogan.

We weren't that close right away.

Once, early on, when I had taken a day off from job-hunting, Margaret became annoyed with my laziness. She was up at 7a.m. like clockwork and usually, me with her. But on this morning, I dove under the covers.

She had her breakfast, and then waged her campaign to get me up. First she turned on the dining room humidifier, which made an annoying “Whooooo!” call. I ignored it.

Then, in a flourish that would have made any political campaign proud, she threw open the living room curtains, flooding the room with sunlight.

That did it.

We raised our voices. I told her that I already had one mother, that I didn’t need another. She cried, but we later talked things out.

It was that day, I think, that our friendship began.

In time, Margaret and I worked out an unspoken deal: I made her laugh. She taught me how to think.

And Margaret was a good listener. She claimed she never had an original thought in her life — that her strength was the ability to relay the ideas of others, simply and concisely.

How wrong she was!

How many of my ideas, my compassion for people, my approach to life, have I learned from her? When I argued with my boss or my family, when I first grappled with the idea of getting married, I turned to Margaret for counsel.

She helped me better appreciate my own father who, while liberal on most issues, always voted GOP — because he was a devout Catholic who could not accept the concept of abortion.

Margaret showed me how to better grasp the one-issue voter, how some things could not be helped, just better understood.

I learned from her compassion, her determination, her independence.

Legally blind, she spent hours in front of the radio, or inches from the TV screen, devouring the day’s political developments. She bent over a magnifying glass, researching her family genealogy.

And, man, was she a tough historian. If one of my ancestors was the town drunk, Margaret said so. There was no whitewashing with her.

At night, she lay in bed listening to her talking books. She read more than people with perfect vision. Never fiction, aways history. Real life, she said, was fascinating enough.

Margaret’s friends called her the last real liberal. And Margaret earned the label, wore it proudly, like a badge of honor. She never saw color. She refused to acknowledge race.

In the late 1950s, during the era of McCarthyism and years before the Civil Rights Amendment, Margaret was one of the few whites to attend predominantly-black Howard University.

Earning her master’s degree in social work, she studied at home with groups of students of color. Once, a neighbor called the authorities after looking out her window to see Margaret surrounded by a group of African Americans.

They were, no doubt, plotting a political revolution!

For days, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI kept watch on Margaret’s apartment until one agent approached to ask about the meetings. When Margaret told him they were students cramming for exams the agent smiled and, I’m told, shook her hand.

Margaret remained a woman of principal. When white flight hit her suburban neighborhood, Margaret stayed.

We remained close for years after I left Washington, keeping in touch through her cassette tapes, letters an my occasional visits.

When I received one of her tapes, I would turn out the lights and listen to her hodgepodge rumination about politics, people, ideas and family matters. I would imagine Maggie, shut away in her little apartment, a proud woman who refused to give up contact with the outside world.

By 1988, her body had begun to fail her. She fell and broke her wrist, and was moved into a nursing home. How she hated her loss of independence.

She died at age 77. Today, she would be 108 — still feisty, sill full of ideas and compassion. Still voting.

All these years later, with the nation set adrift amid another divisive political storm, I celebrate my dear Aunt Margaret, a woman who was indeed the last true liberal.

So, go ahead, conservatives, call us snowflakes, me and my Aunt Margaret.

Because she taught me this about those crystalline forces of nature.

They're both intricate and unique, every last one of them.

And together, they can bury you. Blow you away. 

Take this coming Tuesday, for example. 

And when that happens, my Aunt Margaret will be there in spirit.

Maggie.