Do you know who I am? | OPINION

The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.

I’m a woman, and I’m a conservative. I believe in the Second Amendment rights promised to all Americans because my ancestors fled from countries where an unarmed citizenry was doomed to the darkness of oppression. Yet when the Pulse nightclub shooting rocked my hometown, I was driving down nearby Orange Avenue with my mother beside me, neither of us able to speak. We parked across the street and let the car idle. In the silence, tears tracked down our cheeks, into our mouths. We grieved for our community, for our country.

I might not agree with you on the solution. Yet I see the problem—it stares me in the face each time I drive past it.

I’m a woman, and I’m a conservative. I would argue that a socialized health care system would do more harm than good, leaving thousands of Americans with subpar care. Yet for the last three years, my mother has battled against an incurable autoimmune disorder. I have watched my parents struggle to find ways to pay for treatments that could ease the daily pain she lives in; I have watched her be told, again and again, that the only answer to her disease is more prescription medications, medications that deal with symptoms, only symptoms.

I might not agree with you on the solution. Yet at night, as I frantically search the internet for “How to Deal with Autoimmune Disease,” the problem haunts me. It haunts me like a ghost.

I’m a woman, and I’m a conservative. I was born to a family of immigrants—Colombian, Greek, Italian—who risked their all to come to this country, whose lives were seeds in a garden that would bloom for their children. They made countless sacrifices so their daughters and sons—my father, my mother—could have a chance to experience the opportunities they never had. Channeling that legacy, the conviction that legal immigration is the key to America’s future is ingrained in me. Still, I’m frustrated with an immigration system that is unraveling at the seams; I watch children being torn from their parents and rack my brain for a better way, a better way to guide people through our gates to liberty. In the faces of those at the border, I see my grandmother, eighteen years old and alone, hair still smelling of salt from the boat she took as she drinks in the sight of America—America!—for the first time.

I might not agree with you on the solution. Yet the problem lingers over my family dinners like a dark cloud.

I’m a woman, and I’m a conservative. I believe that human life is a precious gift to be treasured and adored, each one intricately woven and designed for a purpose. My identity is rooted in that truth, and so I will always demand that every man, woman, and child be given the opportunity to live the life they were created for. Yet with the same passionate intensity, I will gather the stories and perspectives of women who support or have made the choice to abort, searching for solidarity in the vast and vivid spectrum of womanhood that unites us. You are no less beautiful or valuable in my eyes for any choice you make, however much I might mourn the choice itself.

I might not agree with you on the solution. Yet I will deepen my understanding of the problem in the best way I know how: listening.

I’m a woman, and I’m a conservative. I fight passionately to ensure that other women experience the equality, respect, and freedom that our country promises them. Nothing infuriates me more than when I see women treated as anything less than what they are: strong, worthy, compassionate, intelligent, and powerful. Yet I also have an astonishingly sensitive brother, who proves to me over and over again that men have an equally valuable purpose in this world, and must be continually lifted up in their pursuit of what it means to be a man who is as loving as he is strong. 

I might not agree with you on the solution. But the problems created by denigrating the worth of either gender burrow like shards of glass into my heart, merciless and unrelenting.

I’m a woman, and I’m a conservative. I’ve seen the door shut behind your eyes when I tell you what I am. I give you two words—seventeen letters, a collection of vowels and consonants—and you know me: what I think, where I’m from, how I talk, how I act. I am reduced, like data in a computer program, to meaningless descriptors, woman, conservative. So I ask you: do you know me?

Do you know who I am?

Cassandra James

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