Voice of Voiceless

Tonight my wife, coming home from work around 9:15pm, fell and hit her head on the wall as she was coming up the side door stairs. Since she is going in for day surgery tomorrow she felt it best that we go to the urgent care service tonight to have things checked out. The doctor saw her fairly quickly after we arrived and said there were no symptoms of anything but a bump on the head. She would be free to go after some paper work. Then came the long wait. Finally, about an hour later I went to the nursing desk to make sure they had not forgotten us. They said they would be in shortly and were.

For some time now I have been working through our alderman to get a speed board on our street to make drivers aware of their speed on our stretch of street with no stop signs for nearly 10 blocks but boarded by three grade schools. The speed board has come and gone, worked and not worked and finally yesterday was moved and today was removed. I wrote my alderman tonight about this situation and copied the police officers that he always copies. When I drove out of the driveway tonight taking my wife to the urgent care clinic I saw a police van pulling up with a new speed board. Since it is solar driven we will need to wait till tomorrow to see if it works.

I tell these two stories from today to relate in a small way the power of advocating. There are bigger examples in my life of how advocating made a difference. Persistent, assertive persons like me make good advocates. But this raises the bigger question of why the quiet, low-income, marginalized or ill person needs an advocate. Why isn’t the voice of every person, be they poor or rich, powerful or weak, treated with equal respect and dignity?

An advocate needs to be aware of his or her limited role, to spark a response and have the other person’s voice heard but not to do for someone else what they can do for themselves. An advocate’s job is simply to allow the voice of the voiceless to be heard.

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