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Live United by Erin Haag

This weekend, I’ll be attending parades with my little family. We’ll admire the floats, cheer on friends walking and hope to get one of those freezie pops. I’ll be the most popular mom in my area, because I’ll have the little scissors tucked into my bag for opening those freezie pops. I’ll also be the one with the really loud voice to remind people to stand up, pay attention and show respect for our veterans as they walk by. Sometimes it can take people by surprise — and that’s understandable. The excitement, the crowds, the long wait for the parade to start. I’ll be standing — the Disabled American Veterans, the American Legion, the American Legion Riders, the Color Guard, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Women Veterans, the Vietnam Veterans, the Marine Corps League. I’ll be looking for familiar faces and paying them respect.

Freedom isn’t free. People use this phrase to remind themselves and others the sacrifices made. It’s well known that I spend most of my evenings on a ball field somewhere, as classically “American” as it gets — hotdogs and popcorn, sunflower seeds and a bat and ball, celebrating with ice cream after the game. It’s become my hobby to photograph it in the last few years. This year, I stepped up my game and became team manager for the softball team, and thus getting the credentials to be allowed in the dugout. Background check, concussion training and Safe Sport-certified.

Safe Sport focuses on protecting athletes from abuse and misconduct. It’s the framework used by the U.S. Olympics, Special Olympics and Paralympic programs. As a social worker, it was familiar ground to me, ensuring that our vulnerable populations aren’t placed in situations. It might seem easy, it might seem obvious, but it’s not. If it was, our rates of abuse and misconduct would be much lower.

There’s a significant imbalance of power in many situations. Society reinforces the idea of people’s ability to choose. They can choose to walk away, choose not to participate.

This idea underestimates the prevalence of power imbalances, and how that can factor into a person’s decision making. I’ve witnessed it in many forms. In the educational setting, working with teenagers and young adults, I often saw academic classes being missed. I would hear, “I have a dentist appointment.” I learned that I needed to ask, “is this a routine dental cleaning or do you have an issue?” Usually, it was a routine cleaning. I learned that they just accepted the first appointment given to them, and didn’t engage in the process of letting them know what their schedule was. We’d call the dentist office together to see. With classes being three days a week in the morning, we almost always found the office was able to accommodate the schedule change so the student didn’t miss class. Seems so simple. Just say, “I have class on M/W/F mornings. Do you have anything in the afternoon or on Tues/Thurs?” It honestly never occurred to these students that they could do that.

It was a perceived difference of authority. There was no actual authority, but yet students treated the dentist as the “authority.” Yay for dental health! Yay for doing something grownup! Except, what happens when that perception is carried into other areas? What happens when there’s an imbalance of power, a perception of authority carried into major areas of your life? What happens when you’re in crisis and you’re conditioned over the years to accept what you’re told, or to sit down and be grateful for what you have? What happens when you’re told over and over by society that you should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you just work hard enough, are smart enough, persistent enough?

On the ball field, the coaches I’ve had the privilege of knowing are fierce in their protection of kids. They’re there as volunteers, attending meetings, answering questions and completing their certifications. One coach recently was trying to get softball girls to be enthusiastic, to pump up the energy, boost their morale. He told one of the players, “Smile!” I immediately told him, “No! We do not tell women and girls to smile!” Being told to smile is problematic for women, because it reinforces societal expectations of being nice, being soft, being welcoming. It undermines a woman’s right to be respected as an equal.

Later in a team meeting, I brought it up. I told the girls, “You don’t have to smile — because girls and women don’t need to smile because someone else told them to.” I explained that our goal was to pump up their energy, and by getting loud, smiling, game face — whatever they chose to do would help boost their own energy and the energy of their teammates.

The coach is fine. He doesn’t have the lived experience of being a woman who is told to smile more, and when she’s authority to be dismissed with unflattering terms. He welcomes me talking to the girls, and I’m pretty sure he’ll never tell another player to smile as long as we’re on a team together.

It’s hard sometimes. We have one senior on our homebound delivery list that our volunteer really is worried about. Our volunteer feels that the senior isn’t safe in her current home — and we’ve checked in and offered resources. At the end of the day though, the senior makes her own choices, and we honor that self-determination. It might seem obvious to the rest of the world that these choices aren’t the right ones — it’s not for us to take away her power, her freedom, her rights to keep her safe.

Imbalances of power exist. From teachers to students, employer to employee, coach to player, medical offices to patients — they exist and they always will. These small examples can build up people or tear them down, and take away their perceived power. So much of the work we do is focused on empowering our clients: from choosing their food, the coat they wear to choosing how and where they live.

Freedom isn’t free, and the fight isn’t over — from the Declaration of Independence, to Juneteenth marking the end of slavery, to the 19th Amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These critical pieces of legislation and many more built in protection for our most vulnerable populations. This weekend, we’re honoring Independence Day. I urge people to remember that the fight for freedom didn’t stop that day in 1776 and to keep honoring that sacrifice by striving to make our community better. Every day, we fight for the freedom, the power of our most vulnerable community members. If you’d like to learn more about how to join the fight, visit our website or give us a call at 507-373-8670.

Erin Haag is the executive director of the United Way of Freeborn County.