Hypatia

Cornell, Drucilla.
The Solace of Resonance
Hypatia - Volume 20, Number 2, Spring 2005, pp. 215-222

Indiana University Press

Drucilla Cornell - The Solace of Resonance - Hypatia 20:2 Hypatia 20.2 (2005) 215-222 The Solace of Resonance Drucilla L. Cornell Like so many others I have been out campaigning for John Kerry in northern New Jersey, my old haunts when I worked as a union organizer. I haven't campaigned for a president since George McGovern. As I write we are weeks away from the election, but this is not a "musing" about electoral politics and what role they should play in the Left. It is instead about loneliness. It's about loneliness and the perils that come with isolation. I have been deeply struck and moved by the loneliness of the women with whom I have met in the course of campaigning for Kerry. My main weakness as a campaigner is that I am supposed to spend twenty minutes at a house, and two hours is my average. Marilyn, who gave me permission to tell her story, lost people close to her in the war on Iraq. And then on top of everything else her husband died from a heart attack six months ago. Her husband's wrongful death was unnecessary, as he was caught in the gap between the cancellation of his insurance policy when he was laid off and before receiving much-needed access to Medicare. She described her experience running up and down the hospital halls begging for help, and yet no one would help her. The words she used to describe those desperate hours revealed how alone she felt. She blamed that sense of aloneness on an uncaring and immoral world. That kind of...