But the people did more than just watch.
Vanessa’s popularity had risen fast. Her big smile and exuberance became infectious as she spoke on matters such as family, while her tenacity and conviction drove her to change the status quo. The people watched her speak about the future of government policy regarding the environment, health care, and gun control, in such a way that it was hard not to become enthusiastic and motivated.
She smiled. It was honest and heartwarming. This was her day. More than twenty years in the making. She was getting close to achieving what she’d set out to do so long ago. Vanessa finished her acceptance speech. Turned and then returned to the podium. “God bless you all, and God bless America.”
She’d just won the Democratic Nomination for President of the United States.
The crowd of more than thirty-five thousand people cheered and chanted her name. Despite reaching into her late forties it wasn’t hard to imagine her just as perfectly at ease on the cat walk as she was in a political arena. It would be easy to mistake her as simply a beauty pageant contestant, but in reality she was a formidable presence in the political arena.
Staring at the thousands of cheering people in the crowd, Vanessa realized for the first time that her lifelong dream might just become a reality.
She had campaigned heavily on the future of the environment, clean energies. She was supported by a grass-roots campaign, motivating the younger voters who were sick of the age old rhetoric that there were other problems to beat first, and the planet would be saved when the time was right. Of course, everyone knows that the world has a number of problems that will continue to occur until it becomes too late to save earth.
She thought about her own vicissitudes. The challenges that had forced her into her current position. One that she would have never believed herself capable of. Lost in the sound of a thirty-five thousand people cheering, her mind returned her to the journey which had ultimately brought her to this place.
Chapter Sixteen
After completing a bachelor of medical science, she’d planned to go on to study medicine. However, after marrying Brian, her high school sweetheart she fell pregnant immediately. She gave birth to a boy.
Her baby was beautiful, and she fell in love with him instantly, as every mother does. It wasn’t until he was nearly six months old that the doctors confirmed what she had suspected all along — her son was blind and deaf.
It took another two years before she discovered the cause. It was the consequence of a local mine sending their run off water, containing a deadly element, into the town’s water supply. It took three more years to prove they were involved, and nearly ten before they closed down the mine altogether.
In that time she’d put all her energies into fixing it. Instead of drowning in the time and effort required to help her own child, she had fixated on changing the status quo and improving the environment so that no one else had to bear the same experience.
Instead of going on to study medicine, Vanessa changed to a Master of Environmental Sciences. She studied mostly in the evenings. She slept little. Her parents were still alive and she burdened them with longer and longer hours with her son. She became distant with her husband. It wasn’t that she no longer loved him. It was simply a case that she no longer had time to love anyone. In truth, all she wanted was to change the world. Revenge, she discovered, was as powerful a motivator as fear, and it drove her away from the family she should have loved completely.
Afterwards, she got a job with the Environmental Protection Agency. At first it satisfied her need to punish companies and people who managed them. Each fine she issued, or case she brought before a court, somehow made her feel as though she was making the person responsible for her own child’s pain pay. It was foolish, she knew, but still it felt good.
For a time, she felt as though she was making a difference. That, somehow, what she was doing served a purpose. But then she saw how the penalties demanded of the companies who were destroying the environment were nowhere near enough of a deterrent to force the companies to act decently. In many cases, the companies had performed a simple cost versus benefit analysis and found that it was cheaper to pay the fine than it would have been to work in a safe manner to begin with. If she ever really succeeded in a major windfall, the company would simply appeal in one of the several legal avenues for recourse, so that it would be years before anything would be achieved.
This made her more fanatical, and drove her to achieve more. The EPA demanded more hours of her, and further study to stay ahead of the next culprit. The companies would often simply purchase the expert opinions of others to satisfy their objectives by providing false perspectives. And then, the only solution she could see was to study more.
By the time she was thirty-two, she went back to university for the third time in her life. This time, to complete a doctorate in environmental sciences. She mistakenly believed that to beat people in this game, she would need to increase her knowledge base.
After the first year of her third degree, Brian left her. She didn’t blame him. How could she? After all the hours that her chosen field demanded of her, it left no room for intimacy or family.
Three more years of study, and she had successfully completed her Doctorate. Now, she’d thought, she was armed with the knowledge base required to change the world. It took her another two years, and finally the death of her son, before she discovered that she’d been absolutely wrong about everything.
Her son had died aged nine, during winter after contracting viral pneumonia. He was unable to shake it due to his multitude of lead poisoning related illnesses. She walked in to check in on him on her way to work at 4:30 a.m. one morning. At first she thought he was just in a very deep sleep. She thought he looked so very peaceful.
Vanessa had walked into his bedroom to see him for a moment, and give him a kiss before going to work. Instead, she greeted his lifeless body. The ventilator that her son had now lived with for nearly nine years, was still going, mechanically causing his chest to rise and fall. He hadn’t changed much since she’d kissed him goodnight before going to bed, but in an instant, she knew that he was dead.
She sat down next to his bed and cried. To her dismay, she knew that they weren’t tears of loss, but to her shame, tears of relief.
Vanessa contacted her boss at the EPA that very day, and quit.
It was the catalyst that changed her life. Suddenly she realized how wrong she’d been all this time to think that she could change the world by simply enforcing rules. No, for her to make the world a truly better place, she would have to do so by changing everything from the top down. She needed people to think differently. To do that she would need to commit to something more than she ever had before.
And that meant that she would have to reach the top. Politics was the only way to really change the view of the people. To really make a difference. The difficulty was to not become lost in the corruption required to achieve it.
The crowd started chanting her name.
It brought her mind back to the present. They had come a long way since that day nearly thirty years ago when her son had been poisoned. Her thoughts considered the current lead poisoning case in the town of Flint — but there’s so much further to go.
She smiled. Her life’s ambition had begun. As she rolled the die of chance she wondered where it would end. Her acceptance speech had been well received, and she wondered for an instant if she might actually have a chance at winning.