In Memory of Lauren Maker

BY ED FELIEN

Let us not weep for Lauren. She is beyond our tears. Let us grieve for our loss—the loss of a great fighter for a better world. She had an unshakeable faith that the world could be better than it is. But she didn’t just believe in it. She didn’t just hope for it. She went out and worked for it. And she challenged us to work for it, and all of us at some point, no doubt, fell short of her expectations. The ancient Greeks believed that Sysiphus was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain and just before it got to the top it rolled back down to the bottom, and he had to start all over again. Albert Camus, when he wrote about Sysiphus, said he must have been happy because all any of us can ever hope for is the struggle to reach the heights. Lauren worked on endless campaigns but even when she helped win an election, the boulder never stayed very long at the top of the mountain. And when it knocked her down and rolled over on her, she picked herself up and went back to the bottom of the mountain and started all over again. That’s the spirit of Lauren Maker. That’s the spark of divinity that she saw in all of us. Let us celebrate that hope, that joy, that struggle. We owe it to the faith she had in all of us to re-dedicate ourselves to making this a more just, a more humane, a more democratic world.