A Hero Falls

 

We sat on my balcony in Beirut overlooking the sparkling Mediterranean. His name is Alex Moore and we met when I taught his son in Sri Lanka; he was staying with me while refreshing his memory of the city during the war. Sexy on so many levels.

He still looked like the college quarterback; tall, fit, blond, real Southern sex. So many stories of his time in the Secret Service from eating cookies in the White House kitchen during Gerald Ford’s time, running beside Ford’s limo to helicoptering into Beirut from Cyprus, under the radar at midnight, after the Marine barracks were blown up in 1983. He was in the process of writing a fictional book and was revisiting a changed city.  It has now been published, Boundary Hunter, and is on Amazon. His style reminds me of David Baldacci with a similar storyline and a hot protagonist.

Politically we were polar opposites and conversation soon turned to Muslims, which in his mind are all terrorists; but that is another topic. We moved on to other hot topics of immigration and equal rights. 

So I told my story. In 1973 I was hired as MS Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s first woman Provider Relations Representative,  little did I know at the time of the battle that led to this point. At the time, Blue Cross was under a Federal mandate to hire more minorities but the women in the company had had enough of only men in leadership roles. So they filed a class action suit and were successful in demonstrating blatant discrimination. When I was hired in 1973 suddenly there were women in executive positions and more on the way. When I left Blue Cross I was Director of half of the claims department, a role previously held by a male. One woman who was hired during this period left and co-founded a mental health peer review service and retired a millionaire. And miracle of miracles,  another woman from this period became the first woman President of Blue Cross of MS. 

None of this would have happened if those first women had not gone to court and demanded equal opportunity.

Alex became quite indignant and belligerently stated “I never got a job that I didn’t earn and I did it without a court mandate.” I suddenly understood white male privilege and it is alive and well. He became much smaller to me.

Ajijic, Feb 10, 2021