Empowered Women Empower Women

I spent my 58th birthday today in Washington, D.C at the Women’s March surrounded by thousands of like-minded women and men: cis, gay, straight, trans, black, brown, white, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, atheist, young, and old who descended upon Washington and other U.S cities to uphold women’s reproductive rights, demand immigration reform, and fight for climate change legislation.  I saw sign carrying women in wheelchairs pushed by more able bodied sign carrying women, pig-tailed little girls barely out of toddlerhood carried high on shoulders, men marching with pink hats perched on their heads (my husband one of them!), hijab draped women standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Christian women demanding equality for all, and an umbrella carrying woman who blocked counter protesters with her umbrella who were trying to engage a woman holding a pro choice sign.

            I met two other women who were also celebrating their birthdays and another woman whose almost twelve-year-old daughter was turning thirteen next week. I saw tall, gorgeous drag queens, beaded and feathered Indian women and men, and several women dressed as 1920s era suffragettes. I saw a woman who stood in one spot for three hours dressed as a handmaiden from Handmaid’s Tale and a man wearing a Trump face mask and orange jumpsuit holding a newspaper whose headline screamed “Trump Jailed!” I met women from Virginia, Michigan, Maryland, North Carolina,  Florida, and even fellow Georgians.  Women who had traveled all night to attend the march and who were heading back out tomorrow so they could be at work Monday morning.  Those thousands of strangers left  me feeling renewed. They gave me a feeling of commonality and community toward a greater purpose. They recharged me.  

           

            I attended my first Women’s March in January 2017 in New York City and I remember the pervading sense of loss and sadness that was thick as fog that day. It was a day where women held one another up almost physically while tears were shed, including my own. We were afraid. Afraid of what this new president would do; a newly electorate college chosen president who had no experience in public service in any way, an ego bigger than his newly opened grandiose Trump Hotel, and deep personal financial connections to Putin, one of  most pro-oligarchy fascist dictators of the 21st century.  Three years later our fears, and more, have been realized. Standing in Freedom Plaza today as the march gained momentum, I didn’t feel that sense of loss or fear. No, today I felt strength and justified anger over children in cages, individual reproductive rights of women being slowly chipped away, and a world increasingly being altered by climate change. Today, standing side-by-side with my sisters (and brothers) in arms, I felt hope that all of our hard work of marching, writing letters to our elected representatives, voting, and being vocal the past three years is paying off at long last. We have proven that we won’t be ignored or dismissed, and with that comes a simmering rage over the audacity and criminalizing hijacking of the White House. OUR White House.

           

            This year, women’s voices were clearer and their voices stronger. There was courage in those voices. Martin Luther King’s son, Martin Luther King II and his wife Arndrea Waters King, spoke to a rain soaked crowd reminding everyone that it was 100 years since women have earned the right to vote and that we must be vigilant to protect the rights that we have gained. Ms. King reminded us that there is yet so much work to be done for the next generation of women.  For my granddaughters. And yes, for my grandsons. The Civil Rights movement and Women's Rights have been closely intertwined every since abolitionists first gathered in numbers. Now we stand together in numbers again and there is hope. Hope for a country that will one day respect individual reproductive rights, a country that will address long overdue immigration reform, and a country that will use scientific data and research to effectively tackle an exponentially alarming climate crisis. Yes, there is hope for 2020 and beyond.

           

            Today as snow lazily drifted over Freedom Plaza and the wind chill factor dipped into the 20s, and a woman standing next to me said, “I can’t feel my fingers,” I listened to the Chilean performance group, Las Tesis perform “A Rapist in Your Path” and the raw emotion nearly blind- sided  me.

And it’s not my fault, not where I was, how I was dressed.

And the rapist was you

and the rapist is YOU

It’s the cops

It’s the judges

It’s the system

It’s the president.

About two hours before the march I told my husband something I’d never told anyone except my daughter: when I was nineteen years old I was sexually assaulted at Keesler, AFB hospital during a routine gynecological exam by two white coated men who said they were doctors. I always felt it was my fault because I didn’t stop them. I was nineteen and it was only my third gynecological exam. The men's laughter and their sneering sexual whispered remarks washed over me and turned to deep shame.  I left the hospital that day and in instinctive flight or fight mode, I put the experience into a mental box and locked it away and I didn’t think about it for over thirty-five years until the #MeToo movement hit with full force. It took the collective voices of women across the United States for me to finally open that box. Today I loudly, sang, “And it’s not my fault!” I couldn’t have done that three years ago.

            Now sitting in my hotel room with my fingers finally thawed and my feet sore and aching, I almost relish the physical discomforts that remind me that, yes, I am 58 years old, and I’m happy and energized and hopeful that tomorrow or tomorrow or the day after will see sanity restored to this country, but even if it doesn’t, I can fight and I can march and I can ignore writers’ cramp as long as needed, even to my last breath because this is MY country and every human being deserves dignity and to live without fear and with truth.

The Drums of War

Each new generation has to have its war. A war in which boys who hold fast to the illusion that they are a warriors and only need a war to prove it, march off into battle fields with eyes bright. They come back home at best jaded and disillusioned and at worst shattered, used, broken, and angry. They come back to a country that has yet to take care of the thousands of vets that were broken in past wars. They come back to words such, as “Thank you for your service” and 50% off meals at IHop on Veteran’s Day, but still have to fight the powers-that-be to make an appointment at the V.A when they’re feeling suicidal or when chronic acid reflux caused by the toxic Iraq waste fires burn their esophagus.

            “War, what is it good for (to borrow a phrase that dates back to my childhood)? The answer of course, is nothing. Diplomacy, level heads, and compromise should always be the natural order before war is ever even considered. War should not be fought impulsively amid dreams of grandeur by powerful men in their safe towers and $2000.00 suits who lust over having their names immortalized in history textbooks. War should be reserved for justice, and not revenge and not glory and damn sure not as a diversion.

            The United States is still trying to fly high on the after effects of World War II in which we were the heroes, the saviors of the world who helped demolish two nationalistic and authoritarian governments of Japan and Germany, but that glory is tainted and long burnt to ash by a disastrous war in Vietnam, the Iran Contra Affair, Iraq, Afghanistan, the United States coup in Pakistan, the War on Terror, and other overt and convert inferences in other countries’ autonomies. We have become what we profess to hate. We are war mongers and can’t, as one of my students used to say, “Get over ourselves.” We aren’t “all that” anymore. We are just one cog in a great machine, granted we are a powerful and wealthy cog, but a cog nonetheless in a world made smaller by the development of the internet and transportation. We are part of an interdependent modern world in which each country relies on others for their economics, trade, safety, sciences, and technologies. Yet we still flex our muscles and beat our chests and shout about how great we are while we bomb civilians, line the pockets of the industrial war complex, and turn our backs on the helpless in which just and necessary wars might be fought. In a little over seventy-years we have taken the good guy reputation that we earned on the battlefields of Europe and the waters and islands of the Pacific, and carelessly traded it in for greed, power and political gain. We’ve made fresh enemies the world over and created more and more terrorists with each bombing of a civilian village or assassination of a leader.

            We have tipped over into the pinnacle of lust for power and strength that toppled Rome and the Soviet Union. Rome was never able to recover, and Russia is currently trying to recover, to the determent of the United States, but that’s for another discussion.

            I believe we crossed a line with the assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani on Iraq soil, a nation who was an uneasy ally of ours in the Middle East. Notice I wrote “was” because I don’t think that’s the case any longer. I think we’ve made Iraq our sworn enemy again, as well as Iran, and there’s no going back. We went uninvited into a sovereign nation and assassinated a well known general from another country with whom we canceled a nuclear deal. What is the end game? I don’t think there is one. I think that history will prove that the assassination was the act of an unfettered and ill advised president whose impulsivity got the better of him.

            I remember my dad being deployed to Vietnam when I was a child. I remember how, at the end of his life, Vietnam haunted him. I sent my own son off twice to Iraq and my best friend’s son served multiple nightmare tours of duty in that country at the height of tensions. I comforted my then three-year-old granddaughter when her father was deployed to Afghanistan. I was an Air Force brat until I was nineteen and I thought everyone stood at attention for the National Anthem in movie theaters. When I was a child my friends and I would stop playing hide and seek to stand at attention in the evening as the colors were lowered on base. I bleed red, white and blue; I do not however bleed nationalistic blood because that is the color to degradation and failure.

            While we beat our drums of war and spread the falsehood of patriotism being dependent upon support of war, no matter if it’s an unjust or impulsive war, we are preparing to line up our young men, our not-of age-to-smoke-or-drink young men, and almost physically feed them into the war machine and spew them out at the other end as cannon fodder. The young don’t know any better. They don’t have the experience of living through this same scenario again and again and again. The drums and the pats on the back and the flags and the crispness of new uniforms will mar their vision. It is only when they are entering the last decades of their lives, and history has written the truth across the sands of time, that they will wonder why their government lied to them, and they will either bury that knowledge deep within, because to take it out and gaze upon it in the glaring light will cause confusion and pain, or they will be able to say, as my father did, later in life, “They lied to me.”

            Don’t confuse patriotism with nationalism. Don’t confuse truth with propaganda. Don’t confuse historical lessons with shiny rhetoric. Don’t confuse flag waving with morals. Don’t confuse military strength with common sense. Don’t send our children off to die in order appease a leader’s lust for an historical footnote.  

           Have we learned nothing at all?

(Photo credit: Department of the Air Force)

           

How an Auld Lange Syne Becomes a Love Letter

Twenty years ago, at just about this moment, ten minutes after midnight, I had just breathed a sigh of relief knowing that the Y2K scare had been what I suspected all along: a load of horse manure, and I was wondering what in the hell the recent ex was going to do with all the Ramen and canned meat he insisted we store (hoard) in our walk-in closet. Thankfully, I left him in July, six months before Y2K, and the divorce was final in November of 1999. I guess he ended up having to eat all that potted meat all by his lonesome. I started the new millennium out on a clean slate in a nightclub filled with strangers, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life. I didn’t know anyone in the club. Two minutes after midnight, yelling into my blind date’s ear over the fading notes of Auld Lang Syne, I told that puzzled man to take me home and I never saw him again.

            

         Regrets, I’ve had a few, but in the end too few to mention. Good ole Blue Eyes (Frank Sinatra for all of you born before 1980).   It’s been a helluva ride. In 2000 I started work as a high school teacher, in 2001 I came down with autoimmune issues, (thanks germy kids), 9/11 happened, and my house burned down. Nowhere to go but up, right?

            

          The next five or so years were a blur of trying to raise three kids, work, juggle bills, and trying to get a handle on how my body was betraying me with almost constant mind numbing fatigue and pain. Work, rest, work, rest became my life. I just got out of bed every morning and made it through One.More.Day. I had to. I was a mom.

            

          In 2005 I met My Jim. We went on our first date to a jazz club in Macon on July 9, 2005. Three years later, on December, 21, 2008, I married him in New York City. I knew a good thing when I saw it. The past fourteen years have been a roller coaster of traveling to places I never dreamed I’d go: Midway Atoll, Hawaii, touring every museum in D.C four times, the Met in NYC five times. We’ve sat in the pews of the majestic St. John the Baptist cathedral and celebrated Winter Solstice, we’ve had salt water spray in our faces on ferries to Ellis Island and Ocracoke Island.  Together, My Jim and I have pilgrimaged to probably fifty independent book stores, even driving hundreds of miles out-of-the-way to buy books and cuddle yet another bookstore cat. We’ve been to Broadway shows and Niagara Falls. We’ve sat in smoky jazz clubs in New Orleans and New York City. We’ve eaten in Chinatown, Nathan’s Hot Dogs on Coney Island, and run-down roadside BBQ stands in the Mississippi Delta. We’ve put more miles on a car in one year than most people put on a car in five. We’ve flown, rode on trains, and stood on crowded subways.

             

          We lost our beloved dog Truman, and mourned his death together, and welcomed two new pups who had no homes and gave them love and laps to sit on. We’ve welcomed six grandchildren, and though they aren’t of My Jim’s blood, they are of his heart. My Jim helped me pack when I wanted to go teach overseas, he held me when my dad died an agonizing death,  he told me everything was going to be okay and that it wasn’t my fault when I became too ill to teach any longer, and held me up after I delivered the eulogy at my best friend's funeral two years ago, and I held him up when his only sister recently passed away.

          These are the moments that make up the years, that make up a life. All mixed together like raindrops on a spring day splashing into a sun soaked puddle.

            

          This started out as a look back on the past nineteen years and how I’m looking forward to the next two decades, but it ended up being a love letter to My Jim because he has been a part of almost every day of this millennium that matter the most to me. He's made the past fourteen years worth living and has turned each and every day into a supreme, exciting adventure. He loves me with short or long hair, sick or well, purple hair or blonde, blue jeans or dresses. He loves me with a picket sign in my hand or when I’m writing late into the night on a short story that I have to write NOW.  He loves me when I bring home a new dog and when I ask him to go out late at night because we've run out of dog food for the dogs or chocolate cereal for the grand kids. He loves me when we're both sitting quietly reading or when I'm bouncing around the house talking a mile a minute over a news article that's gotten my dander up. 

And because I was all alone on New Year’s Eve 2000 in a nightclub filled with drunk, happy confetti throwing strangers and was more lonesome than I’d ever been in my life, tonight I cherish 2020 even more.

            

          Here’s to many more decades, love of my life..