Ericka's 'Verse

This entire week, I’ve had laryngitis off and on. It usually strikes when I go to work, because lately work has been a bit rapey.

I honestly didn’t correlate the loss of my voice with the recent experiences I’ve had in the workplace, or with people with whom I work outside of the workplace, but my husband, Walt, did. With a slight shade of annoyance he said, “You have LITERALLY lost your voice. You feel like you can’t report all of these incidences to your managers because you’ll be the problem child if you do, so your voice literally goes away because you don’t feel like you have one anyway, so what does it matter? Don’t think I haven’t noticed.  You need to talk to that shrink in Cayman again and you need to remember you’re the strongest woman I know.  Quit letting something that happened 26 years ago fuel the fire on these assholes now. And oh by the way, if you ever see any of them again, call me immediately and I come and will kick their asses.”

He’s rather valiant.

The problem is, in a woman’s world, it isn’t nearly that simple.

We are almost always on the defensive.  And when we are not, we end up in hot water more often than not.  We have to put up with a lot of stuff we don’t want to.  We placate in hopes of saving our own skins.  We have to approach our cars with care, making sure no vans are parked next to us, no one is hiding under our car to ambush us, no one has managed to gain access to the inside of our car and is waiting for us there.  We have some weapon at the ready, be it a knife or a set of keys interlaced in our fingers.  We have to know how to quickly disable a would-be predator because we basically have one shot at it and then all bets are off.  We lock our car doors the moment we are safely ensconced.  We pay close attention to our surroundings because it could be the creepy guy or it could be the Rico Suave type or the nicely-dressed businessman who could be potentially dangerous.  We have to keep our guard up all the time, which also kills your adrenals.  And we are not the only group with an adrenal-killing situation.

Walt isn’t wrong.  Our voices get lost.  I felt my voice get lost as a teenager, so I suppose this was a long time coming.  And when they are lost enough, well, we sometimes physically lose them.  It truly does physically manifest.

Women’s voices are easily lost.  People of color, members of the LGBTQ community, people who are in the U.S. on visas or who simply came here looking for a better life and are trying to work through the arduous process of becoming legal members of our society or naturalized citizens, have lost their voices.

That is why large, legal, peaceful protests like The Women’s March need to happen.  That is why taking a knee for the National Anthem by NFL players who have a platform needs to happen.  That is why Black Lives Matter needs to happen.  That is why protests against what is becoming the truly unfair targeting of illegals trying to gain citizenship needs to happen.

We’ve lost our voices, and it is imperative that we find them again.  It is imperative in a free society that we have that recourse.  It is imperative in a republic to have a free press, because that includes voices with a platform that call leaders out on their shenanigans.

The First Amendment clearly states the following:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

So, when it is somehow disrespectful for the people from whom we stole their country to peacefully protest in Standing Rock but perfectly acceptable for law enforcement to shoot at them with rubber bullets, when it is somehow disrespectful for NFL players to take a knee during the national anthem and lock arms in solidarity to protest the treatment of blacks in America by police who carry weapons and are not held to account when they gun someone down in cold blood, when the efforts of women and their families to draw attention to an obvious issue in society that unfairly targets women in every way possible is poo-pooed and dismissed as foolish–which is exactly what pisses us off–I say: First Amendment.  FIRST.  The very FIRST one.

If you think it is disrespectful for us to faithfully follow through with our Constitutional rights in order to “petition the government for a redress of grievances,” and you think that is going to make any of us who do sit back down, you are sadly mistaken.  In point of fact, 45’s recent attack on Kaepernick did two things: It made the exercise of the First Amendment an absolute right under the law (and a moral imperative), and it solidified coaches and teammates–hundreds of them–into an united front against the tyranny of the government and the outrageous behavior of police officers who literally get away with murder.  45 actually ensured that the very thing he was pissed off about got a national platform.  He seems to be good at that.  That is how Puerto Rico drew attention to their plight.  That is also, incidentally, how the International Women’s March began as well.  Don’t forget, people in countries around the world marched in solidarity with us gals and our families here in the U.S. who didn’t like the fact that after losing the popular vote by a wide margin, but who seems to think he can grab us by the pussy, got into office.  And no, I’m not letting that one go.  Because in what is supposed to be a civilized society, that is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE.

That brings us full circle to the original topic: We need to find our voices again.

Make no mistake, we cannot afford to be complacent or to back off with the notion that one protest will be sufficient.  It will not.  We need to continually make our voices heard loud and clear, from sea to shining sea, until we get these chinless turds out of office that are bent on silencing anyone who disagrees with their notion of justice, which I frankly find unjust.  And we need to start standing up against the idea that this is a nation that should fall into a certain line and lockstep.  That is not who we are.  It never has been.  Nor is it productive.  And contrary to ideas articulated by a lot of uneducated, bigoted white men in Charlottesville, we are not a nation of white “Christian” men who deemed themselves worthy of being in charge. We have always been a multi-cultural, multi-colored, multi-religious nation.  We have had a lot of differences and still do, that is true.  Until recently, what inevitably united us were the big tragedies.  Now, the chasm has gotten too large for us not to stand up, or to take a knee, and remind everyone that freedom can be a costly thing, but we are willing to pay the price.  Now is the time for us to remember who we are.

Now is the time for us to find our voices again.

Read.  Write.  Listen.  Educate.

Just don’t lose your voice.