Ericka's 'Verse

Yesterday I had the pleasure of walking and talking with an inspiring group of women and men, my elders and juniors, and children learning from the example of their parents.  I walked in the annual Women’s March.

I didn’t actually PLAN to go.  I just woke up and went because I felt compelled to go.  I had no pre-made signs.  I had only the angst I carry—my constant companion—and the “pussycat” hat I knit, adorned with a yarn variation of a daisy.

I arrived at the site of the march, and suddenly it was, “WE.”  It was no longer me alone, me driving by myself, me showing up at a place 40 miles away from home.  It was WE.  It was fellow females, men and women who support them, children who look up to them.  It was WE.

It was newly elected female leaders and former male leaders who introduced them with great admiration.  It was a youthful leader of an anti-gun violence organization in Ventura County, the first African-American women elected to a city council, a female state senator, two Congresswomen from our SoCal districts, and a woman who represented the local art council and encouraged us to continue to create for remembrance and in defiance.  I waded into a sea of people—young, old, well-to-do, scraping by, towing children and dogs, men and women, boys and girls, people of all colors, genders and orientations, and it really hit me.  This is WE.

Then I realized…this is, “We the people…” the first three words in the Constitution.

WE THE PEOPLE.

Much ado has been made lately about the women’s movement for various reasons.  As always with any movement there is controversy and division.  What began as a poignant and necessary check on a very dangerous man in the executive office quickly evolved into an umbrella organization of women’s rights, religious freedom, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, Native American rights, health care activism, disabled activism, environmental activism, veterans affairs, gun control and so many other issues that it became over-weighty.  Then, of course, there was the conflict of leaders of the movement affiliating with a person who routinely expresses anti-Semitic and anti-female viewpoints.  Many predicted that was the death of the movement.  And that might yet prove to be true.

But WE THE PEOPLE showed up for this march nonetheless.

Though he did not march with me due to previous commitments, I was supported by my husband with love, food (he went grocery shopping and cooked dinner), acknowledgement and pride.  Over dinner he went out of his way to tell me how proud he was that I marched again.

The reaction I got from my family was predictably…interesting.

I called my dad not because I wanted to tell him I marched—in fact I never mentioned it—but to thank him for letting me know he received a quilt I made for him.  Interestingly, when I asked him how he was doing, he said he was trying to recover his shaved manhood from Gillette (a reference to the new anti-bullying, pro-female, basically “ for the love of god try to be a good person” commercial).  When I asked how a razor company advertising shaving was unmanly, he said that wasn’t the kind of manhood he was referring to them shaving.  Basically, he is one of the assholes who thinks treating people poorly in general, particularly employing bullying tactics and treating women as less than is part of becoming and being a man.

Then I called my mom.  She initially asked how I was.  I told her I was great and feeling inspired after having once again participated in the Women’s March.  She queried, “What are you marching for?”  Summoning my marketing training I quickly responded in one sentence, “It’s a referendum on Trump and all the anti-female bullshit and bigotry he and his followers espouse.”  “Oh.  Well, it just seems like no one in “that movement” knows what they are marching for.”  NOT TRUE.

I do not really know how to reconcile the juxtaposition of the attitudes of the people with whom I marched today with the attitudes of my parents and people like them.  Granted, I didn’t even bother to tell my father what I did today after he opened our conversation with his opposition to a commercial that espouses being a decent human being.  It would have invited a diatribe I just didn’t want to deal with.  And I have learned over the last decade or so to accept my mother’s increasingly intolerant, bigoted leanings.  But what struck me squarely in the face today is that I’m not just dealing with the utter sexism, racism, xenophobia, ignorance, and general assholery of strangers or mere acquaintances; I’m dealing with the incredibly troubling attitudes of the people who spawned me.

I confess myself somewhat lost.  I really do not know how to deal with this.  My close friends don’t know either.  They can’t quite figure out how I came by my internal system of morals and ethics.  And if I sound disrespectful right now, it’s because I have to admit to myself that I did lose respect for them somewhere along the way, and that makes me little sick.

I am also sick of intolerance, sick of jerks, sick of people with no empathy whatsoever, sick of ignorance, sick of people who cherry-pick pieces of information and spin them to espouse their own personal opinions or belief systems (reality be damned),sick of the moronic conspiracy theories, sick of being treated as less than because of my sex, sick of getting paid less than men for the same work, sick of the cat calls, sick of the mental checklist I have to go through every time I leave my own house or walk to my own car in a parking lot just to stay safe, sick of old white men with attitude problems regulating my health care, sick of other women downplaying the reality of our plight because they have a vested interest in preserving a patriarchal system, sick of having to fight for everything I have just because I’m a woman, sick of all of it.  And by the way, if anyone says I can change any of this any time I want, it turns out I can to an extent.  But it requires that I be firm which is interpreted as me being a bitch, stand my ground which is spun as being irrational and stubborn, carry a weapon with which I am efficient which is interpreted in turns as me being deliberately threatening or silly, and express thoughts and ideas and setting boundaries, at which point I’m told I should smile more.

The Women’s March is both an outward expression of exercising my Constitutional rights and a way to remind leadership that they serve at the pleasure of the people.  I and my walking companions are actively reminding them of what we want to see evolve.  It is for me a kind of veneration of and regard for the framers of the Constitution.  This gathering of WE THE PEOPLE is something akin to going to the church of democracy to worship.

There are still enough of us who believe that our country succeeds when women succeed.  That women’s rights are human rights.  That we have more than earned a seat at the decision-making table.  That morals and ethics are still worthy aspirations, and they mean nothing if we don’t stick to them when it is difficult to do so.  That bigotry of any kind, that hatred and ignorance have no place in a civilized society.

WE THE PEOPLE have a duty to our country.  When we see a loud, racist, sexist, xenophobic, cruel, heartless sector of society rising to power and political influence, when we see the 1% of wealthiest people in society influencing and enacting policies that benefit only the wealthiest in our society while serving to further harm the rest of society, when we see foreign enemies gaining power in our country and not only influencing free and fair elections but also influencing policy, we the people have an absolute duty to do everything in our power to steer us back to a more noble course, worthy of our ancestors.

There are many who would deny that any of this is true, that anything nefarious is going on.  There are many who would also parrot phrases like, “witch hunt,” and “fake news.”  There are many who think our president is just great, that we are somehow making America great again.  There are some who simply shield their eyes from the obvious bigotry and hatred that has arisen in our country in the last few years, and others who embrace it tightly and rejoice.  I never cease to be shocked by that genuine expression of inhumanity, nor to be moved to tears that enough of my countrymen hold such unconscionable beliefs as to give rise to an increasingly divided, polarized society.  And I honestly fail to understand the willful ignorance.  Hatred, ignorance, and a willingness to do nothing is what those in power right now are counting on.  Capitulation to their conflations and cherry-picked “facts” that bolster your beliefs and by extension, your ego, is what they are counting on.  It is what keeps them in power and it is NOT making America great.  It is rotting it from the inside out.  Those who continue to blindly support and in some cases push the current president’s agenda recklessly forward, neither realizing nor caring that they are in the worst throes of the Dunning-Kruger effect and certainly not caring about their fellow human beings in any meaningful way, is a truly dangerous game to play.

As WE THE PEOPLE gathered yesterday, I journeyed in my head through the tumultuous times our country has managed to survive.  We fought an entire civil war over race.  Brother fought brother and we lost so much, but even that was not enough to eradicate bigotry and hate.  So a great man like Martin Luther King arose to push us further toward a truly free society, and still race is an issue today because you cannot erase the hatred in men’s hearts.  Women fought, and marched, and struggled and were jailed and even died for the simple right to vote.  They weren’t even fighting to be treated equally on the whole in society, but for the simple right to have a say in how they were governed.

When most people think of women’s suffrage in this country, they immediately (and rightly) think of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul in the 1910’s.  But Abigail Adams comes to my mind too.  In a letter to her husband and future President, John Adams, written in March of 1776, she implored him in part, “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Many see these marches as silly, frivolous, and even useless.  I know my own mother thinks we “don’t even know what you’re marching for.”  WRONG.  We know exactly what the fuck we are marching for.  You just happen to disagree with it.  And you attempt to minimize it because deep down it scares you; it threatens your internal belief system that you have so carefully cultivated and nurtured and the patriarchal society on which you have become dependent.

I look back at our history and realize that often drastic things had to take place in order to effect change.  It was always a combination of things.  It was voting, writing, lobbying, petitioning, talking about ideas in public forums, holding rallies and marching.  In at least one case, it took a war.  When you look back at the last century of our history, when tensions were high and things really were boiling over, we marched.  Women have been trying to simply be enfranchised with the power of the vote SINCE THE BEGINNING OF OUR HISTORY, but we didn’t get that until we organized and petitioned and wrote and talked and rallied and MARCHED.  We didn’t get the vote until 1920.  When the Viet Nam war looked increasingly horrible, we organized and petitioned and wrote and talked and rallied and MARCHED.  When enough people had finally had enough of the unconscionable, systemic racism in our country, the great Martin Luther King arose and led his followers and organized and petitioned and wrote and talked and rallied and MARCHED.

It is no different today.  When we as women became so distraught by the direction our country has taken, troubled by the course plotted that looked like all the ground we had gained was on the chopping block, when we saw sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia and all manner of bigotry taking root again, when we continued to see atrocities committed against the very earth we inhabit, babies ripped from the arms of their mothers, gun violence on the rise, and basic human respect going right out the window, we organized and petitioned and wrote and talked and rallied and MARCHED.  And we VOTED a record number of women into Congress.  We VOTED the first Muslim woman, the first Native American women, the first openly bisexual woman into congress.  We still only have 24.7% representation for a set of the population that currently constitutes about 51% of our total populace, but we voted in more women, more diverse people, more of an accurate representation of our actual society.  2018 was indeed the year of the woman in the United States.  I am very proud of that.  But if we look to history as a teacher, that is not enough.  We need to make sure that every elected official is daily confronted with some sort of visual representation of what we the people expect.  Not just the loud minority, but WE THE PEOPLE.  In the last few years, the loud minority, many of whom blame “the other” for their problems, has won out because we the people did not do our duty.  We did not do enough.  We did not get enough voter turnout.  We did not write enough, speak enough, petition enough, lobby enough, rally enough, or march enough.

WE THE PEOPLE will no longer shirk that duty nor shrink dispassionately back into the shadows.  We will stand up and make some noise.  We will say no to hate and yes to progress.  We will say no to bigotry and yes to inclusion.  We will say time’s up to men who still treat us like play things and yes to working together to empower women.  We will say no to environmental destruction and yes to working as a society to treat our earth more gently.  We will say no to ignoring big problems like gun violence because they seem too far out of reach or because the gun lobby is too powerful and yes to taking off the blinders and working actively together to find solutions because our family members and our friends are worth it, and our kids deserve to attend school without the worry of whether or not they might die there that day.  We the people say, “No, this is not insurmountable, and yes, we will work together to find solutions worthy of our forefathers who crafted a basis for a nation.”

On we march.