Women on the March—Laughing All the Way

It’s International Women’s Day. A part of me loves the idea of drawing attention to the contributions women make to our world. Another part of me would be happier with more concrete changes to the laws and policies that continue to oppress and discriminate against women around the globe.

I haven’t heard a single male politician make a statement that acknowledges or advances women’s rights today—save the president, and we know his tweet this morning was as disingenuous and ludicrous as the rest of his Twitter proclamations.

Gloria Steinem was in Santa Barbara last week, and she spoke about the need to continue to fight for women’s rights, despite the very clear objectives of the conservatives in Congress and the White House. While we keep an eye on Washington, it’s almost more important now to turn our attention to the states, she said, where anti-women contingents have been successfully reversing—or trying to reserve—many of the health, job, and safety net protections we have fought for for more than four decades. And we have to abolish the Electoral College.

Steinem was a sponsor of the Women’s March on Washington in January, a march that brought out nearly five million women and men throughout the nation and in major cities around the world. We can’t let up. She spoke about the need for women to come together and support each other—no matter our race, ethnicity or creed.

“Intersectionality is a good word,” she said, “but I prefer intertwined.” She linked her fingers together: “You can’t uproot one without the other.”

The issue is violence against women and its interconnectedness with all other “isms,” she said. Sexism and racism are linked—it's all about dominance and control, what she called “supremacy crimes.”

Despite the 2016 election results, Steinem said she believes we are more on the path toward a real democracy than we were when she spoke in Santa Barbara two years ago.

“Are we awake now?” she asked, to murmured laughter and applause.

She was asked about the perceived conflicts between women of color and feminists. How do we bridge concerns and needs? “We listen to each other and ask how we can help each other,” she replied. She pointed out that the Women’s March was organized by young women, mostly of color. “I just did what they told me.”

“Remember that anger is healthy. To be hopeful doesn’t mean you have to be saccharine,” she said.

“Also, women have to learn how to treat themselves as well as they treat others.” We can’t allow others to tear us down, and we can’t do it to ourselves.

“Get up in the morning and say, What outrageous thing am I going to do today that will serve social justice? And think, How can I reach out in my community? It's going to take both individual and group efforts.”

While she didn’t deny the political threats women continue to face, she also encouraged us to be mindful of the great strides and progress that have been made.

Remember to laugh, she said, because that’s how we know we are free.

An 11-point Plan to Open Dialogue, Support the Oppressed, and Resist

With Joan Bolton at Santa Barbara's Women's March in January. Don't you love her sign?

Last weekend I attended a Huddle Up event sponsored by Santa Barbara members of the Women's March Support Team and ActionNetwork.org. We had a great conversation about ways to keep the resistance movement vital and moving forward.

Below is my list from the discussion—I think #4 is probably the most important, and I'm interested in doing this in Santa Barbara. Let me know if you want to help me organize something.

1) Use the power of your purse and boycott products and companies that support the administration. You can find the list at grabyourwallet.com.

2) Say thanks by tweeting or writing a company and Congress members whenever they take a stand—Apple, Lyft, the two GOP women senators who voted against Betsy DeVos, etc.

3) Keep talking to Congress—attend town hall meetings, call, write postcards, etc.

4) Create dialogue and conversation with those who support the administration. It’s tough, but we have to learn to understand each other and find common ground.

5) Stand your ground: express your beliefs even as you welcome others to the table.

6) Encourage faith communities to speak out. There’s been a noticeable lack of comment from the very people who claim to care for the poor, disadvantaged, immigrants and others who are discriminated against.

7) Support refugee populations—monetarily, materially, spiritually (my favorite blogger Jon Katz says his tiny community in upper New York state set up a way for people to buy needed goods through Amazon for refugees getting settled into the community. It’s been a huge success).

8) March! There is a Tax Day March on April 15, and an April 29 march in Washington, D.C., for jobs, etc.

9) Organize. Ask local businesses to host events to raise money for various causes: ACLU, Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc.

10) Support your local mosque. Reach out and ask if there’s anything you can do to support the Islamic community. Organize a town hall with various religious and community leaders to talk about how best to communicate with Trump supporters and to resist the administration’s policies.

11) Write! Raise your voice.

For our mothers, for our sisters, for our children.

Remembering My Dad, and a Republican Party That Was

Today would have been my dad’s 91st birthday. A lifelong Republican, he would be astounded and appalled at the state of our nation and world if he were alive today.

The rise of the Orange Menace would have left him deeply puzzled. And ashamed. His GOP cared about small businesses and worried over the size of government, but it always acknowledged its relevance and necessity. His GOP was never mean-spirited or bent on punishing the poor for being poor, as this Republican Party has been since the 1990s. His GOP would never have considered abolishing two of the nation’s signature social safety net programs—Social Security and Medicare—that raised a majority of our elderly out of poverty and eased the ravages of old age.

His GOP understood that a functioning democracy required people of good faith on both sides of the aisle to hold the interests of all people in equal measure. His Republicans knew that governance required negotiation and compromise, and placing the common good above their own craven grabs for power and money.  

How far we’ve strayed from that principle.

I am slack-jawed at the recklessness with which the GOP has moved to abolish the health insurance of more than 20 million people in this country. The chaos that will ensue in both the health care and insurance industries will be equally devastating.

Are there no grown-ups in this party? People who can put all Americans’ interests above their own? Who do they think they are helping?

These truly are dark days.

Sleeping with the Enemy

A very personal and political piece posted this week on WritersResist.com, a little out of the ordinary for me, but the times are anything but:

I have been sleeping with the enemy for more than two years. Rob is a Republican. But on the morning after the election, he held me close as I sobbed and promised, “It will be okay.”

He promised. But he doesn’t know. And nothing that has happened since that morning has made either of us feel better....(continue reading)

Rise up. Speak. Resist.

Photo by mheim3011/iStock / Getty Images

A good friend of mine fled Nazi-occupied Hungary with her family during World War II. Her parents had gone into hiding and she was placed in a Christian boarding school in Budapest in an effort to shield her. She was forced to wear the yellow star on her clothing, and by sheer luck and her own chutzpah ultimately escaped a death camp sentence.

On the phone the other day, I said: “Well, perhaps this will all work out. Perhaps the president-elect won’t actually turn out to be the despot he appears to be. Maybe he won’t actually go through with all his ill-conceived promises.”

She said: “I have lived through this. Don’t think it isn’t what it seems.”

I am reminded of the adage: When someone shows you who he is, believe him.

As each extreme Cabinet pick is revealed, I grow more anxious. His pick for Health and Human Services is an Obamacare foe and ardent anti-abortionist. The president-elect has chosen the nation’s most vocal climate change denier to head the EPA. This week, he announced an anti-minimum wage, anti-labor fast-food mogul to lead the Department of Labor. Ben Carson—a neurosurgeon, not to mention nutcase—has been tapped for Housing and Urban Development. His Education secretary choice is a staunch anti-public education, pro-voucher advocate who would dismantle much of our educational system.

Trump, who attended—and thrived in—a rigid and harsh military boarding school as a teen, is packing the Cabinet with former generals and other military chest-beaters bent on advancing a pro-conflict stance globally.

These extremists have the potential not only to undo many of the Obama administration’s hard-won policies—policies that have provided rights previously denied to the LGBTQ community and other minorities—but may do lasting damage to our country’s foreign relations and economic policies.

As for “draining the swamp,” he’s nominated people who are anything but outside the establishment, and most are millionaires and billionaires.

They want to return to an America that hasn’t existed in decades: a paternalistic, authoritarian society dominated by white and male dinosaurs. Never mind Trump’s inability to control his emotions, his thin skin pricked by the smallest slight. He has opened the door to a Republican Party whose influence and policies have been roundly rejected by a majority of Americans (2.7 million more than voted for him, and counting).

I am afraid for the homeless, the mentally ill, the arts and education, women, children and all those who are the least among us. The whole country is in danger of losing its soul if we turn our backs on the poor. To counter a popular Republican trope, there is no such thing as the “welfare state.” Since the 1960s, welfare (once known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children) has increasingly been replaced with welfare-to-work programs intended to get welfare recipients into jobs. In 1996, Congress and then-President Clinton approved the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replaced AFDC with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). For the first time states were required to meet minimum work participation rates to receive federal funding.

Today, virtually no one receives welfare without proving they are working or actively seeking work. Food stamps, renamed the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), provides a stipend for food each month (in debit cards) to the poorest of the poor. The allotment is based on the family’s income. The maximum monthly benefit for one person is $194; a family of four would qualify for up to $649 (again, depending on income). Could you buy groceries for a month on that? It’s a travesty.

Earlier this year, Speaker Paul Ryan, speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference, repeated what turned out to be a false story about the reduced and free lunch program offered at schools across the country. He told about a little boy who didn’t want a free lunch; he wanted to be able to bring a brown bag lunch to school because that would mean his parents cared about him. It was hogwash, as is the myth that those who receive government assistance are lazy. The fact is most of those kids’ parents do work, often two or three jobs. It’s just that minimum-wage jobs and part-time work often don’t add up to a livable income, especially in the more expensive regions of the country.

Don’t even get me started on Ryan’s dream to privatize Medicare and Social Security.

I am appalled at the fact that most of Trump’s Cabinet picks are driven more by ideology than by facts and knowledge. And his willingness to attack (by Twitter, no less) individuals and corporations, and engage in uninformed conversations with foreign leaders without regard for the consequences, is alarming.

I know there are several efforts at recounts and Electoral College vote switching to try to change the outcome of the presidential election. I applaud them. But I think it is more incumbent upon us—citizens, artists, writers, thought-leaders and educators—to stand up, speak out, and resist these disastrous choices and their beliefs at every turn.

If you can attend one of the many Million Woman Marches being planned around the nation, go, speak, let your voices be heard. Writers Resist is organizing events in January all across the country for writers to express our concern.

Do not remain silent or allow yourself to be lulled into the delusion that this president-elect will not be who he has showed us to be.

In 1963, the white ministers in Alabama urged Martin Luther King Jr. to moderate his rhetoric and tone down his call for peaceful resistance in the civil rights cause. In his thoughtful and stirring letter from the Birmingham jail to those who had criticized him, he wrote:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

King was talking about the fact that rights denied to black Americans were rights indirectly denied to all, and white Americans didn’t have the right to tell blacks to simply wait for the laws to be changed in due course.

We, all of us, are responsible for standing up for those Americans whose lives may be terribly affected by the changes anticipated from a Trump presidency. None of us has the luxury to wait and see what will happen. That’s what good people in Germany did when the Nazis came to power, and Hitler promised to make Germany great again.

Rise up. Write. Speak. Take action. Resist.

2014 - Welcome to an Extraordinary Year

Shoreline Park, Santa Barbara

Does anyone else feel as if the coming year will be extraordinary? Perhaps it’s my insufferable optimism, but I sense something will break open this year, as if a river long constrained by concrete and rebar is suddenly rocked by a massive eruption, the water pouring through the fissure, flooding all the carefully tended fields and opening the earth to Nature’s serendipity.

Welcome to 2014. I believe it will be a time of growing awareness and revelation, understanding and perhaps, if we can hope for the most inexplicable, peace and productivity in Washington, D.C., to the benefit of all those who have been forgotten these past seven years. Wouldn’t that be worth celebrating?

The homeless, the infirm, the hungry, the lost. Perhaps this year the politicians will find some empathy and practice the most Golden of Rules: Love Thy Neighbor.

The New Yorker has a piece on Pope Francis in the year-end edition. I was raised in the Catholic faith, and while I have not practiced in many years, I follow the church’s foibles and failures, hoping that something might shift. It is with a little caution and lots of hope that I say Francis is a breath of fresh air. He allies himself with the very-forward thinking Pope John XXIII, whose vision produced the Second Vatican Council and changed every Catholic’s life significantly in the 1960s.

Soon after he became pope, Francis suggested that everyone belonged at the table of God, not just Catholics who had the seal of approval affixed to their foreheads. “Who am I to judge,” he said to a reporter who asked him about the status of homosexual priests in the church. In his first major declaration, he said: “We want to enter into the fabric of society, sharing the lives of all, listening to their concerns, helping them materially and spiritually in their needs, rejoicing with those who rejoice, weeping with those who weep; arm in arm with others, we are committed to building a new world.”

Arm in arm with others? Sharing the lives of all? This is not the papal message of the past thirty years, and so it is suspicious. Francis has issued no edicts that would change current church policy. But, still.

Is there hope for change? If the New Yorker piece is any indication, perhaps.

In an interview with the periodical Spadaro last year, Francis referenced John XXIII, who had said: “See everything, turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.”

“John XXIII saw all things, the maximum dimension,” Francis said. “but he chose to correct a few, the minimum dimension. Many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. I believe that we always need time to lay the foundation for real, effective change. And this is the time of discernment. Sometimes discernment instead urges us to do precisely what you had at first thought you would do later.”

This is a time of discernment. We are a broken society, torn by political and economic passions driven by divisiveness and hate. If the pope, leader of an institution that has been the cause of perhaps as much heartbreak and scourge as solace and love, can suggest that it needs to look within, then the rest of us can do the same. This New Year offers as much hope as we are willing to embrace. Shall we?