I feel the need to start #wombsplaining things, and I hope my smart writerly researching friends will do the same.
1. The medical system and social care network obviously let down a boy who grew up to become a murderer of 17 people yesterday in Parkland Florida. If you look at a picture of him, you can see that there may be physical reasons for the adjustment problems he had. He looks like he may have some of the characteristics of FAS. He was adopted. Both of his adoptive parents died. He’d been expelled from school and identified as a potentially dangerous individual to the school. Our system let him down and because of that 17 people, thus far, are dead. Hundreds or thousands have been traumatized because of this one mass murder.
https://youtu.be/uUZ6LBbaML4
2. I am nauseated when I see Governor Rick Scott talking about the well-being of his constituents. This man has no concern for people, he was the CEO of Columbia/HCA during the time when the company committed the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in U.S. History. The company paid $1.6 billion criminal and civil fines for Medicare fraud. The people who committed this crime went, literally, Scott-free. Corporate crime takes money away from the healthcare and social support systems that is desperately needed for dealing with the health and well-being of the cast-offs of American society (rightists often call thsee things entitlements.)
3. The crimes committed by Scott’s company occurred when yesterday‘s shooter was in utero and a small child. Now this immoral corporate white man is “guiding” the state in which there have been two mass shooting recently and dodging questions on gun safety.
4. If the shooter was given up for adoption, unwanted, and suffered from birth defects, I wonder if his birth mother thought about abortion? I wonder if she had access – physical and economic – to all the medical care she needed? (I am allowed to say this as I was an unwanted child and was psychologically tortured by my mother because I was unwanted. No child should have to live with knowing they are unwanted. It warps them.)
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Perhaps corporations should be killed (dissoved without the ability of owners/board etc. to reform corporate entities) when they do things that kill.
Perhaps immoral people like Scott behind corporate crime should not be allowed into leadership positions ever again.
Perhaps we should not allow weapons of war designed to kill great numbers of people rapidly to be sold to civilians.
Perhaps people should be able to get the healthcare they need regardless of their SEC.
Happy 2018
The new year has always seemed a lot like a beginning of winter, or mid-winter celebration. It does not occur at a time reckoned by natural seasons or lunar cycles. It roughly, inexactly, pays tribute to the solar year. It happens at the beginning of a month because, like most things, a man said that is how it is. In 45 B.C. Julius Caesar declared Jan. 1 to be the first day of the new year, the Julian Year, after adding 45 days to the Gregorian Calendar. Before that time the new year was in March – closer to and more in synch with Spring.
But other than Father Time there is not that much about contemporary New Year revelry that seems male. Beginnings tend to be female conceptually as new life is the territory of females.
But what about resolutions? We do not know when or where, exactly, new year resolutions began. In mid-20th Century, Isidor Thorner, a sociologist, put forward the thesis that ascetic Protestantism, or Puritanism, adopted the practice of renewing ones dedication to godliness and self-control for the new year.
That would explain the focus on health improvement in current resolutions. This might carry over from the denial of sinful or indulgent behaviors by 17th Century ascetics.
Carrying on this tradition is perfectly reasonable thing to do. But making the resolution practice one’s own can also be perfectly reasonable.
Perhaps women should start creating collective resolutions. Like all collective action, it would be easier to have a group effort in which individuals can increase or ease off commitments as dictated by other commitments. The Women’s March certainly showed the might of women standing together. The #metoo phenomena showed the power of our collective voices.
So what should we focus on?
- Getting women into positions of governance certainly comes to mind. This is a biggy.
- Changing the language of governance, taking out the words of power, dominance, and war can change the discussion just by choosing costructive words to express our needs.
- Expanding our networks beyond easy, comfortable practice is also worth considering. It can be as easy as changing a meeting place so as to encourage broader geographic participation, or joining in activities with participants outside our own age group.
As the editor and publisher of this site, I will make changes related to the guiding spirit of this emergent phase of the women’s movement wherever possible.
Political legacy will be more prominent this year at WLP. I will try to be as non-partisan as I can.
No matter what you are doing to make the new year a focused and meaningful one, have it be a Happy New Year.
Then let me know what you would like to see in these pages.
Women Who Left Us in 2017
We lost so many strong, even iconic, women in 2017. And so many of them received little to no public media attention in this year of seemingly non-stop discussion about men.
Maggie Roche, of the Roche Sisters, left us at age 65 in January.
Here’s the NYT article briefly chronicling her music career.
Mary Tyler Moore
We heard about Mary Tyler Moore’s passing this year, but most coverage reminisced about her roles. What about the woman who brought those iconic roles to life? The best short summary I have found is under the subheading The True Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore in Forbes article about her passing.
Kate Millett
Radical feminism, anyone? Second wave? Kate Millet was at the front of the wave. She passed in September. Her last interview, only 6 days before her death, is in the New Yorker.
Edie Windsor
Edith Windsor, Edie, brought groundbreaking same-sex marriage case to the Supreme Court, and DOMA, left us in September. She was 88. I recommend her site for info about DOMA, Edie and Thea, and Their Long Engagement.
Other Inspiring Women Who Passed in 2017
Mary Anderson, Cofounder of REI, with her husband, not only started the business as a cooperative buying/import company when they could not find good mountaineering equipment to support their shared passion for climbing. The sport and business must have been good to her, she lived to be 107.
Harriette Thompson, two-time cancer survivor began running marathons at age 76.
She died at age 94 in October.
Nancy Zieman, of Sewing with Nancy also passed on this year. I am writing a special piece on all she gave to regular women. It will be published before year’s end.
Who passed on this year that you would like to honor?
One Story of the ME TOO Stories
This started out as my ME TOO story and it still is, part of it is anyway… the meta-story of a movement.
The #metoo phenomena is not just about sexual assault or harassment. It is about speaking truth to power.
Speaking truth, telling our stories, strengthens us. The voice in our heads becomes the voice in the streets.
It has been almost one hundred years since women gained the right to vote in the United States by what had come down to one young man serving in a state’s legislature taking stock of what his mother had taught him and what she had asked of him.
Roughly 150 years before women gained the right to vote, a woman asked her husband who was deeply involved in the drafting of documents that would create the first liberal democracy in the world to “remember the ladies.”
It appears to be time for more change.
Ideas develop as time passes. Some call this social evolution. But it does not really matter what we call it. Change happens and it has trajectory and momentum. It cannot be stopped simply by individuals thinking it should stop.
This is my take on part of what is transpiring in the U.S. today. We cannot know where this will lead, natural forces can be channeled but they cannot easily be stopped.
I see patterns. Sometimes when I say this I feel like a character in a M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The Sixth Sense.
These patterns are not, to the best of my knowledge, intrinsic patterns, like spirals and handedness, but simply patterns I perceive given my vantage in life.
The primary pattern I note and study is law “a virtually unbroken chain concerned with inheritance, trusts and foundations and other relevant matters leads back to Roman law” but law through a cultural not legal sense, law painted with a broader brush such as is found in the near universal moral code embodied in what we know as “The Golden Rule.”
The trajectory I see follows the course of consolidated power from when the Council of Nicaea united Roman religious and military powers, until the Magna Carta limited the power of the King, which was followed in relatively short order by the Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Unitarian Reformations of Catholicism that limited the power of the Pope, and Constitution of the United States of America constrained the power of the State.
Another shift in power is occurring. Our human nature has moved us to react to atrocities of slavery in the Civil War and genocide by the Nazis through WWII. We do not want another war, in fact, most of us want to end the use of war as a means of major dispute resolution and dominion.
What I see emerging is a shift in kind. The inclusion of all people into the governance of our selves will change everything, when and if it progresses. The most massive way to change societies is not bit by bit, group, race, or ethnicity. The most massive way to impact all societies and move us along the path of culture change is to include women fully and equally into the governance of society, not just legal governance, but in all the ways our society regulates, manages, and governs itself.
Let’s try this and see what happens.
Seneca Falls, Meet Detroit
Yes. I have high hopes for the Autumn.
There is a gathering in Detroit at the end of October.
I am of course thinking of Seneca Falls, but also of Julia Ward Howe’s words:
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects…
The Women’s suffrage movement made some poor judgments mid-Nineteenth Century and the along the way through the 20th Century. They addressed class but chose to exclude race from the scope of their concerns. After an inclusive beginning at Seneca Falls in 1848 which Frederick Douglass attended and at which he spoke, and at which abolitionists were well represented, something happened. That something was silence. White privilege is not a new concept. Inherent bias within the ruling class, whites, existed pre- and post- Civil War, and existed on both sides, not just the Confederate side. After the Civil War the North needed to walk the walk at home and in the southern lands and peoples that lost. They did not do this. It was more comfortable for white women to stick with white concerns and less painful for them to avoid the integrative issues, such as economic inequality.
We have started to own up to this history and must continue to do so. It benefits no one to engage in counting wrongs. Wrongs cannot be compared. I may have been raised in poverty and diminished by sexism, but I will not compare my personal history with anyone else’s. I will not pretend I can right the wrongs of the past either. I can acknowledge them. I can try to stop their perpetuation.
I know I am not alone. For almost 5 years a group of Tucson women writers have met once a month to discuss blogging and social media as it relates to business, personal writing, ethics, and legacy. The group is actively engaged in creating a better world. We are meeting the weekend of the Autumnal Equinox to have a retreat/conference. I know of at least a dozen other women’s groups in the area working to similar ends. Such groups and numbers, when combined, across the US and world, can and will change everything.
For 10 years prior to that I was a local, regional, and national level activist in a women’s peace and justice group.
The time is right.
The combining mechanism has been announced. The Women’s March has announced the Women’s Convention at the end of October of this year, 2017.
It is time for the aspirations of Seneca Falls to meet the full spectrum of American women in Detroit.
I will be there, will you?
Planning, Openness, and Synchronicity
It is time to plan for the coming month. I rarely accomplish all I plan to do, and that is just fine.
The first rule of planning is: Plans change.
Rule two is that there are no rules, only guidelines.
Guideline 3: Treasure each moment by living in the moment.
Today I am in a beautiful city I first visited forty years ago. I could focus on what I cannot do today because I have my large dog with me and my husband is in meetings all day. But that would decrease my joy of living today as fully or at least as best I can.
My husband is doing what he loves. He is making theworld a better place by serving on an NIH panel. I am so proud of the organic chemistry he has producd that makes the living world a better understood and healthier place, and that he can also contribute at the higher level of advancing the research of other scientists, as he is doing today, by being activity in the national research community.
Buddy, my neapolitan mastiff companion, and I went out for an hour and a half walk around Union Square. He was happy to relieve himself and I was happy to have a cup of coffee and people watch.
The best moment was when I had the pleasure of choosing a pastry. There in front of me was a simple bit of dough folded over and crimped around a bit of cream with sugar. My mother would make these for me when I was little and she had a bit of dough left over after making pies. The taste brought back one of the nice memories of Mom who left this world 10 years ago yesterday.
Having coffee and pastry with my best pup and my mother, even if only in memory or across timeless mysterious dimensional divides, this morning was a beautiful gift.
So today I plan, and if I do not accomplish all I plan, that is okay, because something akin to pastry with my mother in San Francisco might unexpectedly present itself to me.