On a recent weekend I spent the morning thinking about women, education, empowerment, information, fundamentalism and the tremendous power we fortunate women who have access to social media and the time to use it are frittering away. I am not lecturing, I am as guilty as anyone.
First of all, I do not expect every woman to want to be political. I understand that politics is man’s game, that is, a game where the rules were created by men. Our current political system is derived from previous systems and those trace back to territorial and resource protective strategies as old as human communities. Rancor is ever-increasing, and it was not great to begin with.
I really do understand wanting to stay out of the fray. To live a functional life I have to manage my stress level quite carefully. Bumping over a stress limit can send me into a fit of tears and fight/flight behavior that is nearly impossible for comfortable folks to fathom. I have learned to recognize these very thing lines between acceptable and melt down levels fairly well and only veer off course a couple of times a year.
Some of this may be my basic constitution that infused my personality with a toughness and resilience long before any trauma and situational stress triggering of post traumatic stress reactions ever came into play. But maybe I learned to be tough after living through nasty situations and breaking through barriers in my path.
But all that said, I expect women who are aware, intelligent, and informed to do everything they possibly can to help others who do not have the luxury of time and money to spend on activities that do not directly support food, shelter and basic hygiene in their lives. Most of the world is hungry, has no access to clean water, water with which to wash, nor access to toilets.
If I can keep knocking away at the problems as I see them and keep crafting solutions as best I can, almost everyone can.
In basic anthropology courses I took when I was an undergraduate, I was exposed to the concepts of environmental degradation, climate change, and that pandemics and starvation are likely to emerge when ecosystems, if not the entire biosphere, begin to fluctuate and exhibit crazy flip-flops looking for a new balance. No guarantees that humans will be around when a new balance emerges. That was a long time ago. We’ve known. Those of us who understood have not been silent, and are not silent now, but most of the women I know, even the really smart ones, avoid thinking about unpleasantries of what life will be like in a decade or two.
We can change things. But we have to act. Now. A major opportunity exists in form of elections next month.
I personally believe if enough of us decide to write about making intelligent choices in this election, in light of current events, that we can have a significant influence on how our women readers think about the issues and get them to the polls. I will be writing pieces about ebola, fundamentalism (as in ISIL,) infrastructure, community, and scientific/critical thinking. I hope these will give others ideas as to how they can frame issues.
Let’s do it.