Bi-state March for Women, Tahoe Basin, January 21, 2017, To the Future…

I walked with you all today through the blizzard because I believe – deep in my heart − that it’s women’s time in American history.

I walked with you all today because I want to get involved in that.

We all come from a history where we women were controlled by our menfolk, where we were directed, led, protected – or abused – by our menfolk. We come from a history where the sphere of women’s influence was limited to caring for our homes and families.

But we are now reaping the fruits of our foremothers’ hard work – hard, hard work that got us voting rights, that now gives us choices about what we do with our bodies, that now gives us choices about what we do with our minds and energies, that now affords us opportunities to direct, lead, and protect ourselves and our communities.

We now can influence not only the sacred and central inner workings of our homes – which we still do – but we can also influence the vital and influential workings of public life, our shared life.

How?

  • We work – so we influence the economy.
  • We earn – so we have the opportunity to be financially independent and understand the responsibility and opportunity this gives us.
  • We lead – so we have voice and can shape the policies and practices that we all live with day to day.

But what really makes this women’s time in American history?

Women care. This is our tradition, our history as much as it is our collective future, too.

Women bring an ancient tradition, a daily practice, a way of being, that our country needs now: we bring care to public life.

***

My generation and younger – I’m speaking directly to you now:

We need to step up.

We can’t be sitting around waiting for other people to provide for us. We can’t allow ourselves to feel entitled to the freedoms and rights we enjoy. We can’t let problems we see be someone else’s problem to solve.

So GET INVOLVED. From where you are.

If you stand on the top of that snow-covered mountain and look down on our Tahoe blue – and you care for the earth, water and air, landforms and creatures, the human race, GET INVOLVED.

If you know that economies we all depend on can’t survive without careful management and accountability to the people who pay for them – and you care about fiscal responsibility, GET INVOLVED.

If you look into your child’s eyes and see every other mother looking into her child’s eyes – and you care for children and who they become, GET INVOLVED.

If you understand the difference between the opportunities you have had in your life and the opportunities your sisters in Syria or the Congo or Pakistan or across town have in their lives – and you care for disadvantaged people, GET INVOLVED.

If you know that women still do not earn as much as men do for equal work or that achievement gaps still plague our education and workforce systems or that brutality and discrimination still exists across racial and ethnic lines – and you care for equity and fairness, GET INVOLVED.

If you know that every day around the world from Oakland to Bangladesh to Sierra Leone, many, many girls and women are sold into slavery – and you care for the sisters who are enslaved, GET INVOLVED.

If you are your own decision maker about your body and you believe every woman should be empowered to be in charge of her own body – and you care for every body, GET INVOLVED.

If you believe deeply that every life is important, that every life should be counted and held sacred – and you care for every life, GET INVOLVED.

So…

If you care about the values you hold – the religious values, the feminist values, the family values, the political values, the values of your political party, values that need to become a new or revised, GET INVOLVED.

***

So what happens when we get involved?

  • We learn.
    1. How complex things are
    2. What the real details are
    3. What the big issues are
  • From learning, we understand.
    1. Opportunities to make lasting change
    2. Chances to lead other people
    3. Ways to solve problems for the better.
  • From learning and understanding, we care more.
    1. Appreciate the complexities and other people who care too.
    2. Fuels our fires
    3. Find ourselves in our work.

And all this sets an example for the next generation.

My daughters Addie and Miri are almost 6 and 8. Over the next four years, the influences in their lives will form who they are the rest of their lives.

From my standpoint as their mother, the stakes are as high as they could be. I want them to see me and the women around them as having the courage to step up, to care for the world around us, and to demonstrate what democracy is. We are ultimately accountable to them, the citizens of the future.

Our democracy is always on the edge of survival. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton knew this. Peg Kortes and all of us here know this.

In 2016, we saw a more divided country than my generation has ever seen. We can’t afford to leave decisions to someone else. We must get involved and be decision makers.

So, GET INVOLVED for your country.

Our democracy always stands in the balance. It doesn’t exist without us making it. As Dr. King said,

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Our leadership is always accountable to the people because our leadership is the people. So be leaders. Be decision makers. Don’t sit back and wait. Don’t back seat drive. Every women, every man, every gender or sexual orientation, every language group, skin color, tradition represented here: GET INVOLVED.

We must care for this fragile democracy – we must show the world how to care for this fragile democracy – so that our children will have this American home for the rest of their lives.

***

We have a way for you to get involved right now… [pledges]

Dear Miri

Dear Miri,

My love, my daughter. There couldn’t be anything more exciting for you – and for me – than to watch as we believed we’d see our first woman president. The morning after the election though, after barely sleeping, I lay in bed in the dark of the early morning, waiting to tell you – a lump in my throat – that Hillary Clinton lost. She lost to Donald Trump.

You woke up and ran into our room, expecting good news, expecting the biggest Christmas present ever, only to see your parents’ faces and know. You cried. You said, “But mom, he’s a bad man.”

This is one of the moments when I wish I could protect you from the ugliness of the world. I wish I could promise you that a woman will be president and by logic then, you, my girl, could grow up to be president, too. But I can’t make that promise, not yet. I can smell it, I can imagine it, I can want it with all my heart.

So I want to talk with you about what’s next.

The reasons why we have never had a woman president are many and complicated and hard to suss out. So how will we see a day when our country successfully votes in a female leader?

First, having a woman president cannot be our goal, to have a woman leader for the sake of having a woman leader. We must focus on a different goal: to have brilliant leaders all the time, leaders who lead us well and where we need to go. The distribution of brilliant leaders includes women. We have many examples: Sheryl Sandberg, Angela Merkel, Abigail Adams, Harriet Tubman, Tina Fey – women dead, alive, every color, every personality type, every field. So know being a woman has no bearing on whether you have the potential to be a brilliant leader.

But also know that there are forces in the world that have taught all people – men and women – that women should not be leaders. These forces are very, very old and very, very powerful because we learn them when we are little. We learn to let the boys speak more in class. We learn to distrust our own ideas. We learn to be quiet. We learn to accept advances from men. We learn to think of ourselves in roles that limit our opportunity to practice leadership. Language people use to talk to us teaches us to act little and timid. They call us “girl” and focus on what we look like, not what we think or do. We have separate sports teams so we can’t compete at the same level as boys. We have separate scout troops and dance teams. Boys learn to be afraid to like pink, and girls learn to be afraid to speak up. These forces are strong and old.

Just because there are forces like this all around us, it doesn’t make these beliefs true. It is up to you and to me to believe in ourselves and to focus our attention on what we want to do with ourselves in the world. No one can take this from us. No one can make it for us. We must find our strength inside and always resist the thought, “I should just shut up.”

Instead, let’s practice speaking up and saying what we feel we need to say. Today, every day. Let’s practice together, because you are better at it than I am. You have not had decades of learning to be quiet and let men win.

Here’s one thing I will say today: I cannot support our president because he does not support me or women in general. He belittles and assaults and insults and patronizes women. He stereotypes and demeans women. We will support our system and respect his role, but we will not be quiet. We will join with all people who agree with us so we can gain power together. We will love with a demanding love that requires our politicians and political system to respect us and work with us to meet the needs of all people. Let us think for ourselves and determine now that, even if he is our president, we do not support him and we will work to replace him.

I promise you that I will spend the rest of my life working to make this world a place where you can become the person you choose to become.

I love you always.

Your mother, Annie

 

To trust or not to trust

How much do we have to trust our government to make a democracy work? It can’t be all or nothing.

It feels to me that a natural part of our American-ness is to be skeptical of our leaders and our system at least to some degree. We want to be sure that we are not brainwashed, given the Kool-Aid, played for a fool, burned. We are Americans, for goodness sakes. We don’t let other people tell us what to think.

So it may be a very healthy thing that we just don’t trust our government and even its laws… until we remember that we have the chance to vote for and participate in that government. Of the people, by the people, for the people, and all that.

How much is enough trust then? Or is the question more about what in our government do we trust? Do we trust leaders as individuals? Do we trust systems of laws and bureaucracies that deliver them? Do we trust movements and platforms? Do we trust the media that relays and characterizes the information we have about leaders, systems, and platforms? Most of all, do we each feel represented enough to be invested ourselves in public life?

I think we all need to feel represented. We need to feel it. This feeling is not always a causal or logical thing. It’s a visceral thing, a hunch, a hope, a way of letting go to someone else. For any person who has wondered, “was I treated differently  than other person back there because of what I look like?” you know what I mean. Like when I go to the car dealership and wonder why the Man Car Dealer won’t look at me as long as my husband is there. Or like when I go to the car dealership without my husband and wonder if the Man Car Dealer is about to ask me out. I might be bothered by that guy or I might relish it! In the end though, I want a decent car with a decent deal. Still none of that means I trust my car dealership blindly – nor do I love waiting at the DMV…

I may trust my family a lot. I might trust my car dealer only enough to make a deal. It would be great to know how – and how much – to trust our leaders. But perhaps much more important is, can we trust our system of democracy? It sure has taken our country a long way, from slavery to a black president, from husbands owning wives to me holding on to my independence in marriage and the real possibility that a woman would lead our country. Black or not, woman or not, most of all, do we trust that there is justice in the system?

There are enough people who do not feel like there is justice for them. There are enough black men who do not feel safe, enough women who do not feel independence, enough police officers who do not feel they can uphold the law of the land without using terror tactics. This distrust must be addressed. And to do so, I want to hear from our black Americans, what do you need to rebuild trust with law enforcement? What would have to happen?

If you ask me, as a woman, what do you need to trust the system? And one answer would be, I need to feel represented.

 

 

 

Vote Flavors

Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump. That’s your apparent choice of president flavors, America.

Hillary, if you did anything that is against a law of this country, voluntarily PULL OUT OF THE ELECTION. As much as I want a woman, as much as I want to believe in you, if you do not uphold the law, if you manipulate to get your way to my president, if you can’t hold the same expectations for yourself as the FBI and CIA agents who give their lives to protect me daily, you have failed me. Start over. Clean up your legal battles. Explain to me how your missteps won’t happen again. Then I will reconsider. But I know you won’t have time this election. I was going to vote for you because you are not Donald Trump. Now I see: I can’t vote for someone who broke a law of my country and continued to pretend it shouldn’t matter. I need to trust the law and the people who uphold it. Did you break the law? Did you or Bill manipulate Loretta Lynch? Tell me true or leave.

Donald, if my children behaved as you routinely do to manipulate and rile up folks, I would ground them for a year. I would take away the TV, the sweets, the trips to fun places. You are a bully. If my president is a bully, I can’t tell my children that they shouldn’t be as well. I’ll say it and plan on you calling me a nasty name: PULL OUT OF THE ELECTION. I do thank you for bringing to light that there are many people who are really angry about important things that have been taboo (like racism, elitism). Thank you for making this truth crystal clear. But you will not have my vote because if I allow a bully into the office of president, I have let down my country, my Constitution, children and their  children forever. No to bullying. No to solving problems by being an ass. No to calling people mean, nasty names to make them feel bad and dumb, no more inciting others to join you in taunting, no more being selfish and hoarding other people’s money, no more lying and stealing, no more covering up what you don’t want people to know. Oh, and do your homework.

America, this is our fault. We have made these politicians what they are. What are we going to do? Join me in seeking another flavor of president for our country who can uphold the laws of the country, who respects people, who is a grown up. With integrity. We have to be able to figure this out. Maybe it is Hillary?

Blessed be the ties that bind

I’m reeling along with my country after tragic, horrible events of the last 24 hours. Two black men in different cities shot and killed by police officers. Five police officers dead after a US serviceman sniped them during demonstrations. We are not done with race as a point of dangerous division in our country.

Race is a central – if not the central – issue in our current election drama, too. Most of the people in my circles stand flabbergasted at the support Mr. Trump trumps up. I am not flabbergasted. And I even appreciate that he has brought to light the truth that keeps bubbling around at the edge of our American story these days: racism is alive and well, along with many other “isms” that are cliched at this point – elitism being perhaps the most potent. (I’m sure someone would call me a feminist but I won’t think of my story in terms of other people’s cliches. I’m a woman, so that’s technically the card I can play. I’m not a Spanish speaker or have higher amounts of melanin in my skin so I can only play the feminist card. However, I’m determined not to play a card.) I am here to put forward an idea I hope you will consider well even though I’m a woman – that we must commit to the idea of America, of United States, of the working through of democracy in the practical space of discourse – of seeking the ties that bind us – if we are to stay afloat as a country.

When I was a little child, my family attended a small, rural church in northern New England. Each month when we had communion, we sang the song, “Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts…” I take this statement up now – not as a Christian, but as a human and an American. Our central question must be: What are the ties that bind us?

To start finding those ties that bind us, we could start by thinking about what we want, even as we mourn the tragic and unfair deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and five Dallas-Fort Worth Police Officers picked off by a US serviceman from a rooftop above a crowd demonstrating the deaths of Philando and Alton. (Yes – this is the course we are on.)

If we want security, we may have a clue. We all want to be safe. We all want our children to be safe, our mothers and fathers. We can all agree on that. I conclude then that, if any person does not feel safe because he or she is a certain color of skin or fears another person because of their skin, we are all not safe. That’s the lesson here.

We all want to have freedom to make our lives our own. If anyone loses their life and the circumstances were criminal and not handled fairly, there is a chance that I too do not have the freedom we love. This means we all must protect each other’s freedom in order to enjoy our own.

We all want to trust our government and our law enforcement. If you do not trust your government or law enforcement, I can’t trust them either. We must all have trust in these institutions if our country and American dream can survive.

If we cannot find the ties that bind, we can be assured America will become the next saga of intergroup hatred and killing. We will lose our freedoms, our chance to feel safe, our power and glory. We must find these ties of human love that bind us beyond our cliched group identities, our cliques and gangs and clubs.

How do we build – or rebuild – trust?

I say we focus on ourselves first and decide to listen and respect other voices, no matter how well we understand or agree with them. We stop thinking we alone are right and start thinking we are all Americans and humans. We must reverse this trend and focus on life, liberty and pursuit of justice for all.

I’m Liking This Midlife Crisis

A midlife crisis is when you feel like you haven’t done much in your life and you might never do anything important ever, right? I’ve been starting to think about things along these lines – and wonder if I shouldn’t start doing something important. What? If I haven’t really done anything that mattered so far, why would I know how to do it now? So I’ve decided to sit at a computer and start typing something – ah, that will make this midlife crisis wash away in a shower of sparkly shimmer and blow away to Neverland. The most useful thing I have to say to you, reader, is, “I haven’t figured it out.” Hope that helps!

While that sounded like the end of this little blog, there’s an itchy scratchy feeling in the center of my chest that compels me to write more. (I acknowledge I may be completely wrong about this diagnosis: I might actually have heart disease or some skin irritation between my boo-boos.)…

So despite the itchy scratchies and the need to write, I just ran around doing a zillion other things: finished up a load of laundry, watered the plants, swept the kitchen floor after finishing the dinner dishes. It’s like Pharaoh himself directed me to do these chores: it’s like I must do them now or he might have me thrown into a miserable dungeon to sleep on straw I had soiled myself and to eat McDonald’s forever. Clearly the plants will rat me out, it would seem, if I fail to water them immediately. They’ll droop, see, and everyone will know I had failed in another part of life. This is similar to the carpet. So as I walk a heaping basket of laundry from the back room to the den, I have to stop, put down the basket, and on my hands and knees, pick pieces of dog hair and construction paper scrap from the carpet. Don’t want the carpet to report me.

Actually, it might be BECAUSE of the itchy scratchies that I end up on my hands and knees picking almost imperceptible pieces of junk from the dark brown carpet. Avoidance. I know how to do this picking up tiny things with my forefinger and thumb; writing something relevant and important is another story. At least, I chose these shit jobs, not Pharaoh. If they reflect my neurosis, at least it’s MY neurosis.

My fear is, what if I actually discover that I’m right about being unimportant and irrelevant? What if the writing reveals that I haven’t done anything important with my life to date and that this awful performance predicts only continued irrelevance and worthlessness? Ah, I might well be right. In that case, you’d be wise to turn to a different source of content to satisfy yourself right now.

Ha! You kept reading.

(That was an ancient female tactic intended to tease out whether a suitor is serious or not. Tell him “I’m sure I’m not worth anything” and see if he denies it. While the logic is problematic, you have to understand it has been shown to work, and when you are trying to see if your self-deprecation and insecurity are perceptible to others, it can really do the trick.)

So, with renewed energy and confidence, I will continue.

Here’s what I need to tell you:

First, I want to tell you about being a woman in a professional job. The injustice is real. I wouldn’t believe it for a long time but then tripped over situations where I swear to goodness, men and the people they influenced would not support me and my work despite all evidence that I could do it very, very well. If these men were in control of the situation, I have chocked that job up to experience and got the hell out of there. (My other choice was to try to build a case against them. I have always chosen not to do that, despite my big talk of justice. This is a topic for another day.)

Second, I want to tell you about being a mother in a professional job and realizing that I truly don’t care about my career more than my children. There is certainly part of me that can’t imagine life without the self-affirming reality of having 22,000 emails in my inbox, deadlines with timelines, budgets with consequences, and a title that says, “I’m important – how about you?” And I also know that my partner in life is willing to do a lot more than be the stereotypical Man Dad who plans on his weekends around beer with his Man Guys and who expects a loving, sparkling clean and luscious wife to return to daily. My best friend and husband carries his weight in child care load, laundry, dishes, lawn care, household maintenance, doing puzzles, brushing hair. That fact does not diminish the fact that I (I would capitalize “I” if it weren’t already capitalized) want to be a certain kind of mother to my children that involves being present. This dream, this identity is my own. I want to feel I know my children well and that they trust me.

Third, as a working mother in midlife crisis, I want to stop feeling the following:

  1. The constant feeling that I should be somewhere else. If I’m at my desk, I should be with the kids. If I’m with the kids, I should be at my desk. (Example: My daughter participates in her first gymnastics event and I am not there because I’m in the Honolulu airport on my way to a meeting. Another example: I’m reading a book with my daughter before bed and my mind is overrun by the need to answer That Email.) This feeling of doing the wrong thing all the time starts to take over my brain. It makes it almost impossible to be smart – and I guess that follows. How could you be smart doing Thing A if you are obsessed with doing Thing B? Once you get to do Thing B, you now think obsessively about Thing A. It really doesn’t serve.
  2. The feeling that, at any moment, my intricate and carefully constructed schedule could come tumbling down. All it takes is a babysitter to get caught in traffic or a meeting to run over. Or the cat to throw up on the carpet and make you slip on your way out the door so you drop your cell phone and its display shatters so you can’t dial into the conference call at the same time as dropping your daughter at school so you miss the first ten minutes when the team decides to give the project to your nemesis because he was there and “stepped up” and because you missed the first ten minutes of another meeting years ago so you’re not a team player and really not the go-to person anyway since you might be picking your child up from preschool next time. “Well, she’s got kids…” you hear them say in your head.
  3. Feeling like I need to take care of all the shit jobs AND the substantive work I’d signed up for. At least in most jobs, it’s considered rude to ask the woman of rank to get the coffee. But there are plenty of other tasks that I’d consider “shit work,” wouldn’t you? How about the request to convert a document from Word to a pdf or schedule a meeting for the group? Or how about getting “promoted” into the lead on a losing project everyone hates and the company wants out of? Another goodie is when my boss asked me to select a hotel and make room reservations for a group going to a conference. As a technical subject matter expert with years of experience in our field, it was not my area of expertise to do travel arrangements, but hey! When I completed my technical report and presentation to the client, I just loved waiting on hold for 12 minutes and then getting a tired receptionist in Phoenix to book rooms for a dozen people in Chicago and then passing all the paperwork on to our admin to learn I’d done everything wrong. Fun times.

Having only whined about my insecurities, lack of contribution, and frustrations with the world, I will now turn to solutions:

  1. I’m going to live my life right where I am doing what I’m doing. So there.
  2. Schedules will have to include allowances for reality. If reality didn’t include motherhood in the past, it does now – so take it or leave it.
  3. I will decide what shit jobs I’ll take on.

Which leads me to my final revelation: if this is a midlife crisis, I like it so far.