OnLine With Zoe

Your answer will be my sextant

Over the next 6 weeks, I expect to be sending and posting letters to my supporters, my sister members, my friends.  I have not had a looming deadline in such a long time and there is an escalating sense of urgency, emergency, finality.  Feb 20 will be a new day. filled with new tasks and, yet, I am reminded of my speech from running for office last April, which said,

For me, tomorrow, nothing is going to change.
Tomorrow I will do what I do everyday.
I wake up, I get out of bed and work to advance women.
I do it with my blog.
I do it with demonstrations.
I do it hosting Feminist Cafes.
I do it promoting the ERA.
I do it protesting oppression.
Tomorrow I will do what I do everyday.

A year ago I was invited to a summit, to support and guide a group of servant leaders in designing their intentions; not mine – but theirs.  Out of that meeting the current leadership of CA NOW was called to service.  We shared a vision that we would be of service to the members with our the feet in the field, in service to the activists who work to advance the women and girls of California.  Collectively we support activism, the verb - motion, change, growth.  We have not supported a ladder of authority pointing higher and higher, awarding more and more power with each ascending rung.

The losing slate has not accepted the outcome. They are appealing up the pyramid, bypassing the local remedies and appealing to higher office holders to come and declare the elections illegal removing and replacing the state officers.  And there are things afoot.  As there should be.  A familiar story of  two forms of organizing in a struggle.  The outcome will show itself and there will be fallout as demonstrated by the garden’s seasons. 

What is my role?  What is the right thing to do which is in keeping with my conscience?  Frankly, I don’t lose sleep over such a question, as I might have 30 years ago.  I know the answer -  I ask.  I ask the membership.  I am in their service.  The consistency of conscience is a hard won battle, which slips and slides from time to time, but this is rudimentary for me.   

What do you want?  I will be in service to that answer.  If you want to fight, to go to the mat, to step away, to let it go.  What do you want?  This is in keeping with my form of leadership and this is just another opportunity for me to practice it.  Please, give it some thought and say what you want. 
Your answer will be my sextant.

Tomorrow I will do what I do everyday.
I will buy and read every book I can afford on feminism.
I will crawl the web for every item that is by ~ for or about women.
I will encourage every female to be all she can be and to exceed even her own expectation.
Tomorrow you may decide to get back to the issues of our evolving feminist lives.
But fundamentally, for me, tomorrow nothing is going to change.
Tomorrow I will do what I do everyday.

Celebrate Equality

Over the last thirteen months I have been to an extraordinary number of gala events.  Actually more than I have been to in the previous 58 years.  There is something peculiar about such events and I have really struggled with what it is.  Fundamentally, it may just be answered in the question, “Who are these events for?”

Mostly these events are a meeting place where the workers of the Feminist Waves in the American Women’s Movement meet.  What is repulsive, literally, is that stars of the past dazzle the street activists with no visible shame for the implicit elitism.  Five college students pool their funds to buy gas and drive through Taco Bell to clap and adore sequined speakers on the stage; and what do they learn? Difference.  They learn hierarchy and difference.

Over the last week I have contemplated what would I have done if it was mine to design.  First, the registration table would have been entirely staffed by the most renown people of the event.  Can you even imagine what would be the lasting impact for a 20 year old feminist to slowly spell her name for Gloria Steinem to check off the list?  Or to wait in line to have Peg Yorkin welcoming her to the event?  Consider if a Senator or Congresswoman was standing with clipboard and pen, asking if you need direction?

I would have made two colors of tickets and directed people to sit next to someone with a different color ticket.  Free tickets green and paid tickets blue.  To equally balance feminists to sit side by side; years in the field and experience to share with the one on the right or the left.  And wouldn’t it be great when the 60 year old asks a 20 year old what are HER issues – could it re-enlist her senior sister right back into the street? 

Instead, I was told by a close friend in her early twenties – “look it’s a who’s who of the feminist movement over there” – and all I could think was that she was the legs in the field, the hands of service to those in need, the working feminist and the real who in Feminist Whoville. 

Oh they learned all too well that rich and famous is what is important.  Media and money make the stars.  Not a lesson I want to impart.  Any woman who is in need and calls for help; chances are a college student, maybe an unpaid intern, will answer the phone at NOW, Planned Parenthood or the local shelter.  They are my Who’s Who.  I am honored to know them, work with them, sit with them.  I hope they will remember when they are 60 that 20 year olds will carry on and to teach them equality through their galas.

It would be a Tidal Wave

Catholics are directed to say a prayer at the end of the day, The Act of Contrition.    It is a short examination of conscience and an apology.  It always seemed shallow to me, implying that anything goes as long as one is sorry.  Another point of view is to use examining ones day to see who one truly is.  I have argued this point with many high school girls pointing out that 80% of waking hours spent on one’s body indicates their values.

At age 59 I still carry on this practice.  I spend the majority of my day working to empower feminists working in the Third Wave.  I am not necessarily any good at it.  I lose my patience and freak out; mostly because it is hard to get a sense of urgency brewing in someone who has always had birth control, freedom of choice, women’s studies classes, even the phrase “pay equity” in their common vocabulary.  However, if I stop my interior conversation for a few minutes, it is clear that there is a whole new set of issues which are not mine but genuine, frightening, URGENT; safety, alcohol, debt, violence on every tier of human experience, global anti-women campaigns and the disregard for earth herself.  I wonder if, at 15, I could have even handled knowing about the abuse of women all over the world.

How do women (of all ages – young and middle and old) working in the Third Wave of Feminism keep going, stay inspired, find their voice, make any headway at all.  First those of us who want glory for what was done in the Second Wave need to put that aside.  Not that it isn’t so ~ rather it is that there is no time to waste.  Second we need to get to work on the current issues facing women.  They are dangerous, suffocating and force many women to hide and give up.  Third we need to start bequeathing all we have to the modern day movement ~ ALL WE HAVE.

Get a shovel and start shoveling all you have learned, earned and have to make this Third Wave a success.   Get your pocket book, join every women’s organization you can afford and DONATE time and money.  Read a few of the many books about the Third Wave so you can be a part of the conversation.  Subscribe to the Third Wave magazines, ( BITCH & BUST) they need our support and we need the content.  Every day – EVERY DAY visit Women’s eNews,  Feministing, CA NOW, and Feminist Daily News.   

If you are not asking why the Republican presidential candidates are funding abstinence only birth control, why are the Democratic presidential candidates not talking about women in the Constitution, why are both parties not talking about women on the Supreme Court, in Congress and in the workplace – then you need to get ONLINE and get the conversation going – flood every political site you can with such questions.  The single largest voting block this electoral season is young single women – WHY ISN’T THERE A DEBATE HELD BY YOUNG SINGLE WOMEN? – the very answer exposes the problem. 

Last weekend I went to the Feminist Majority Foundation celebration in Los Angeles.  It was quite the gala.  All of the people you would hope to see, Peg Yorkin, Eleanor Smeal, Cameron Manheim, Margaret Cho, Maxine Waters, Gloria Steinem, Tyne Daly, Carol Moseley Braun, etc.  It was the equivalent of Rockin’ to the Oldies with the Beatles, Stones and Roy Orbison at the Forum in the ‘70’s. 

But what if???  What if all the students, who had been seated in the balcony, had been seated up front?  What if the registration tables had been staffed by the luminaries as the new feminists checked in. What if the Wildwood Girls Choir and After School All Stars had been first?  What if all of the leaders of the past simply got under, behind, next to – the leaders of tomorrow?  Now that’s a TIDAL WAVE.