You don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows

10.  Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

Timothy Snyder, Professor of History at Yale University, from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century 

Disabled activists put their bodies into the fight and were literally dragged from the arena and told to shut up by those who work for them. Others who work for them did nothing, and I imagine that is because they were disruptive, shrill, out of control. 

The activists were called a sideshow.

What have you done to help disabled persons and the families of medically complex children fight for proper healthcare for everyone?

We are doing this for you, too.

Yes, it's a drag to have to beg, to applaud even those who waffle around about doing the right thing, but we're the sort of people that know fatigue and disappointment in ways that you might not imagine. We're stronger for it.

Help.

Make calls.

Put your body -- your healthy body -- into it.

Be shrill.

Be disruptive.

See the way the wind blows.

Smashing the Patriarchy, Ongoing

I spent most of the day yesterday in my head, not so much navel-gazing (as is my wont) as pondering the universe or as Oliver said when he was little more than a toddler and had recently watched his sister have a particularly grotesque seizure, WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? I wasn't mulling over Sophie, though. I was mulling over the State of the Disunited States. I was trying not to panic about "healthcare reform" and how screwed we are as women, how screwed Sophie is as a disabled person, how screwed we are as a country with the POS Pussy Grabber in Chief.

I was thinking more about the nature of capitalism, of how utterly rotten it is. I was thinking of socialism and how it's not just for Europeans anymore.

I was thinking about the planet, how it's being raped.

This morning's clusterfuck of presidential tweets and the conservatives' "response" to it struck me as near hilarious. It would seem that they are, of a sudden, aghast at how unpresidential  their man is. We don't need to belabor the fact that he was already the designated Pussy Grabber in Chief who had bragged about his own daughter's tits on a radio show not long ago and talked about blood pouring out of the orifices of a woman journalist who had seemingly slighted him during the presidential debates.

The word women apparently doesn't appear even once in the proposed healthcare bill. The word woman appears only in reference to abortion and pregnancy.

The Republicans/conservatives/capitalists are systematically destroying women, children, the disabled and the planet. Oh, and people of color and immigrants.

We are being told to stop whining. When I called the Pussy Grabber in Chief a POS today on a friend's Facebook thread (mea culpa), I was told that I wasn't being helpful. The response in my tiny little mother mind™ was to smash him in the face. That's the language of the patriarchy,  though.

When are we going to have had enough?

We will, I think, fight back with a ferocious love. Or Love.

I'm thinking Mother Nature.

Earthquakes

Hurricanes

Fire

Thunder

Lightning

Hail

Floods

Remember what it was like to give birth to a human being? If you don't, remember what it was like to be born of a mother?

Yes. Like that.

Corporeal Politics

photograph by S. Herman

On Friday afternoon I joined a group of women from the Catholic community in my neighborhood and visited the Islamic Center of Los Angeles in our neighborhood for prayer. I confess that I was reluctant to do so for selfish reasons having to do with organized religion, but after brooding about it for a day or two, I realized that my discomfort was just that -- discomfort bred by ego. I was struck, especially, by one of the "twenty lessons from the twentieth century" that I posted the other day.

10. Practice corporeal politics. Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people. Make new friends and march with them.

Corporeal politics.

The mosque was filled, crowded with members there practicing their religion and with people from the community of diverse faiths, including a contingent of Latino men. We were there to pray with our Muslim brothers and sisters and to show solidarity with the Muslim people of our community and world, particularly in the face of the Trump administration's oppression of civil liberties.Those of us who chose to do so wore appropriate head coverings and went into the room for women, while others sat in the vestibule. The imam led all of us in prayer and then gave a beautiful talk about inclusivity, emphasizing that we are all God's people and intent on peace everywhere in the world. Afterward, the women of the mosque invited us into the kindergarten room to share in treats.

It was a profound experience for me, underscoring my conviction that we must continue this uncomfortable and difficult work to resist those who would divide this country and go against every ideal that we have ever professed.

Here's a wonderful and prescient poem by the great suffragette, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who wrote it in 1914. I listened to and read it this morning at the Brainpickings website. You can read more about Ella's exhortation against silence here. Listen to the poem, too.

PROTEST

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticize oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and child-bearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.

Therefore I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God’s soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.

Ella Cox Wheeler (1914)

#resist