It’s a playground yelp when a bully shoves a kid off a swing. Children grow up learning to be more or less adept at handling bullies, whether by intrigue, insurrection, passive resistance or going along to get along. Woman, scorned for resistance, are called, “Nasty.”
Where We Stand
A dozen years after the United Nations instituted International Women's Day on March 8, 1975, American women who historically succeeded in exercising their power earned their own month – March. Taking the name literally, we've gathered under banners to defend a civil society (at least our version of it). Some protest with hefty pocketbooks. Some break presumed physical barriers, entering male-dominated occupations, the military and sports. Women are still standing, many of us in new places.
Lip Service
Still, the Democratic Party's presidential debates seemed to pay lip service to women candidates; that apparently because the woman who ran in 2016 only got three million more votes than the man selected by the Electoral College with a 77,000-vote edge. According to The New York Times, that convoluted reality is a cautionary tale to Americans longing to dump that chump as he rewards interest group pledging to see he stays put, come hell or come hell. We've already got the high water.
Worried Yet?
With so many glad-handing him, the chump isn't worried about how to control a coronavirus pandemic - so much as the clobbering of the stock market. His Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, opined China's epidemic would boost our economy. His gadfly of a Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz, hangs out in the United States House of Representatives wearing a gas mask. He's such a gas. Seems the best idea originating in the White House is: Beef up the border wall. Such thinking seems to rely on a belief in a Flat Earth. These people are in charge.
Unbridled
Interesting to learn in the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas raps on the White House door to drop off lists of “disloyal” public servants and preferred candidates for key positions. Ginni Thomas might not have much agency without her Clarence; but she wields it with no thought to propriety. Such a quaint concept in unbridled times.
Bridled
Bridled women recoil from the 20th Century version of feminism to embrace their reproductive civil rights; this at a time when Senate Republicans sideline 400 House bills, yet force to a vote the, “Born-Alive Survivors Protection Act” termed “an event that is exceedingly rare, occurring when the unborn is not viable outside the womb,” according to The New York Times. The “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” prohibits the 1.6 % of abortions scheduled after the 20th week of pregnancy. This law is proposed despite scientific dispute of the pain claim and the undisputed non-viability of a fetus.
Grace Under Pressure
In a world so fraught with power plays, I look with amazement at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She can shake her manicured finger at any attempts to box her into a place called hate. Celebrating her 80th birthday in March, she has navigated in unhinged Washington, D.C. to usher in the “forever impeachment” of an unfit president. Wow! Republican 2016 presidential candidates (15 of them men) couldn’t stop his takeover of their party and are left to cower at the prospect of his mean tweets. Not Nancy.
Watching Them Swing
Domineering powers swing to extremes. My agency as one human being to share these observations with you, to march, to work the Democratic Party phone bank and vote in November seems unequal to the task of resisting the bullies. To that extent, they are the bosses of me.
Left unchecked, as William Butler Yates predicted in 1918, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
One ray of hope: Voters who showed up on Super Tuesday, in one state more than voted in 2016!
That's big. I think big enough for us to stand up to a bully.
The View