What a complicated,
paradoxical week lies ahead, bracketed by two weirdly incongruous events, leading
next weekend to a celebration of resistance and hope by hundreds of thousands of women
(and some men) in locations all across the nation and beyond—a global event that includes around 400 marches in 40 countries at last count.
The opening bracket
is Monday’s national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil
Rights icon who is regarded as such a moral leader (despite certain moral
lapses) that his image, name, and rhetoric have been appropriated by all manner
of groups and causes. And the closing one comes on Friday, when the 45th president
of the United States will be inaugurated, a man who is regarded by many as a
rescuer from the swamp, but by few as a moral leader. The contrast was highlighted
over the weekend, of course, when the president-elect verbally bashed another
Civil Rights activist, Rep. John Lewis, accusing him of “all talk, no action”—as
if the scar on Lewis’ head came from couch surfing. It’s telling that Lewis
wasn’t baited into a response. That, I suggest, is moral clarity.
 |
| Not the person who will be inaugurated this week |
This morning,
Monday, I heard my partner singing: “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around … I’m
gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’…,” words from a traditional protest
song, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” I’ve sung it at a lot of events
and actions, but this morning, it had an especially poignant feel because I’m
feeling so disoriented by the contrast between Monday and Friday. I celebrated
King’s work today—and, as important, his iconic moral stature— at a rally and
march, as I would if we weren’t in such a mess. Standing in the cold before we
took off on our route through downtown Boulder, we sang that very song.
It felt
particularly good to be in a crowd singing protest songs. But it felt different
from usual, as I looked down the week to Friday. On the one hand, these songs
are perfect for this week, this off-kilter time—songs of resilience,
the commitment to ‘keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’. But, damn! I hate that they feel so right precisely because of
what will transpire at week’s end.
Still, I remind
myself that there’s light at the end of the week-long tunnel: the Women’s March(es)
on Saturday, designed to put the new president on notice on Day 1. This may be
the ray of hope that unites Monday to Friday.
Not long ago, a New York Times column by Susan Chira worried about the costs to feminism of Hillary Clinton’s
loss:
This was supposed to be the year of
triumph for American women. … Instead, for those at the forefront of the
women’s movement, there is despair, division and defiance. Hillary Clinton’s
loss was feminism’s, too. … A man whose behavior toward women is a throwback to
pre-feminist days is now setting the tone for the country. … Many who care about the place of women in American
society are gripped by fears that men will now feel they have a free pass to
demean women at home or in the workplace, that women’s health, economic
security and reproductive rights will be dealt severe blows.
In what seems like
a psychologically apt image, she described the Women’s March(es) as “an apt metaphor for the moment: movement
as primal scream.”
The core point of Chira’s column, as I read it, is that
feminism is at an existential turning point. It clearly isn’t, and can’t be,
what it was in the 1970s. Since then, we’ve had decades of growing awareness of
the complex intersectionality beneath the term “women.” There’s no going back
from those painfully-learned insights. But we have little idea what tomorrow’s
feminism (or whatever we’ll call it) might become—or, perhaps more to the point,
we have countless ideas (for discussions of this question, read this and this). The question is how, and whether, these ideas will come together.
So tonight I’m thinking, this situation is just a microcosm of
the the working edge of the movement: the marches offer an opportunity to stitch
together the two sides of this strange seam in history. The task is simply to simultaneously
resist the backward turn to the (distorted) view of the nation as a monolithic
utopia before diversity and globalism made it so dang complicated—i.e., resist
Friday—and embrace King’s “Dream” of what this nation (and the “women’s
movement”) can become when we welcome both of these realities in our vision—i.e.,
embrace Monday.
No small task, but what better venue for beginning it than in
the midst of thousands of fired-up women, many of us wearing defiant pink “pussy hats”?
©
Janis Bohan, 2010-2017. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a
link to the post.
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