FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

Hannah and I took one of our walks again last night. We set out at sunset; now that it’s February, the five o’clock hour comes before the light cedes everything to the dark, and we walked in the last of the shadows up the road toward one of our regular haunts.The Brooktondale cemetery spans the history of the village. Some of the graves indicate birthdates from the 1700s’s; last week, I nearly stumbled into a freshly dug rectangle of earth that had sunk a couple of feet from all of the freezing and thawing that January brought with it. I must admit: the brand new grave was a shock. We don’t often bury our dead in the dead of winter, but rather, wait until the ground softens in the spring. Until then, coffins are kept in storage, awaiting the days when new life can come up, and old life can be returned to the earth.Our routine is that Hannah stays on her leash for the half-mile walk up to the cemetery. By that time, she has usually done whatever doggie “business” needs to be done. When we get to the graveyard, I let her off the leash, and the two of us wander. Sometimes, we follow the road that circles the graves. When I walk the road, I pay close attention to who is “inside” and “outside” the old road.As you might expect, outside the road are the newer graves. Some of them stand solitary, like place holders, waiting for the rest of their family members to come join them. Some are already part of small colonies who share the same names, a testament to the fact that many in this area do not wander far from here. They are born, educated, married and buried within a few miles of this community, and when they come back to the earth, they re-join the family that many of them never really left.Others, though, are jolts. The first few times I saw the solitary graves, I had to leave the road to read why these graves stood alone. A stranger might think that someone had been ostracized by their family. Allowed to be in the same graveyard, but cut off from the comfort of being close to family.Turned out, that wasn’t the case at all.Just off the curve of the road sits one of the graves that are increasingly common out here in the country. They’re made of marble, but on the front, lasers have carved out elaborate drawings that depict the life lost. Gone are the Victorian symbols of death and mourning–no more half-covered vases or crosses or weeping women. Rather, the entire front of the grave may be covered by some modern-day laser Norman Rockwell landscape of a farm, or an eight-point buck, a pair of beloved dogs, or even, hauntingly, the laser-etched portrait of the recently deceased. I do not know if these images will stand up long to a Northeast winter, but for now, walking through this portion of the graveyard is like touring an art gallery of self-portraits: “here I am,” the pictures say. “Here’s what was important to me. Here’s how I want you to remember me.” Here is where I’ll find the grave of the young man who died in a car or farm accident, or the teenager who died of an incurable disease.If those graves give me a bump when I see them, there’s another solitary grave that I have almost trained myself not to see when I walk through. Set off almost to the edge of the woods that border the graveyard, at least 20 yards back from the edge of the road, sits a piece of red granite that practically calls to you the first time you walk through this place.She is alone. Beside her stone is an American flag–always–and on her gravestone are the markings that indicate her branch of the service. She was a soldier once. She was in her 20’s. And she died in the 1990’s. I don’t know where she died. I do not know if she died overseas in some desert land, crying for her Mom when the IED went off too close to where she was. Or whether she was the victim of a traffic accident on a base somewhere. Or, whether, to our shame, she was the victim of a fellow soldier. But whatever. She is gone. And her family, perhaps confronted with losing their first (their only?) child, has buried her close to the woods, close to where the deer come out of the forest to nibble the grass of the cemetery. Close to where the redheaded and downy woodpeckers have created their own colonies. Close to the pair of red-tail hawks who nest in the trees and use the farm fields that lie outside the cemetery as their hunting grounds.She seems lonely where she is. So far away from all the other graves. But her grave is well tended. Something new is there all the time, and the American flag is changed regularly–it will never look ragged or unkempt. Still, I can’t bring myself to spend any time sitting with her or trying to know her story. Does that make me a coward?—-Last night, the dog and I walked for a long time. The long shadows disappeared, and by the time we were on our second loop through the graveyard, it had gotten dark. When I was a little kid, I would have been frightened, but not now.As I rounded the bend in the road, on the “inside” of the road, two lights shone. I walked closer. Three small headstones were gathered close, family members all, and in the near-zero temperatures, it was as if they were huddled together. But somebody who had loved those three people had buried pillar lights among the three graves. They were triggered to come on when the sunlight disappeared.I walked closer. The snow had been falling while the dog and I circled. Not a heavy snow, but that crystal snow that, when the light hits, makes you think you’re surrounded by fairy dust. I knelt down by the stones, and brushed from each one the dusting of snow that made the dead nameless.Then, calling the dog to my side, I put her back on her leash, and we walked back home, to the light and the warmth and the love that waited for us there.

“It does not profit a man to marry. For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?”

St. John Chrysostom

Sensible, decent Jimmy Carter got it right again. “This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a higher authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with and reinforce traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant, and damaging examples of human-rights abuses.”‘

Francine Prose has once again turned her attention to the status of women (did I just see you yawn? Go ahead. Click away if you wish.)  in various cultures world-wide.

While it has become fashionable to bash Muslims as being the most severe in their treatment of women; after all, the most strict enforcement of sharia sees women being whipped for showing an ankle or their face, or being stoned to death for adultery, we continue to overlook the “death by a thousand papercuts” that both Christian and Jewish women are subjected to, even in this country, where, to hear some tell it, women have got no cause to be bitching about inequality.

But, you know, when Jimmy Carter makes the painful decision to quit the church to which he has belonged his entire life because of its insistence on the inferiority of women, we need to be paying attention.

The right wing in this country comprises not only teabaggers who think all taxes are the devil’s handiwork and that Obama is a socialist, it is also full of folks who believe that women need to be at home, making babies, and keeping their mouths shut.

And yes, I know. I’ve written about this before. I’ve written both as an angry woman reclaiming my body and as a scholar attempting to understand why we do not take the suffering of the body seriously.

As I wrote upon the death of Terri Schiavo:Terri Schiavo’s death has affected me, not because I knew the woman, but because I know about the thing that drove her to her collapse in the first place. Eating disorders. Hatred of the body. The desire to hurt the thing that will not be controlled-the body, the female body.

So much of what I write about comes back to the body. It is the topic I cannot stay away from. It is the source of my politics. It is the source of my art. It cannot be separated from my brain. I am not a Cartesian. It’s not just that I think; it’s that I feel, and I touch, taste, smell. It’s that I have orgasms, that I know the touch of flesh on flesh. It is that I have felt a baby pass through my birth canal, have felt the stirring of life within me. It is that I have been penetrated by another human being. It is that I have experienced pain. It is that I have looked at my body and seen a reflection of imperfection that I wanted to fix, and in seeing that, I have starved it, purged it, wished it different. And so, having been so much an inhabitant of my body, that I declare that bodies are the site of resistance. It is that I think the government has no right to tell me which of my senses I should privilege, and which of my senses I should discipline.

But because I am also a thinker, I think often of the sources of body hatred in this culture. They are myriad. We all know them. Today, I focus on one. This is inspired by a number of things, too many to go into here. But I picked up the Bible again recently, and concomitantly, I re-read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It has made me want to write the following.

Let’s start with Genesis. With the creation of man and woman. Did you know there are two creation tales? The one that we usually remember is the one that says that woman was made from the rib of Adam, that he came first. But that’s not the first one.

Chapter 1, Verse 27. ”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

In this version of the story, God is both male and female. Both male and female are expressions of God’s essence. And yet, that’s not the story we are told in Sunday school. Frequently, if we are told of Eve at all, we are told of her being the source of original sin. And what was original sin, exactly?

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Eve didn’t give humanity sin. She gave humanity knowledge And God’s punishment for that had been like something handed out by an angry father. “How dare you speak back to me. How dare you question my authority. I will make you sorry that you were ever born.”

Not only that, Eve becomes aware that she has a body, and in that awareness, a whole other world of sensory experience is opened up to her. Think about it: What does the term “to know someone biblically” mean?

As Scarry writes:

Part of the knowledge that comes with eating of the tree of good and evil is that they stand, without protest, as creatures with bodies in the presence of one who has no body. It is crucial that these two be said together: the problematic knowledge is not that man has a body; the problematic knowledge is not that God has no body; the problematic knowledge is that man has a body and God has no body-that is, that the unfathomable difference in power between them in part depends on this difference in embodiness … their awareness of the body will soon be correspondingly be heightened: the body is made a permanently preoccupying category in the pain of childbirth, the pain of work required to bring forth food…

And so, God places a curse on Eve and Adam’s bodies. He makes it that they will die. He curses women to bring forth children in pain. He makes their bodies the source of suffering. He makes the fact that God has an urepresentable body and humans have a body the source of suffering, of separation, of pain.

And I think that we’ve been laboring under that ever since. Do I believe the Genesis story? No. Not personally. But it doesn’t matter. Because so many people do, and for them, the body is the thing that got us into trouble with God. And other people’s bodies are still getting us into trouble with God. Unruly women, gays and lesbians, teenagers having sex, people insisting that they have the right to determine how and when they die. It’s all, according to some, designed to piss God off. And we know what happens when God gets pissed off. Look through the Old Testament. There’s plenty there. You want something that will really set you back on your heels? Look at the Book of Lamentations.

Elaine Scarry has an entire section of her book devoted to God’s lack of body. Yes, of course, in the New Testament, God does have a body in the form of Jesus Christ. And there’s a hell of a lot of suffering that gets inflicted on that body. But in the Old Testament, God does not have a body. And what’s more, the Fourth Commandment specifically commands that humans not dare to imagine what that body might look like-at least not by making graven images of it.

What does it mean that God does not have a body? To quote Scarry:

But to have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension out into the world; conversely, to have a body, a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction (e.g., bodily cleansing), and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (here as in many secular contexts) is almost always the condition of those without power.

In other words, to be represented by a body is to be finite, to be less powerful, to be controllable. It is not the suffering of Christ that is offered by the right wing as the source of their politics. If it were, their politics would be more compassionate, would recognize the body as the source of pleasure but also of pain. Instead, they make references to the Old Testament, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to Leviticus, to all the parts of the Bible where God seems to punish humans for simply being human.

So, I’ve been thinking about all of this as the drama of Terri Schiavo has played out. I’ve been thinking of a young woman who believed her body was the enemy. Who set out to control it in the only way she knew how. By purging it, and in purging it, destroyed it.

***************

Francine Prose returns to many of these same themes. She, too, sees women’s bodies as the sticking point for male-centered religion. Let’s face it, women’s bodies are so damn messy.

Ranke-Heinemann tracks much of this back to the body-hating, pleasure-despising strain introduced into the early church by the Essenes and Gnostics. Later, the early and medieval saints and theologians would show little interest in concealing their horror of sex and the body. According to one thought often attributed to Thomas Aquinas, any variation on the so-called missionary position was as sinful as having intercourse with one’s own mother.

The debate over sex with the beautiful versus sex with the ugly had its twisted roots in the belief that there was an almost mathematical ratio between pleasure and sin. The greater the pleasure, the worse the evil. Apparently, too, there also was considerable worry about ejaculation as something that drains and weakens the male, a dangerous process in general and particularly in the presence of the predatory woman who, unlike her mate, doesn’t lose in sex a life-sustaining fluid. The rabbinic admonition to think of a woman as “a pitcher of filth with its mouth full of blood” was echoed in the work of the twelfth-century theologian Petrus Cantor. “Consider that the most lovely woman has come into being from a foul-smelling drop of semen; then consider her midpoint, how she is a container of filth; and after that consider her end, when she will be food for worms.”

Julia Kristeva, the French feminist, has argued that the “abject,” literally, that which we throw away from us, includes all of our bodily fluids. And women simply have more fluids than men. No wonder, then, that religion, which strives to have a spiritual relationship with God, is disgusted by those things that keep it earthbound.

Women cannot help but be aware of her relationship to the earth. She bleeds each month, most often in tune with the moon. When she gives birth, it is in a rush of fluid, and blood, and shit, that firmly anchors the process of becoming human to the things about our bodies that we claim disgust us.

Theologians debated for years whether Jesus shat or pissed. They could not accept that a perfect being would produce waste products. What to do then, with a creature, that produces waste products constantly–and does not die as a result?

Increasingly, I find the body phobia of each of the three monotheistic religions to be pathological, and that pathology turned into holiness.

I think I’d rather stay a woman. Grounded. Of the earth. Messy. Real.

Yesterday, I went to the doctor’s office again to talk about my headaches again, but this is not a story about that. This is a story about what happened afterward.

Armed with a handful of prescriptions that would all supposedly do their parts to ameliorate pain that has plagued my life for three years, I went to my local Target, where they have been filling my prescriptions since they opened, where everyone knows my name, and where, frequently, as I come in for something “heavy duty” for the pain, someone will sympathetically say across the counter, “those headaches are bad again, huh?”

Yesterday, a few people milled about. I had dropped off my scripts, and wandered through the mall, incredulous that just a few days after Christmas, people still felt the need to buy themselves something. It’s funny how we can build up in our minds that Christmas, like our birthdays, or like losing 10 pounds, or like getting a new job, or like the “geographic cure, i.e., moving across the country” will solve the basic problem that lies at the heart of ourselves. Our inability to make peace with who we are, what we are. To simply be. And, so, as I walked through the mall, I was feeling attuned to a lot of frantic misery as people shopped feverishly, and a lot of overtired toddlers voiced their complaints in the only ways they know how–whining, crying, tantrums–while their parents screamed at them that they were being naughty.

I retreated back into Target. I figured it was better to sit and wait for my prescriptions rather than to observe the bile of human misery.

My prescriptions were almost ready, they assured me. The woman ahead of me–an older woman, who looked harried, and worried, and whose hands flew this way and that–as if this were her reaction to life that had not treated her all that well, was asked if she could be helped. “We have to wait until my daughter comes out of the restroom,” she said.

A few moments later, the daughter emerged. Despite the heat in the store, she was wrapped up in her coat. It didn’t look as if she had showered in a few days. The first thing I noticed, though, was that she had her hand protectively placed over her lower belly. “Bladder infection,” I thought to myself. “Damn, those hurt.”

The mother began waving as soon as her daughter approached. “She’s here!”

The pharmacy rep stepped forward. “How much are these drugs going to cost,” the young woman asked through gritted teeth.”

“The first is $14.97 and the second is $74.55.”

“Could you ask the pharmacist which one I really need to take?”

The young woman came back in a minute. The conversation took place in hushed tones, but there’s not a lot of privacy in the crowded area near the pharmacy stand. “She said this one will take care of the infection, and the other one will help with all the nausea and vomiting.”

Take them both, I was thinking. Even if you have to give something else up, you can’t get better without them. I’ve had friends whose bladder infections have turned into kidney infections and then you’re in the hospital. It’s nothing to mess around with.

The daughter was clearly angry. Her mother did nothing, just fluttered her hands around. It was clear that neither of them had the money to pay for either.

I started thinking about my checking account. I got paid last week, but it’s the first of the month coming up, and I’ve got rent, and a whole series of bills that are on automatic repayment. If I paid for her pills, I’d bounce something. I wanted to step forward, save the day, pay for her pills. She looked awful.

“I’m not going to take either of them,” she said, in a disgusted voice. Clearly she was mad at the pharmacist. Oh honey. It’s not the pharmacist’s fault. It’s the fucked up system we live in. The people who run this country don’t give a shit that you’re suffering. But this was not the time for political speeches.

I watched her and her mother walk down the aisle, the younger woman limping in pain. I had no idea how she was going to make it through the night.

I do have insurance. I stepped forward, to pick up my four new drugs. “That’ll be $16.27″ the clerk said. “Really? That’s all?”

I felt guilty, and mad, and thought, once again, about how fucking obscene this system is.

I wonder if that woman is in the hospital yet?

 I believe that David Brooks is a smart man. I also believe that deep within him lies a belief in Manichaeism, that is, that the world is divided into dark and light, good and evil, and each person must choose his or her side or thereby lose his soul.

More important for Brooks, each nation must choose its side, or lose its way. For Brooks:

If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibben, deliver one of his commencement addresses. Hibben’s running theme, which was common at that time, was that each person is part angel, part devil. Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.

You, and others of your era, would have been aware that there is evil in the world, and if you weren’t aware, the presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.

For Brooks, such a time in world history was defined by clear enemies: those who murdered the innocent, and those who came to their rescue (forgetting the so-called rescuers who turned the innocent away because they were undesirables). You’ll notice in his history that Stalin and Hitler are mentioned, but not Franco, for our response to Franco was shameful, and many good men and women died on our watch while we did nothing.

But, because we knew we were not perfect, Brooks says, we would have been aware.

At the same time, you would have had a lingering awareness of the sinfulness within yourself. As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”

So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.

As a matter of policy, you would have thought it wise to constrain your own power within institutions. America should fight the Soviet Union, but it should girdle its might within NATO. As Harry Truman said: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”

And you would have championed the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature. As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

You would, in short, have been a cold war liberal.

I love this. A cold war liberal. Were these the fine folks that dragged us into the Korean War?  Were these the cold war liberals who failed to help the Hungarians in 1956? Were they the cold war liberals who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion? Did they invade the Dominican Republic?

Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s.

Was that before or after we murdered Allende and installed Pinochet? Helped the Argentinian Generals with their Dirty War? Supported the torturous regimes in Africa? And Reagan? What do we qualify him as?

Actually Reagan is missing from Brooks’ entire formulation. Shall we talk about the millions who starved while Reagan played war games? Or the regimes in Central America that butchered their people funded by our illegal arms deals with Iran?

But Brooks has a new champion. Someone he can, well, patronize, because he’s a “young thoughtful black man.”

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

Obama’s race probably played a role here. As a young thoughtful black man, he would have become familiar with prophetic Christianity and the human tendency toward corruption; familiar with the tragic sensibility of Lincoln’s second inaugural; familiar with the guarded pessimism of Niebuhr, who had such a profound influence on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Brooks wants us to believe that we can believe in Obama because he will take a Christian approach to fighting evil in the world. And while it might not be the Christianity of a King or a Bonhoeffer, we must be assured that it’s not the Christianity of Urban II, who began the First Crusade.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am a Pacifist, but I do believe that we cannot sit on our hands when evil is being done to others. I believe that, if there is a purpose to our lives, it is that we were put on this earth to help each other out. That means we feed people, we comfort them, we clothe them, and, if need be, we protect them from bullies.

My thoughts about this have been influenced by a wise woman I know from Pakistan, who reminds me that it is not the responsibility of Western women to rescue women persecuted by their religion, but rather to work with these women to empower them so that they may throw off their own shackles.

But reality tells me that sometimes, violence is involved. I’m not a Manichean. There is too much gray within me. But that gray still calls out for justice.

And, as I have stated before, I am not a Christian.

And so, I pull out the speech, the inspiration, that reminds me of my responsibility. It is a responsibility that reminds that a lot of evil has been done in the name of doing good. But it is a responsibility that comes from the artist’s heart, from the rebel’s heart, from a Nobel Laureate’s heart.

“That, I believe, is all I had to say. We are faced with evil. And, as
for me, I feel rather as Augustine did before becoming a Christian when
he said: “I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it
is also true that I, and a few others, know what must be done, if not
to reduce evil, at least not to add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent
this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we
can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us,
who else in the world can help us do this?

Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great
unequal battle has begun. I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to
the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought, and I know
that certain men at least have resolved to do so. I merely fear they
will occasionally feel somewhat alone, that they are in fact alone, and
that after an interval of two thousand years we may see the sacrifice
of Socrates repeated several times. The program for the future is
either a permanent dialogue or the solemn and significant putting to
death of any who have experienced dialogue. After having contributed my reply, the question that I ask Christians is this: “Will Socrates still
be alone and is there nothing in him and in your doctrine that urges
you to join us?”

It may be, I am well aware, that Christianity will answer negatively.
Oh, not by your mouths, I am convinced. But it may be, and this is even
more probable, that Christianity will insist on maintaining a
compromise or else giving its condemnations the obscure form of the
encyclical. Possibly it will insist on losing once and for all the
virtue of revolt and indignation that belonged to it long ago. In that
case Christians will live and Christianity will die. In that case the
others will in fact pay for the sacrifice. In any case such a future is
not within my province to decide, despite all the hope and anguish it
awakens in me. I can speak only of what I know. And what I know–which sometimes creates a deep longing in me–is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices–millions, I say–throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for men.”
Albert Camus–”The Unbeliever and Christians” from Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

Gail Collins’ column today most likely gave Suffragettes, Sappho, and all of our Feminist Foremothers the vapors today.

Seriously.

How else to react to the following:

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate contains a provision known as the Bo-Tax — so called because it would levy a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery procedures. The idea is to tax those who indulge in medically unnecessary procedures in order to pay for medical necessities for everyone else.

This sounded like a refreshingly good idea to me, until I read that Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, is against it.

“Now they are going to put a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle-aged?” she complained to The Times.

The tone of Collins’ column is incredulous, as is my reaction to it. So many things to be concerned about in the Healthcare bill, and the President of NOW is objecting to the five percent plastic surgery tax?

O’Neill argues that middle-aged women face so much discrimination in the job market that many of them must lie about their age. In order to do that, they must appear younger than their years; hence the need for Botox, tummy tucks, and all the other things women do to themselves to erase the signs that they are passing out of their reproductive years.

Collins’ column is worth reading. And her questioning the fear that drives someone like O’Neill–that all women secretly fear  they are going to wind up as bag ladies, despite their wealth–is perhaps dead-on in its accuracy.

But I find myself unable to feel sympathy for these women.

First of all, plastic surgery is expensive and is not covered by insurance. So, an extra five percent is hardly Draconian. I doubt it will keep the privileged few who can afford it from getting it. And, if it’s true that middle-aged women are terrified that they will lose their jobs or not be able to find jobs without it, we are talking about women who are looking for jobs in the upper strata of the working world.

In other words, this sounds suspiciously like a white, upper middle-class feminist complaint. I thought that feminists had realized that they needed to embrace class and race as issues within feminism? If defending white middle-class women’s access to the Botox deprives a poor, white woman of an opportunity to get an abortion (because, say, someone trades their vote on the Stupak amendment for this Stupid amendment), how does that help bring women together?

I thought that, as older women, we were to have been taught to embrace our wrinkles. Our laugh lines. Our worry lines. Our creases. These are our badges of honor, they show we have lived, loved, and watched a world that is often unfair to us all.

My sense is that as feminists, we need to be fighting for things that affect us all, and I can’t help but see this as a problem that affects primarily white, upper middle-class women. Am I wrong?

 I do not know what it is to be a woman in Israel. I cannot pretend to, as I have never been there. I have friends who have lived in Israel, some observant Jews, some not, but other than that, I don’t have much of a clue. Yes, of course, I read things. But I just want to point out, before I begin,  that I am not speaking as an Israeli woman.*

I am speaking as an American feminist who is trying to figure out the mixed messages that women are sent in Israel, and the frightening world of surveillance that many Israeli women live under. (And if Israeli women live under surveillance, multiply that exponentially to get to Palestinian women’s experiences.)

But I was struck by two stories that appeared close to one another in Ha’aretz, one of the more leftist Israeli newspapers. In one story, a woman was arrested for praying at the Western Wall (frequently referred to as the “Wailing Wall.”) In another, women can be forcibly inducted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) if they are thought to be faking their religiosity.

As many of you know, all Israeli young people–male and female–are required to serve in the IDF.  According to War Resisters International, Israel violates young people’s human rights in that there is no conscientious objection status for men, and only partial c.o. status for women.

A woman can claim c.o. status:

Art. 39 (c) deals with the exemption of women with a particular religious background. According to this article: “A female person of military age who has proved, in such manner and to such authority as shall be prescribed by regulations, that reasons of conscience or reasons connected with her family’s religious way of life prevent her from serving in defence service, shall be exempt from the duty of that service.”

Men are allowed to claim religious education (e.g. studying to be a Rabbi) as a basis for exemption, but with women (who may not join the Rabbinate,) the right to claim c.o. status is directly linked to her family’s level of religious orthodoxy. Article 39 seems to assume that a woman (who is apparently old enough to fight and die for Israel) is still subject to her family’s religious beliefs. In other words, she is not recognized as her own person, but as an extension of her father. The religious exemption is not based on objection of war, as Judaism is not a pacifistic religion; rather, it is the family’s fear that she will “stray.”**

The legislation on exemption of religious women is based on Jewish tradition, which does not permit daughters either to stray from their father’s authority or to live in a mixed-gender society. Military service by women would conflict with both these proscriptions, hence with the traditional religious way of life.

Art. 40 specifies exemption on religious grounds. According to it, exemption is permissible when: “(1) reasons of religious conviction prevent her from serving in the defence service and (2) she observes the dietary laws at home and away from home and (3) she does not ride on the Sabbath.”

I would be curious as to whether there is someone reading this who can enlighten me why these same observances do not preclude men.

November 22nd saw the introduction of a bill that will radically change this.

The Ministerial Committee on Legislation on Sunday approved a bill aimed at curbing the growing number of secular girls evading service in the Israel Defense Forces by claiming to be religious.

The bill, which was proposed by the Defense Ministry, advises that the Israel Defense Forces keep close surveillance on every prospective recruit who cites religion as a reason not to complete service. This way, say minister, the IDF will have an easier time determining which claims are valid.

The article does not detail how a woman’s religiosity will be determined. Will she have to take a test? I assume that this will automatically preclude any Conservative or Reform Jew from claiming the exemption. But what does a woman have to do to prove that she’s religious “enough.”

Approximately one-third of women seek the exemption. This is seen as a problem, but this bill is also seen as a continuation of the struggle between the secularists and the religious in the Knesset.

The most chilling part of the bill is the surveillance apparatus that these new rules will create:

Hasson called his bill an opportunity intends to equalize the conditions under which women can receive exemptions, characterizing the ministers’ proposal as one that would simply enable the establishment of a team of private detectives whose sole purpose would be to follow up on women already exempt from their military service

Imagine: private detectives whose sole purpose is to follow women exempt from military service to make sure they are religious enough.

Having just read that article, you can imagine my bewilderment when I read this article:

Police on Wednesday arrested a woman who was praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, due to the fact that she was wrapped in a prayer shawl (tallit).

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz said the act was a provocation meant to turn the wall into a fighting ground. “We must distance politics and disagreement from this sacred place,” Rabinowitz said.

Rabbi Gilad Kariv, associate director of Israel’s reform movement, said that all over the world women are entitled to wear the tallit, and only in the land of the Jews are they excluded from the social custom and even arrested for praying.

Last week Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the Shas party’s spiritual leader, said during his weekly sermon that the women in the feminist movement are “stupid” and act the way they do out of a selfish desire for equality, not “for heavens’ sake.”

I have quoted most of the article because I find it appalling. In effect, a woman was arrested for wearing a prayer shawl and reading the Torah at the Wall. She was arrested because the courts have ruled that visitors to the Wall must comply with its dress code.

In the practice of something private, praying to G*d at a holy site, this woman was arrested. Someone was watching her. Ironic, huh? Not religious enough? You’ll be noted in some little book. Trying to practice the religion? Back in the book.

Both cases are about how women are not seen by Israeli law as equal in the eyes of God. They can die for their country, but they cannot pray for it–at least not in places that have been reserved for men.

Why does this infuriate me so? I’m not Jewish. I support a two-state solution, in which both Palestine and Israel would be recognized as sovereign nations. (Yes. I’m aware that Palestinians are second-class humans in Israel. I’m not trying to have that argument.)

But I find it interesting that, when you have determined that women are lesser beings, the perimeters that you put around acceptable female behavior is so constricting that “too much” –whichever way you go–brings you into conflict with your society.

Israel is a modern nation. The United States is a modern nation, but we have our own issues that are similar to those of Israel. For example, women are still exempted from conscription. I do not believe that anyone should be conscripted, but if the draft exists, then everyone–male and female, rich and poor–should be eligible. I don’t think that women in this country will have full equal rights until they can be drafted. ***

Military service for women is fraught with danger–not only from the enemies, but also from your fellow servicemen.

The scope of the problem was brought into acute focus for me during a visit to the West Los Angeles VA Healthcare Center, where I met with female veterans and their doctors. My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41% of female veterans seen at the clinic say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% report being raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and the downward spirals many of their lives have since taken.

In this country, there are those who continue to insist that while women are also children of God, they are first their fathers’ daughters, and then their husbands’ wives. Their personhood is defined by their relationship to men.

Such seems to be the case in Israel. The only route to conscientious objection in Israel is to claim that one’s father’s religious beliefs preclude one from being exposed to military culture. Where is the claim that you simply do not want to participate in what you perceive as an immoral war? Can you serve in a non-combat position?

Perhaps this blog post makes little sense. I cannot pinpoint what made my eyes skip through the headlines to settle on these two separate stories. But as I read both of them, I envisioned Israeli women in a box.

And, as I hear our politicians negotiate a health care bill that would preclude women’s access to medical procedures because of some legislators’ moral concerns, I realized that we’re in a box, too. Maybe a different shape and color. But a box nonetheless.

*See Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things You Need to Know about the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.

**Friends of mine were part of the Peace Now! movement in Israel. They were at a rally when a friend of theirs was killed by a fellow Jew, who objected to those who objected to Israeli policies.

***Newt Gingrich once famously said that women should not serve in combat positions because sitting in damp fox holes would give them yeast infections. (He said it more crudely.)

Update:

I’ve just assigned an essay to my students for them to read.  By chance, the Western Wall comes up in the essay.

From Richard Rodriguez, “The God of the Desert,” Harper’s

“After the Six Day War, the Israeli government bulldozed an Arab neighborhood to create Western Wall Plaza, an emptiness to facilitate devotion within emptiness–a desert that is also a well…

Western Wall Plaza levels sorrow, ecstacy, cancer, belief. Here emptiness rises to proclaim its unlikeliness to God, who allows for no comparison. This is His incomparable Temple. It does not resemble. It is all that remains.”

This week marked the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, in which 162 people were killed, and scores injured. I began a series of articles that mirrored Virginia Quarterly Review’s decision to run a four-part long-form journalism piece that would be exclusively online.The articles, which all-told, totaled 19,000 words, told a stunning tale of chaos, terror, the deliberate infliction of suffering, and a response from Indian armed services and police that seemed to contribute to the death toll.

Jason Motlagh, the author of the article, spent months interviewing survivors and researching the details. The result is something stunning. And, I believe, ground-breaking. It heralds good things for what can be done online.

This type of journalism is usually saved for the pages of print. VQR’s decision to run it online was monumental, and I was curious, now that the series was complete, how its editor, Ted Genoways, felt the experiment had gone. He was gracious enough to allow me to interview him.

In our interview, we talk about the successes and limitations of writing long-form journalism for the Internet.

LB: What was the genesis of the idea for doing long-form journalism as a blog piece? Why not publish it in the print journal?

TG: Jason Motlagh had written an outstanding article for us about separatist groups in India and came by the VQR offices to discuss what he might work on next. I wondered if he thought it would be possible to undertake a long-form narrative of the Mumbai terror attacks. Jason has great contacts in Mumbai, especially with reporters there, so he agreed to give it a go. The original idea was to publish it in our Fall issue, but Jason was still working as the deadline approached–and the piece kept get longer and longer. But it wasn’t just getting bigger; it was getting better. We started talking about releasing it on the web as a way of letting it run as long as it needed to be and also timing its release closer to the anniversary.

LB:  Now that you’ve done it, what is your initial reaction to the response the piece(s) have received? Do you think it would have have attracted a larger audience in the journal? Or do you think that you’ve benefited from word of mouth (something that is hard to do with journals, I would think.)

Probably the most gratifying element of the response has been hearing from survivors of the attacks–words of praise and thanks but also additional information and refinements of the timeline. We’re working on a revised version of the article, something else that wouldn’t be possible with a print publication. It’s still too early to judge the full readership of the whole piece, but we’ve already had a strong response. The upside of the blogosphere is that it’s democratic nature allows a great piece like this, even if it’s from a small publication like ours, to circulate widely and swiftly. The real question is whether we can convince foundations or other funders to support this kind of journalism, because it’s expensive to produce and putting it up free on the web doesn’t do anything to offset those costs.

LB:  What is the future of this piece? Is it something that your writer is going to turn into a book?

That’s up to Jason–but he’s gotten a number of inquiries from agents and book editors. I think that it would make a great book, and Jason is the perfect writer to undertake that job.

LB: Having done this once, and really broken new ground, would you do it again?

That’s an interesting question. This piece was really a special opportunity, and I think that we should try experiments like this only when we feel like we have something as singular and important as this piece is. On top of that, this isn’t the kind of thing that we can afford to do often unless we can identify sources of support. So I think we’ve proven that we can undertake this kind of ambitious reporting successfully and shown that there’s an audience out there for it. Now the question is whether we can figure out a way to pay for it. The web is a cheap delivery mechanism, but multiple trips to Mumbai, months of research, and the staff time to edit the piece, prepare it for the web, and promote it, isn’t free. We’re lucky to have great support from the University of Virginia, but in tough economic times, we need to find a few altruistic supporters of journalism who see this kind of work as important, whether it’s profit-generating or not. I’m optimistic that such people are out there.

> As so many complain that the web is full of ‘bad journalism,’ this piece will become my touchstone for rebutting such nonsense.

That’s great–and you’re right: it’s untrue that the web is bankrupt of good journalism. And we’re actually very excited about the possibilities of mixing traditional media with new media. Indeed, one of our principal foundation supporters, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Journalism, underwrote an article that we published by Kwame Dawes about HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Pulitzer funded a photographer, Joshua Cogan, and film crew to accompany Kwame. They developed that story into news segments for PBS and, with support from the MAC AIDS fund, into an incredible online project called “Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica“, that recently won an Emmy for “new approaches to news and documentary programming.”

Kwame also wrote poems that he and Josh turned into audio slideshows. That approach inspired a project called In Verse that I created with radio producer Lu Olkowski. That project produced paired poems and photographs for the current issue of VQR (Susan B. A. Somers-Willett and Brenda Ann Kenneally in Troy, New York, and Natasha Trethewey and Josh Cogan in Gulfport, Mississippi), but it also turned into several amazing radio segments for WNYC’s Studio 360 and some incredible audio slideshows that exist solely on the web. That project got off the ground because of a pilot program called Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

What I find hopeful about those projects is that they represent a convergence of nonprofit organizations–print, television, radio, and multimedia storytellers working with altruistic funders like MAC AIDS, Pulitzer, and CPB. At a time when journals are threatened and support for journalism is dwindling, these initiatives seem vital and exciting to me–evidence that great storytelling can be carried out on the web as easily as any other medium.

The Guardian reports that a new drug, originally tested as an antidepressant, has been shown to increase sexual desire in women.

Women who took the drug during the six-month trial reported more satisfying sexual encounters and higher libidos than those who were given a placebo.

Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be an effective treatment for low libido, a problem they estimate affects between 9% and 26% of women, depending on their age and whether they have been through the menopause.

The drug is flibanserin, and was tested in Germany as an antidepressant. Turns out, it was a lousy cure for depression, but women taking it reported a wonderful side-efffect: an increase in sexual desire.

The new drugs raises several questions for me.

1. How quickly will it be approved by the U.S. FDA?

2. Will insurance companies pay for this drug the same way they currently pay for male ED treatments?

But I have other questions, too. If both men and women go through periods of diminished sexual desire, (assuming that this is not a permanent condition), then can’t the decrease in sexual desire be seen as a natural rhythm in the life cycle? Are there times when nature simply doesn’t want us to have sex?

My most important question is this, however. We already have a horrible time in this culture accepting that women have sexual desires. We still categorize women by either the “girls-gone-wild” hook-up culture or the “Purity ring-wearing not-until-I’m-married” group. We think we’ve made progress on this, but evidence suggests otherwise. How quickly are women condemned for deviations from the sexual norm? How quick are we to label sexually active teens girls as somehow wrong in what they’re doing (even if they are being responsible and using birth control).

And what about the ultimate form of punishment: The withholding of contraceptive knowledge from sexually -active women as a form of social control. We insist on teaching abstinence-only education, try to limit young women’s access to contraceptives, and make it a crime to transport a woman under 18 across state lines to get an abortion. Given that there are few states left where one can get an abortion, we’ve de facto made it illegal to help young women get abortions unless it’s their parents who are directly involved. (And how come these same people who believe that these young women are too young to make the decision to have an abortion are therefore old enough to make the decision to bear a child?)

The same problems faced by young women are also faced by those women who do not have the financial means to travel interstate, or who do not have the money to pay for this medical procedure. And, if they do have the money to pay for the medical procedure, how much shit will they have to endure to get into see an ob-gyn who still performs abortions?

My point is that, once again, our culture will send mixed messages to women. Now, those whose libidos are going through a temporary cool phase will be told to get with the program and take a drug. Those who want to heighten their desire and take advantage of the drug will be seen as “loose” women for wanting to enjoy sex. And, while insurance companies may pay for women to have sex, they won’t pay for the consequences of sex.

What a mad world we live in.

Being fat in Japan is no longer a matter of shame or embarrassment: the size of your waist is now determined by law.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.

An American journalist, living in Japan writes:

“I am back in Japan, living in Tokyo for a year, and one of my Japanese co-worker recently stopped joining the other men for lunch at restaurants; instead, he began bringing a small bento box. When I asked why, he said his wife believed he was getting fat and required him to eat her pre-approved portions.”

Not surprisingly, there are unintended consequences. Eating disorders are prevalent, especially among young women. When Ralph Lauren was criticized by the U.S. media after digitally altering an image of already-slender supermodel Filippa Hamilton to make her appear even skinnier, I was not surprised that a company executive said the advertisement had only appeared in Japan.

Maybe you are thinking, “Good. Too many fat people in the world. Maybe this is the way to get people to quit being so obese.”

I guess I don’t see it this way.

For me, regulating someone’s waistline is akin to telling a woman what she can do with her body when she is pregnant. It’s called privacy. It’s a matter between a person and his/her doctor. Your doctor may tell you that you need to lose weight to maintain your health. But the government? Mandating your weight?

I keep thinking about Ceaucescu in Romania, who, determined to see birthrates rise in his country, outlawed abortion. Women underwent mandatory pregnancy tests at work. And the orphanages filled to capacity with abandoned children.

How can a government tell a member of its populace what the limits of its body is? How can the government tell any woman that she must stay pregnant?

If the idea that someone could come up to you in a restaurant and tell you not to eat dessert because your waistline exceeds the national standard, imagine how it must feel to have a total stranger tell you that you must carry a baby to term?

For me, there’s no difference.

Privacy is privacy.

Body sovereignty is body sovereignty.

Bitter? Moi?

Mais, non! I live in the greatest country in the world. Everything we touch turns to gold! Why, just look at all the great things we’ve accomplished in Afghanistan!

In today’s Guardian, we learn that Three Cups of Tea and The Kite Runner be damned, things are NOT better for women in Afghanistan.

Afghan women protest at the proposed new family law Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

(For more of my writing on this subject in the past, see When Will Women Matter; Faces; Will Women Pay for Peace in Afghanistan; and How Can I Bear It?.)

According to reporter Janine di Giovani:

Eight years later I returned, but the Afghanistan I found was far from jubilant. Despite the money poured into reconstruction and development, it is one of the five poorest countries in the world. There is 40% unemployment – nearly 80% in some parts of the country. A third of children under five are malnourished. Life expectancy is 43 – and it is one of only three countries in the world where women die earlier than men.

Did you read that statistic? LIFE EXPECTANCY IS 43 and women die earlier than men. 

You would think, given those miserable statistics, that perhaps the United States and the Afghan government would be looking at ways to improve the lives of its people, especially its women.

Yeah, right. When things aren’t going right in a society, what’s the first thing that gets blamed? Lax morality. And who is responsible for lax morality? Yep. Us. Those daughters of Eve.

I arrived to meet women before the presidential elections next month and to talk about a new law, which if brought in, could have drastic repercussions for women. The Shia Family Planning law was signed last March by President Hamid Karzai in an attempt, many believe, to appease powerful mullahs. The Afghan constitution allows Shias to have a separate family law from the Sunni majority based on traditional Shia jurisprudence, and some think the law is linked to the August elections and the Shia electorate who would have to abide by it (they could form up to 20% of the electorate).

The proposed law led to furious protests from women’s groups. It sanctioned marital rape and brought back Taliban-era restrictions on women by outlining when a woman could leave her house and the circumstances in which she has to have sex with her husband; Shia woman would be allowed to leave home alone “for a legitimate purpose” only which the law does not define, and could refuse sex with their husbands only when ill or menstruating.

You see? The best thing for a woman who is not going to live very long anyway is to just have sex with her husband whether she wants to or not; to stay in her house; and to keep her fucking pie-hole shut.

Following international outrage, Karzai backtracked and said the law would be reviewed. This month it was amended and re-signed by the president, but has not yet been ratified by parliament. Human rights groups say it is unclear how much the amendments have done to improve the law. And the law has already achieved its aim – instilling fear and insecurity among an already traumatised female population.

Soraya Sobhrang, a human rights activist I met in her Kabul office, says, “The law will affect all women if it goes through. It opens the door for other repressive laws to be passed, for Sunni Muslims as well as Shia.” A young doctor friend, Najeeb Shawal, says he is seeing more female patients who were depressed since news of the law emerged. “They have the kind of hopelessness that comes with knowing your life is incredibly repressed. And might become more so.”

Congratulations. The law is already working. We love it when women are depressed. That means we don’t need to worry about them going outside and making a ruckus. Instead, they’ll just stay inside, and, if we’re really lucky, they’ll stick their heads in gas ovens or set their burqas on fire. Everybody wins!

By the way. Karzai’s original excuse for signing the law? He didn’t read it before he signed it. 

There are bright spots in Afghanistan:

Bamiyan is the home of the Shia Hazara, the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. I am surprised by the “city’s” remoteness because there has been a huge outcry here from the women over the law: demonstrations, protests on the radio, grass roots organisations very quickly coming together. I meet one of the protest leaders in a small restaurant overlooking the holes in the mountain left when the Taliban blew up the ancient Buddha statues there in 2001. Batool Mohammadi is 27, black-robed, and heavily pregnant. “The law does not fit with humanitarian law,” she says. Batool, a Hazara, comes from the generation of Afghan women born after the Soviet invasion and raised during the Taliban era. She has only known war, conflict and repression. The small window of triumph after the fall of the Taliban – who brutally repressed the Hazaras – has given her a taste of freedom and she is not ready to give it up. “In an area as traditional as Bamiyan, one of the major problems with this law is that it will stop the trend towards modernisation.” As Batool leaves, she says that when her baby is born in June, she wants him or her to enter a world moving towards equality, not repression.

The governor, Habiba Sarabi, is the former Minister of Women and as a Shia will have to obey the law if it is passed. She meets us in her sparse office, a grim, Soviet-style building set on a windswept plain. There are plates of nuts and fruits and the governor, looking exhausted, nibbles dried apricot. At 53, Sarabi is no-nonsense. She is a chemist by trade and speaks good English. The daughter of an illiterate mother who encouraged her daughter to read and write, she tells me when she was young she was mocked as she walked to school alone. Having struggled so hard it was particularly hard to see her own daughter, now 24, denied education under the Taliban. The family escaped to Pakistan and Sarabi worked on human rights and women’s projects.

On the new law, she tries to be diplomatic, but I can tell she is concerned: “Fortunately, women raised their voice.” She is confident (perhaps overly so) that the law will not go through. But later, at her residence, when she curls her stockinged feet under her, she admits the wider crisis. Bamiyan is one of the few success stories in Afghanistan: it is poppy-free, the government functions well, and as she points out, “It is the safest place in Afghanistan. The rule of law is important here.” She has improved the education and health services (instigating midwife programmes, for example, in a province that has one major hospital). But can this last? If, following elections, Karzai succumbs to the mullahs (who exercise huge political power in Bamiyan and the rest of the country), for how long will it be safe for women? Even Sarabi finally admitted that if the law is ratified, it would affect her too.

But those women who have been unaffected by these new laws are rare. And a lot of women are frightened: who wouldn’t be?

Women who have managed to cross gender boundaries seem in a state of shock over the law. Jamila Barekzai is a police officer whose female colleague was killed by the Taliban last year in Kandahar for daring to do a mans’ job. When I go to meet her at the Central Afghan Police Headquarters on the edge of Kabul, next to one of the biggest Shia mosques in the city, she is wearing her olive uniform and heavy black eyeliner. She was transferred from Kandahar last year to Kabul when she thought she would be killed too. She takes out her mobile phone and plays a recording of an unnamed Taliban telling her to stop working, “or you will be taught the lesson we taught your friend”. She says she was mainly frightened for her children and touches the gun at her hip.

President Obama has committed more troops to Afghanistan, ostensibly for finding that guy (what was his name? the one who blew up the towers?) and gettting the increasing threat of terrorism from the Swot Valley in Pakistan under control.

But are women on President Obama’s radar? Are we going to be willing to trade stability in the area for the lives of millions of Afghani women who will once again be confined to their homes, illiterate, ill-considered, depressed, and basic sperm receptacles for their husbands? Is this the legacy that Obama wants to leave in Afghanistan?

Or can we start, right from the beginning, by saying to Karzai that yes, we know you have us by the gas hose right now because you have access to that pipeline we want, but hey, women are people, too.

Please, President Obama. If we are to go to war in Afghanistan, make it mean something. I do not want to have to write in five years that we have subdued the terrorists, but once again, we have paid for it with women’s lives.

President Obama, First Lady Obama, Secretary of State Clinton–anyone–everyone–who will listen: do not turn your backs on the women of Afghanistan. They are not collateral damage. We are not collateral damage of war. We are human beings. We have feelings. And bodies. And we hurt. And we ache. And we grieve. And if, once again, we are told that it is more important that we are treated like pieces of shit so that some problem may be solved, it may be that some of us may not be able to take that anymore.

So please.

I beg you.

On my knees.

For the women of Afghanistan.
Don’t. Forget. Us.

When I leave, someone tells me the Taliban spring offensive has begun, American troops are pouring in, and President Karzai is beginning his political campaign. I keep thinking of Batool, the pregnant activist in Bamiyan, and her baby, and her life in 20 years’ time. If the law does not pass and women continue rolling on, she has a chance. If not, she might still be wearing a burka and never learn how to drive.

—–

Governor David A. Paterson has directed that flags on New York State government buildings be flown at half-staff on Thursday,  July 16, 2009,  in honor of  a Fort Drum Soldier  killed in Afghanistan on July 9, 2009.
Spec. Joshua R. Farris of La Grange, Texas, died in Wardak Pronvince of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.  Spec. Farris was a member to the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 10th Mountain Division.
” I speak for all New Yorkers when I say that we will forever honor the service this young soldier gave to our nation, ” said Governor Paterson.  “He was not a native New Yorker, but we consider all soldiers stationed at Fort Drum to be one of our own.  On behalf of the people of the State, I extend our deepest sympathy to the family, friends and fellow soldiers of Sepc. Farris.”
Governor Paterson has directed the flags on all State buildings to be lowered to half-staff in honor and tribute to our State’s service members who are killed in action.

And the beat goes on….

Poor Sonia Sotomayor. David Brooks writes a sympathetic piece about her this morning, focusing on the fact that she has worked hard her entire life, sacrificed relationships and family, all in chasing the comfort of work.

In Brooks’ picture of Sotomayor, her loss of her father at nine took something away from her, and she’s been on a quest to fill that hole ever since. She works. All the time. And has “failed” relationships and no children to show for it.

But let’s think about this for a moment, shall we? If I were reading this as a work of fiction, I would recognize all the tropes of a moral story. Ebenezer Scrooge perhaps, who loses his humanity, works too many hours chasing the almighty dollar, and then finally, at the end of his life, finds empathy and the company of his fellow humans…?

So, now, I’m really confused. Because aren’t we told that Sotomayor has “too much empathy for her fellow humans,”  that that quality will make her a terrible judge because she won’t rule by some “philosophical-historical construct of objectivity?”

Capitalism thrives on the emotionally “crippled,” on those who are unable to form relationships with their fellow people, who retreat to their work and work and work and contribute to capitalist growth. That’s one story. The other story is that capitalism thrives on those who are so dedicated to their work out of love and passion that they spend hours and hours doing it until they find what it is they’re chasing — and then bring home the bacon, long after their families have fallen asleep, to fund their subsistence.

But it seems those characteristics only apply to men. It’s easy to imagine a man being too busy to get married, or loving his work so much that he can never come home for dinner or be there before the kids go to bed. He has a wife who makes up the slack. But a woman who loves her work that much? “Sssssh. There’s something wrong with her.”

As Brooks quotes:

“As an adult, the profiles describe her as upbeat and social, leading walks to Brooklyn, hosting poker parties, serving as godmother to many children. Yet over the years, she has been remarkably honest about the costs of her workaholism.”

“Her marriage broke up after two years. She was quoted as saying, ‘I cannot attribute that divorce to work, but certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o’clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.’ ”

“Later, during a swearing-in ceremony in 1998, she referred to her then-fiancé, ‘The professional success I had achieved before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness.’ She addressed him, saying that he had filled ‘voids of emptiness that existed before you. … You have altered my life so profoundly that many of my closest friends forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.’ ”

“That relationship ended after eight years, and her biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. ‘You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,’ a friend of hers told The Times.”

“This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.”

Okay. So Brooks backs off for a moment, and says there are plenty of men and women like Sotomayor–the elites, driven by their work (who, by the way, are not having babies)–whose relationships at work become a pale shadow of a real emotional relationship.

He continues:

“These profiles give an authentic glimpse of a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others. In the profiles, you see the intoxicating lure of work, which provides an organizing purpose and identity. You see the web of mentor-mentee relationships — the courtship between the young and the middle-aged, and then the tensions as the mentees break off on their own. You see the strains of a multicultural establishment, in which people try to preserve their ethnic heritage as they ascend into the ranks of the elite. You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.”

“My impression is that judges feel the strain between their social roles and their social lives more acutely than anybody. They are often outgoing people who, because of their jobs, cannot freely socialize with lawyers and others who share their deepest interests. But Sotomayor’s life also overlaps with a broader class of high achievers. You don’t succeed at that level without developing a single-minded focus, and struggling against its consequences. ”

Brooks is undercutting the whole notion that judges should be in positions to make decisions about “real” American life. After all, so many of them fail to live that life (unless they’re traditionalists like those male judges whose faithful wives stand next to them on the podium as they’re introduced.) Judges are disconnected from what real Americans feel, so how can they possibly judge us?

But it’s not just judges. I have two male friends who have both opted not to marry or have children because of their work. I know men in marriages who are workaholics and ignore their families. No one seems to pay much attention to them, until the day their wives walk out on them after the kids have been raised and gone and there’s no one there. My point is, many, many families are like this. This is more the real America than what Brooks somehow thinks. Many people are cut off from the most basic of human emotions.

No wonder the word “empathy” scares the crap out of so many of Sotomayor’s critics.

But life is not just about relationships. May Sarton has written poignantly about the life of “solititude,” not loneliness. Rainier Maria Rilke insists:

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing. ”

We cannot grow without being able to embrace our solitude. While most of us grow within “traditional” relationships, not all of us do. The construction of the family is meant to discipline us for civic life, as well as to comfort us. Yet, to the confusion of some, there are those of us who do not want to live within that discipline.

Finally. Brooks speaks of the “elite woman” once again, who has given up love for work. Never, never does he talk about the low-income women who are working three jobs and have no time for love. Or the middle class man or the homeless person. Forgoing love is not just for the elites. Sometimes, forgoing love is forced upon us.

I just wish sometimes that Brooks could walk among the real people, see that there is not this world of happy workers who love God, their spouses, and their (even unwanted) babies and their jobs versus a world of high-achieving over-educated miserable elites who complain about everything.

The world is just not that Manichean, David. These issues are not “black and white.” Or did you not learn that when you read Augustine–the original who struggled with the life of solitude (which he thought would bring him closer to God and to agape) versus the life of the family (which gave him sensual pleasure and human love)?

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

–Virginia Woolf

I was in the midst of printing out this article, on the poor mothers of Haiti, when I spotted the most recenty copy of The Week, a subscription I still don’t know how I got, and whose viewpoint and presentation of the week’s events, I generally disagree with. But they do run quotations down a little sidebar, and the Woolf quotation made me sit up and take notice, because, in fact, I had been preparing to try to blog about this important article in the SUMMER 2009  Virginia Quarterly Review

I was intending to do just what Woolf was talking about: to be the observant fellow pointing at the outskirts of an agony. But it gets stranger, for the the book I had bought today with the intention of re-reading is Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, which talks about the fact that we are constantly looking at how others suffer–on television, through photography, internet, etc., and what does that do to us?

And here’s the part that’s a little mind-blowing. The first line of Sontag’s book is In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Sontag argues that, as Woolf had done when confronted with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, many of us feel that if we simply show “you” or the reader or the outside world, what have you, that those photographs will move you to the same action that we want you to take. That you will feel the same thing.

And so when I show you the ravages of starvation and malnutrition on the faces of women and children in Port-au-Prince, that you will do  ….
What?

What is it that I want you to do?

And suddenly, my desire to blog about what’s going on in Haiti feels exploitative, or some feeding of some part of myself that really, really does want to point to suffering and to tell you to do something about it. If I had the money, I think, I would change the world, feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the illiterate, stop conflict.

And I feel guilty.

As if I am doing something wrong. Why am I writing about these things?

Sontag writes (pg. 18)

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Warns are now also living rooms sights and sounds. Information about what is happenening elsewhere, called “news,” features conflict and violence—”If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guidelines of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows–to which the the response is compassion, or indignation, or titilation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.

We are all surveyors of the violence, the misery, the suffering of the human condition. Some of us seem to have little trouble shutting it out, insisting, for example, that what the photos at Abu Ghraib show us are simply frat pranks gone amok. Whereas I not only see in them great cruelty toward other humans, it makes me so angry that I want to shake it in your face and ask you what are you going to do about it?

Sontag’s book is brilliant and dense and I find myself wanting to quote huge swathes of it so that we could discuss it. But she is arguing among a number of interconnected points: What does the constant exposure to images of suffering do to us? Does it  make us more compassionate or less so? Does it make evil more banal and everyday? Does it desensitize us, make us cynical, passive?

But what’s the alternative? Not to look?

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflincting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties to other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

I have grown tired of hearing people who should know better say things such as “Americans don’t torture.” Even confronted with the photographs, they put it down to one or two bad apples. They do not accept that inflicting suffering upon other human beings is part of human nature.

Some of us believe ourselves to be incapable of deliberately inflicting such pain on others, and I believe this of myself, but I have not been in the place of those whose wickedness was provoked or whose suffering was recorded.

I know that when I decide to blog about the women of the Congo, or about PTSD, or the plight of children here or of Mother Earth, it feels like it’s coming from a place of a hard-earned determination to try to see the world as it is. And what’s more, to try to persuade you to see the world my way, too.

I want you to get angry that there are 300,000 child slaves on the island of Haiti. I want us to do something about it. I want us to do something about the traumatized bodies of the women of the Bakavu.

Okay, I’m beginning to breathe now, and I see where I am going with this. This afternoon, listening to NPR, someone said something about our collective desire to put what happened during the last administration behind us. But I’m not part of that collective desire.

I want the administration that ordered the illegal tortures, the war crimes, those people–even though they are Americans, and thus I should somehow believe that we, as Americans,  are better than that which we did–I want them to be punished.

I want to be absolved of any complicity in the invasion of Iraq. I want to be absolved of any feelings of guilt I have about what my fellow countrymen and women have done to the peoples of other lands. I am not willing to accept that we are all guilty because we let ourselves be fooled into going off to war against Iraq.

I was not fooled. I was never fooled. And I shouted and shouted, along with a lot of other people, and in the end, what did our shouting get us? An illegal war. Atrocities committed in our name. Torture.

I have this terrible feeling that I am beginning to understand what it was like to be an “ordinary German.” I didn’t vote for Bush; I didn’t support his policies; I wrote as much as I could against what he and his minions were doing. But it wasn’t enough. They still did it. And because we want so much to move on from this, to put it in the past, to move on to issues of health insurance and the economy, they will most likely get away with it.

And what, ultimately, did I do to stop them? Wrote a few letters? Participated in a few protests? Wrote and wrote? Cried? Argued?

Was there something else that I should have done?

That’s the question that I’m sitting here with at this late hour of the night for me. My talents are writing and teaching. But if all I did during the Iraq War was to write against it and teach ethical values, and the war still went on, and I did nothing more: I didn’t stop paying my taxes, I didn’t move to another country, I didn’t get myself arrested. I didn’t stop one single, solitary moment of the horror of what my nation perpetuated.

That’s fine. I’m one person. To think I could have changed the situation is too narcissism in the extreme; but to not have changed the situation is painful to me.

How do I make amends for what my country has done?

What more could I have done?

And thus I return to the blog post I was going to write about the women in Haiti. I suppose I would have quoted from the article, pulled more photos from it, and then, suggested you make a donation to the charities that are keeping those women alive. But if that’s all I did, would it have been enough?

Is being the observer on the outskirts of a calamity and pointing, enough?

Anyone?

Image taken from The Art of Romance: Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs by Joanna Bowring and Margaret O’Brien

Am I more than my body?

As a woman, of late, I feel as if I have had to defend the boundaries of my body in order to prove and preserve my personhood.

Forces abound that seek to put me in my place–violently, if need be. (Paul Krugman’s column this morning is masterful. Please read it.)

I see at work in our culture. I have written before about laying claim to my own body and rejecting government control over what I do with it. I have written my own privacy manifesta, declaring that my privacy is sacrosanct, and not subject to invasion by either the government or the moral scolds in our culture. And, in the past, disgusted with the Democratic leadership over issues such as confirming John Roberts and Samuel Alito without so much as a peep of protest, I considered leaving the party.

You know what? I’m tired. I’m tired of continually having to defend my right to my body. I’m tired of having to say that I’m not your brood mare, that I decide what enters my body, what I carry within my body. I’m tired of this fight. But I have daughters, so I’ll continue this fight as long as I need to.

But I want to say something else. Even as I defend and protect the boundaries of my flesh,  I am more than my body. Women are more than their bodies. Sometimes, I don’t think that everyone thinks so. I’ve read some of the recent posts to OS, and quite frankly, I’ve been sickened. Some of the things that have been written about women make us into nothing but cunts and asses; reduce us to our parts. Our mouths become only good for blow jobs. Our cunts and asses are only good for penetration. Our bodies are broken, bent, spread-eagled, impregnated and harvested for pleasure.

You all know that I’m not anti-sex. I write erotica. Multiple orgasms are … well … you know. And you all know how much I love the man who is my partner.

So, I don’t hate sex or men.

****

I do feel as if we are going backwards as a culture. If, at one point, we were moving toward a sense that women could control their own fertility, women were entitled to equal rights, women’s minds were as fine as men’s and we could compete with them in all intellectual fields, these days, I feel as if we’re having to re-establish that a woman is more than her uterus.

The right wing spews hate against gynecologists who perform abortions, and then refuses to accept responsibility for inciting hate crimes. In fact, to hear some tell it, it’s the pro-choice insistence on a woman’s right to abortion that caused the murder of Dr. George Tiller, not the hateful shit spewed by the right-wing talking wingnuts.

A Latina woman is nominated for the Supreme Court, and suddenly, we have discussions about whether menstruation will affect her ability to make decisions (or whether the pronunciation of her last name is unAmerican, or whether her eating of spicy food is unAmerican, or whether “empathy” makes her unqualified). Never mind that she went to some of the finest universities in the country. She’s a woman, and her body will prevent her from being able to think “rationally.”

I could go on and on.

But I want to get back to the point that I am more than my body. This is not the 15th century, for fuck’s sake. We are not debating the four humors that make up the human body and how women cannot be as smart as men because she’s composed of the wrong essences. We shouldn’t be talking about “hysteria” or “wandering wombs.”

We should not be continuing the old canard, the oldest piece of bullshit, that male is normal and female is “other.”

We should be talking about who is the most qualified to be in the various positions that will help this country get out of the mess it’s in. We should be focusing on the contributions that both men and women can make to improving the world. We should be celebrating the fact that we all bring to the various tables different talents, and we should not immediately eschew one set of talents because the person who possesses them also happens to possess a vagina.

I really didn’t think that I would be 46 and having to argue that a woman can be as good as a man. I didn’t think I would be 46 and having to read defenses of being a misogynist asshole. I thought, mistakenly, that we were going to be past this. I thought that men, women–and the genders in-between–could treat each other with respect, could revel in each other’s brains and hearts, could celebrate difference, instead of either apologizing for it or denigrating it.

I guess I was wrong.

And so, here I am. It’s 2009, I’m 46 years old, and I have to say, I am more than my tits and ass and cunt. I have a brain and a spirit. I am a human being.

I am a human being.

(This story is a collaboration with rstiene.)

It’s funny what we’re drawn to. I was terrified of cemeteries when I was a kid. In one of our many houses (we moved frequently when I was a kid), our backyard abutted a cemetery, and never once, ever, did I cross the fence line and venture inside.

The local kids told tales, of course. Supposedly, one grave was illuminated at night by a lantern, hung by a grieving husband. I find that tale poignant now, but—back then—I was terrified by the thought of some old man keeping constant vigil at his wife’s grave. He might as well have been a ghost, for it was clear to us he certainly had a ghost story.

Things changed when I moved to the Finger Lakes. For one thing, the boneyards here, I discovered, resembled none I’d had seen in the Seattle area. There, cemeteries were evenly spaced rows of square granite—uniformly shaped. From the road, nothing appeared unusual, and no grave called attention to itself. Some cemeteries didn’t even permit above-ground monuments. They called themselves “parks,” and the markers were spare, metal rectangles noting only name, birth and death date.

But here in the East, my first rental house stood across the road from an ancient and none-well-too-kept graveyard which bore the name of the road upon which I lived. From my porch, I could see obelisks, and columns, and tablets, and other shapes I did not have words for. They all said “old.” The historian in me (I had come to Cornell to get a graduate degree in history) buzzed, surmised and inquired as I ventured across the road.

The names and dates were sobering. For the first time, I think, my inner historian saw the reality of what childhood diseases did to children in centuries past: they killed them. So many under the age of five; so many adolescents. Local accounts record that the flu and pneumonia and diphtheria and the measles and scarlet fever and smallpox and diarrhea carried them off. And carried off the women, too. In their 20s and 30s. Sometimes, buried with the infants whose birth had killed them.

Sometimes not.

There were stories told there, written in dates, carved in stone. And so, now, later yet, graveyards still call to me. I go there simply to get perspective. Sometimes, to do historical research. Sometimes, to admire the signs and designs. And sometimes, to simply read epitaphs. I usually go alone. This Memorial Day weekend, I went with Rob. We are both writers, and we were looking for stories among the plots.

—————

We’d gardened our own small backyard plot all the prior day—one of those scorching but soupy Saturdays that lets you know early summer is upon you, and that you’d better get those veggies and herbs planted. Appropriate for a Memorial Day weekend.

So Sunday morning, I broached over coffee the idea of finding a “slave burial ground” that, if memory served, was just up the road from our new apartment, in the Town of Caroline. For years I’d had passed a road marker pointing the way to this tidbit of history (in a state that abolished slavery in 1820), but had never had the occasion to stop.

We Googled what we were looking for. The photo showed a green hillside, and a note said that the slaves buried there had been owned by four families who had moved up from the South (I loved that bit of detail. Of course no real New Yorker would have owned slaves, don’t you know?) The burial ground was now on private property. Still, we wanted to see what we could see.

The road was flat—a rarity around here—and aptly named, “Level Green Road.” We drove to where our research said the cemetery was, but after driving a mile or two, it was clear we’d missed it. The sign I’d remembered being there for years was missing.

We turned the car around and crawled back down the road. On our left, we recognized the view from the photograph on the web. Around here, in early spring, so many shades of green surround you that you find yourself reaching for words like “chartreuse” or made up words like “viridescent,” to describe the hues that shade from tree to tree to bush to wildflower to vine to plant to field. Verdant maple trees bent toward a jade hill.

Seriously. And the sky really was cerulean.

We didn’t get out of the car. At the front of the property sat a mustard-yellow trailer; toys littered the front yard, and hanging baskets filled with purple petunias framed the doorway. People lived there, and it wouldn’t be right to tromp across their land to try to find the evidence of graves. Rob suggested we check out a secluded graveyard he’d spotted off Ellis Hollow Road while piloting the moving truck a couple of weeks before.

This time, we did inadvertently traipse across someone’s property, attracting a woman who helpfully stopped her gardening long enough to share a secret or two with us: how, all on their own, they’d gently tried to maintain the “Ellis Hollow Cemetery” while keeping it unobtrusive. In past years, teenagers had damaged some of the graves, and careless people had picnicked in the cemetery. “I know that the Ellises are buried there, and Ellis Hollow is named for them,” she said, “But that’s not how you behave in a graveyard.”

We agreed, then out-stepped her on the path to the cemetery, and she returned to her gardening.

“The Ellises are buried there,” Rob said. “Do you really think that people make a pilgrimage to see where Mr. Ellis is buried?”

It was clear someone took gentle care of this place. The grass was clipped, the iron-rail fences well-kempt, the graves cleared of all weeds and tree-fall. American flags marked perhaps a dozen of the stones.

Very East coast: the markers were a mosaic of styles, but mostly tall, skinny white granite obelisks mixed with thin, flat slate rectangles with carvings atop them. They reminded me of the carved wood you might see on top of a Victorian couch.

There’s a squared-off obelisk crowned with a draped urn. In the row beyond, some flat stones, each with a hand carved into their faces, each hand with an index finger pointed heavenward. Others featured cypress trees. Once again, I made a mental note to someday discover up the symbolism of gravestone design.

A great number of the graves bore birthdates from the 18th century. And, as usual, tiny stones marked the remains of infants and children. I saw again what I’ve never gotten used to: the name of a man, and below that, “his wife” and her name. Below that, “his wife” and her name. Sometimes, I’ve seen men who are buried with three wives; all married consecutively, of course. These were not polygamists. These were men who lost their wives in childbirth and then promptly married again. If the second wife was lucky, she outlived him. But I couldn’t help thinking what that must have felt like. To know that you were going to be buried with your husband—and his first wife—and to know that from the beginning of your marriage? Was that a comfort? Or would you forever feel like the “replacement” wife who couldn’t even get her own grave? There’s a story there.

The largest stones are usually “family” markers, often with the names of two or more marriage-related clans engraved (or embossed) upon them. These monuments boast many regionally familiar names (Ellis, Landon, Lounsbery, Middaugh); families who tended to marry into families whose names have also became “places.” And so—by tombstone matchmaking—we gathered a sense of not just which families had socialized with each other, but which have outlasted their secreted tombstones to become green street signs and town boundary markers. Not stories so much as sentinels.

And the personal names—what names they were. Rob called out the unusual ones, and I wrote them down in my notebook. Calvin Deputron. Sextus and Abbie Landon. Personeus (or Personius). Rhoode. Olive and Mienert Redenius.

“An excellent name,” called out Rob, later, from a gravesite on White Church Road: “Squire Crane!”

The problem with the thin slate markers is that the engravings fade. A 150 years’ worth of snow and wind and rain and sun will wear away the slate, which is a shame, because—frequently—those flat slate markers had the most eloquent epitaphs.

I found the grave of a five-month old infant. I neglected to write down the child’s name. But I was on my hands and knees to trying to read the epitaph. Finally, lying in the grass with my nose almost against the gravestone, I squinted to see what a grieving parent had chosen as an appropriate sentiment to put upon so tender a loss.

Rob joined me. This is what we were able to transcribe:

Happy infant earthly bless’d

Rest in peaceful slumber rest

Early rescued from the courres

Which increaseth with growth in years

I think courres (and we’re almost certain these were the letters) is “curse.” Dying as an infant let you escape Adam’s curse, and I wondered if a weeping mother had taken joy in knowing that her child was now with God. So there was a story.

———–

In the several cemeteries we visited, American flags had been placed by the local American Legion at the graves of veterans. And, as it turned out, many of the veterans were from the 19th century. Some indicated Civil War service. Others were less forthcoming.

We stood in front of this grave for a long time:

MAJ PELEG ELLIS

D 5/9/1859 on the 84th anniversary of his birth

The name “Ellis” appears a lot around here. Stories there for sure. But I wondered why his birth date wasn’t given. Problem was, Rob and I were both having brain farts, and couldn’t figure out what year he’d been born in. It was right there in the stone: 1859 minus 84, but damned if either one of us in a moment could do the simple math in our head, which made us both laugh, which made doing the math that much harder, which caused us to laugh even harder. If the private lady-caretaker next door was listening, I’m sure we sorely disappointed her. No way to behave in a graveyard.

Inevitably, silence overtook us again, and shadowed us the rest of that hot Sunday. Later, as we watered our new garden in the late afternoon sun’s lantern light, it seemed silly. 1775. Of course. Like I said, it was right there in the stone.

But by then what had become more obvious was that it wasn’t the number of years counted by one tombstone that’s important to remember. It’s the number of flags we saw on this Memorial Day. And, under each, a Memorial Day story.

And so we watered the garden.

Please don’t ask me to write a history of violence against doctors and clinics who provide reproductive medical care to women.

If you are at all aware, if you have read a newspaper in the past 25 years, you know. You just know.

The Wichita Eagle has a full page of reaction to Dr. George Tiller’s murder on its front page. Last night, mourners turned out to hold a vigil for Dr. Tiller. As usual, those who like to dance on others’ graves also turned out, with their hateful signs. These signs were similar to the hateful twitter messages that ChangeAgent has so masterfully documented over at her blog.

When President Obama said that he wanted to meet in the middle on the abortion issue a few weeks ago, I wrote then that I felt as if he had just thrown women under the bus. There is no middle with anti-abortion extremists. They are not interested in meeting in the middle. They are only interested in one thing: eradicating all abortion, all access to abortion. In many cases, they want to eliminate access to certain forms of birth control, (some–all forms of birth control), and, if they can’t get what they want by legal means, they practice terrorism.

Thus, yesterday was inevitable.

The anti-abortion violence of the 1980’s and 1990’s, when clinics and OB-GYNs were slaughtered–some in their own homes, as Dr. Slepian was, were horrible times. They have left us now, with the experience of going to Planned Parenthood and having to pass through metal detectors and bullet proof glass. If you are going into a clinic where abortions are performed, you have to pass by people who feel it is their job to judge you, no matter why you might be going to the clinic.

These people have no compassion. You may be having to go in for a D&C because your fetus has died inside you–you’re still a babykiller in their eyes. You may be the victim of rape. Babykiller. You may simply be too young, or too poor, or not able to care for a child–you’re a babykiller.

Funny, but I don’t see those same people outside urologists’ offices screaming at men that getting a vasectomy constitutes being a sperm-killer or a potential baby killer.

I wish I could write something eloquent, something full of compassion for those who oppose abortion so violently and ask, “can’t we all get along?”

But I don’t have that in me today.

I am mourning Dr. Tiller. I am mourning the women who decided today that they are too frightened to take care of their medical needs. I am mourning the areas of the country that will lose access to adequate medical care for women. I am mourning the messages that are being sent out–once again–to women that their bodies don’t matter. The only thing that counts about a woman’s body is that she can produce babies. And if she wants to not produce babies, well, if we can’t stop you legally, we’ll close the clinics, kill the doctors, tighten the noose so that you will have to travel thousands of miles to find help.

I grieve. Please don’t ask me to be rational or make sense.

I grieve. And I’m angry.

I grieve, but I will not hurt someone in return.

I grieve, but you will not silence me.

I will grieve, and then I will do whatever I can to fight for reproductive rights.

I repeat the pledge I made a few weeks ago: I will purchase Plan B contraception for any woman who needs it.

To the hate-mongers on television who equate abortion with murder: you condoned this, you encourage those who are unhinged to carry out your dirty work. You should be held accountable. I will not hurt you with violence. But I will write to your advertisers, and I will encourage those who advertise with you, to withdraw their advertising or ask them why they support terrorist sympathizers.

For this is what this is. Terrorism. Plain and Simple. Not done by “foreigners.” But by “Americans.”

There is no excuse for it. None.

And we will fight you. Peacefully. But relentlessly. We will not go back to the days of coat hangers and illegal abortions. We will not sneak around to maintain sovereignty OVER OUR OWN BODIES.

We are here. We are not going away. And you will not frighten us.