I totally understand the physicist’s fascination with the
“unifying theory.” Sometimes we just want things to make sense, want there to
be a reason for the way things are. Sometimes I cook up a theory that’s
perfectly logical to me, but trying it out on other people is a bit risky. Just
explaining it is hard. Well, I told my daughter today that being nervous about
something was no reason not to do it, so here goes.
So what about this war on women anyway? I grew up in the
70’s and 80’s, a time when women made great progress in this country, a time
when rock & roll was king, STD’s could be cured with a shot, and my best
buddy’s mom worked at the local Planned Parenthood. We had sex education in
schools AND at church. There was no such thing as a purity ball. Birth control
and abortion were non-issues. I went to parties and dances and school trips
without fear of being raped. When I started dating, my grandmother interrogated
me to ensure that I was on the pill. I joined the army and never suffered from
assault or even harassment from my fellow soldiers. The one guy who harassed a
woman in our Reserves unit got unceremoniously kicked out of the military. And
when our gubernatorial candidate made a casual joke about rape, he was shredded
at the polls and lost to a fiery gray-haired Democratic woman.
So, what the hell happened? Why, at a time when the clear
majority of Americans support free birth control, legal access to safe abortions,
and equal rights for women, are so many fundamentalists crawling out of the
woods to wage an unprecedented war on our bodies and our rights? Why is any
media time devoted to rape apologists, deniers of domestic abuse, and people
who actually say with a straight face that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote?
Why is the "leadership" of my own state mandating invasive trans-vaginal
ultrasounds for women who seek abortion, and wasting my tax dollars in the
attempt to close the remaining abortion clinics in the state?
The thought came to
me as I was sitting in traffic in Austin. I was meditating sadly on my own
inability, as a consultant who is constantly traveling to meetings, to divorce
my car, and the general state of the environment, when the connection suggested
itself. Here we are, in the midst of a catastrophic drought in central Texas.
Wildfires have decimated our forests. Ranchers are selling off their cattle and
their land. Houses in the hill country sit empty because their community water
supply has dried up. Dead trees
punctuate the hillsides, gray skeletons among the springtime screen of baby
leaves. There is a sprinkle of wildflowers on the verges that should be
blankets of blue and red. And what are we doing about this? Practically nothing,
actually.
In general, I blame fear for the evils of the world. It’s an
annoying habit of mine, to try to make sense of everything, and to look for
root causes everywhere. Why does that family member make irrational and
self-destructive decisions? Why does that colleague lash out at team members in
meetings? Why did my cousin’s wife's sister get
nasty in a debate about prayer in school and unfriend me on Facebook? Why? It
usually seems to come down to fear. Yeah, okay, I’m not fearless. Hell, I get
scared about all kinds of stupid things. Skiing moguls. Dancing in public. Job
interviews. But I’ve been figuring out how to get past it and live with it
since I was a little girl.
I’ll tell you what I’m really scared of. I’m terrified of
global warming. I’m frightened for my children and their futures. I look back
on my own childhood and the blissful innocence and ignorance I had, we all had,
about our world, and sometimes I want so badly to wish myself back to that
place. I wish I could go back to an Austin without traffic jams, a Texas that
had open country between the cities, a Dallas with endless flocks of birds and
the Milky Way in the sky at night. I can wish with all my might for this, but
there is no going back, and forward looks pretty horrifying. Desertification,
mass extinctions, coastal flooding, famine, economic and political collapse.
I’m a natural optimist, but even the best-case scenarios are awful to
contemplate.
The climate-change deniers might be able to fool a few
people for a little while, but I don’t think they’re fooling themselves. I
think this ridiculous war on women’s rights is a desperate attempt by people
of little courage and less honesty to attempt to control something, anything,
in this big scary modern mess of a world we’ve created. Women’s bodies are
intimately connected to the rhythms of the earth, to life and death and the
warm mucky wormy soil. Our destruction of the planet and systemic violence
against women are two symptoms of the same disease. These fundamentalists and
their pet politicians remind me of toddlers screaming at and kicking the mother
who said ‘no’ to that toy at the store. Just as our mothers controlled our
lives and choices when we were young, Mother Nature rules us all. Her laws are
immutable; no matter how much we rail against her authority we hold no sway
over her decisions. Her body gives birth to us, nurtures and holds and inspires
us, and eventually consumes us when our span of years is complete. For
centuries, our societies and religions revered and deified the Mother, but as
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spread across the globe, the Goddess was demonized
and driven underground. The lives and bodies of women as well as the earth
itself were reduced to resources entrusted to man by a male God. This myth of
human domination and control of nature is so interwoven into our social
structures, our economies, our language, and our lives that it is almost
impossible to travel to a different mental space and imagine a different
philosophy.
The current attempt to legislate and codify sexual activity,
family life, and child-bearing is the terrified midnight screaming of men and
women who are trying to hide from the catastrophe of a failing civilization.
The news today of legislators in North Carolina attempting to create an
official state religion is just one more foolish attempt to build a wall around
the reality we choose instead of facing the reality that is. There is only one
word for this: insanity.
What is the cure for this madness? People of courage must
be willing to stand unflinchingly in front of the gates of the hell we have
created. We must open our doors and invite terror and death and despair to the
table. We must play the cards that we hold because there is no ace up our
sleeves, and we all know it. Shall I deal you in?
