Wear a Leather Jacket

 

When I was growing up a popular slogan was:  

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              If you’re not mad you’re not paying attention

 

You could find it on bumper stickers, buttons and T-shirts. Mine was on a button pinned to my green canvas ‘army’ bag I had all throughout junior and high school. It resonated with me because not only did it seem true, it felt true. I was glad I was mad because, to me, it meant I cared, that I was awake and was trying to do ‘something’.

 

My sister and I eagerly consumed messages of defiance, anti-oppression and conservation. Poring through Rolling Stone’s back pages looking for the ads for the Ladies’ Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society, and reading and re-reading Whole Earth Catalog issues as soon as they landed on the doorstep are some of the markers of my activist-influenced childhood.

 

We read Stone Soup, made our own newspapers and played bikes instead of Barbies. My sister very nearly succeeding in digging up, for a vegetable garden, the small yard of the rental where we lived until our Mom came home from work and put an abrupt end to that.

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My sister and I were members of Greenpeace, Sierra Club and the World Wildlife Fund, and made our own yogurt and sprouted beans in glass jars. I attended screenings of If You Love This Planet  (produced by the National Film Board of Canada—yay!), about a lecture Australian physician Dr Helen Caldicott delivers on the medical and societal consequences of nuclear war and the urgency for nuclear disarmament now.  

 

The singular event that cemented my activism was seeing The Dinner Party exhibition by feminist artist Judy Chicago at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979. I was gobsmacked by Chicago’s vulva plates arranged on a giant triangular table representing a symbolic history of ‘Western civilization’ women, both real and mythical. And I was stunned by, yes, Chicago’s rage at the (continuing) silence and erasure of women’s accomplishments in historical records.

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(And I was happy-surprised our Mom had taken us to see it. Her hippy-dippy was starting to flag by then.)

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But to call a woman angry is to belittle her…she is instead a ‘shrew’ or a ‘nag’ or ‘harsh’. Better more of that silence than listening to an uptight woman.  

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An angry man is a ‘force to be reckoned with’ or someone who took on something and won. He is admired.

 

My childhood activism turned into adulthood activism and some things got better in the world and much didn’t. The neoliberal agenda disregards and erodes the freedoms and rights our societies collectively have managed to carve out: immigration, education, healthcare, labour reform, same sex marriage. But we are still not there.

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Women’s human rights remain deplorable.

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Women’s organizations are cash-starved.

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Women are still not equal participants in government or the economy.

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So, I am angry. I’ve been angry for a long time now. And I suspect I will continue to be angry for longer still. I’m OK with that. When equal rights and dignity for all has been achieved around the globe, then I can stop being angry. Not a minute before then. We have much to do and achieve. The United States has just elected and sworn in to its presidential office a hate-mongering fascist and sexual predator.    

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One media report on the Women’s Marches around the world said they were ‘surprisingly’ nonviolent and incident-free, which made me burst out laughing. No shit, Sherlock. This is what happens when women come together, whether it’s three of us, or 30 of us, or three hundred thousand of us. We don’t—as a rule—throw punches or bombs, rape, smash and loot. We come together to make and take action and have our voices heard above the cacophony of fear, hate and lies.

 

I have been (re)thinking many things since the US election campaign and its appalling results, and (re)thinking many things during the Inauguration and Women’s Marches.

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One. I am more than ever committed to women’s rights. Human rights are a woman’s right. Women's rights are human rights.*

 

Two. Gender-based violence is a human rights violation. I am committed to eradicating gender-based violence in all forms.

 

Three. Sexual and reproductive health rights are at the heart of gender equality.

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Four. I will continue to exercise my right not to remain silent in the face of injustice.

 

And Five. My righteous rage is not for show or effect. It expresses and is the emanation of my unwavering solidarity with women around the world who face violence and discrimination, and the women around the world who work towards the complete eradication of violence and discrimination.

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My anger is my secret weapon. It ensures that I will not slip into complacency thinking that some problems are just ‘too big’ for one person to solve.

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Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), an American writer and war correspondent, said:

 

“The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.”

 

What I do might be minor, but it's not useless because I also continue to keep going forward with hope. Hope is uncertain, but in that uncertainty is the room, the space to act, says author Rebecca Solnit. And this agency, this action means you just might be able to change the outcomes. The three of you, the 30 of you, or the three hundred thousand of you.

 

Here's some artwork from Austin Kleon, a 'blackout poem' I bought a few years ago. It hangs by my bathroom mirror, a daily reminder of why silence is not an option.

 

 

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use profanity

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wear a leather jacket

                        and

                                   

Shades

 

            put out

 

                                    disrespect

 

                                                            liars

           

           

keep

 

                                                            hope

 

 

                        release

 

                                    the

                                               

                                                balloons

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​*Note: Sisters, abolitionists and feminists Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld wrote women’s rights were human rights in the late 1830s. Hillary Rodham Clinton used the phrase in a 1995 speech given at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

 

Photo: Women's March / Instagram @millioneiress

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