Someone asked me the other day if I was a feminist. My response was that the term felt restrictive, but my belief was that every person should be judged on their merits, not on what’s between their legs or where they like to stick it (or have stuck in it). I still stand by that comment, despite the laughter of most of the world. I also reject the idea that every thing worth understanding must fit into a neat little box with an easy-to-read label.
Most people these days hear statements like that and they laugh at the declarative utterance of common sense. Some giggle also because it should go without saying that a person’s ability to change the world has to begin with understanding the world as it truly is… and yet we constantly make decisions as human beings based on the subconscious presumptions we’ve been programmed to reference during our judgmental processes.
As a young Evangelical Christian, I was conditioned to accept allusions to the vicarious nature of a woman’s existence. Through her husband she would affect the physical world, through her children she would affect the future, through her adherence to God’s law she would affect the souls of those around her. She is a creature with the built-in reflex to nest and nurture, to obey laws and to seek protection from the male influences in her life. Rare indeed were the open-faced attacks on the feminine element in my church family, but even those occasionally had their floor. A woman who disrespects her husband disrespects God, her personal desires were temptations planted by the devil to lead her astray and make her the kind of woman who could not derive joy from bearing children and keeping the house. She was either selfless or sinful, but her struggle was often outlined in very specific terms as being quite different from that of a man. Somehow his trials and tribulations managed to remain various and sundry, and only occasionally found themselves under the microscope of the congregation.
Strangely enough, it was not this sort of marginalization that led me to leave the structure of Sunday morning church for a spiritual path of my own design. It was not until after I had already begun my studies into alternate searches for divine truth that I realized how strongly ingrained those subtle assumptions had become. Years later, in fact, I very gradually began the process of recognizing and removing those beliefs that had not come from my experiences of the world or the spiritual place that guides me through intuition. I still toil along that road today; still finding the misplaced ideas and stereotypes that don’t belong and still struggling to work out a genuine understanding and response that I can stand by. It is the only way, in my opinion, to live with integrity.
We must, as a culture, be willing to do this with our political awareness on a regular basis. The world is constantly changing along with the people and situations in it. Just as you or I are not the people we were ten or fifteen years ago, neither are the communities we live in or the systems that keep order within them the same. As the world around you changes, can you honestly say that you have made it your goal to understand what you can, to explore what is affecting you in the present and further look into what might affect you in the future?
Looking backward, the past twenty years seem to have been the glory days for a certain segment of our society, and while they’ve been building up to the horrifying crescendo we are currently experiencing -who has held the curtain shut? The world has become so much bigger, swollen with the flow of information in a constant ever-changing stream that turns certain stories into snow in the background while the hands of mainstream corporate news outlets plow other stories straight into public consciousness. We see whatever they get paid millions of dollars to show us. Presidential candidates, product retailers and media moguls alike have self-interest and profit at the top of their priority lists, and yet we assume that we know what’s going on because we’ve taken a few minutes to check the headlines.
Local news and public broadcasting are under attack, education is faltering further every year and the working class hasn’t been this politically divided since the civil war. The conglomerates have each presented a variety of scapegoats to hide behind and while we spiral downward into poverty and crime, we bang away at each other instead of the entities holding the knives to our throats. We suffer in such varying degrees that they have led each strata of socio-economic status to find comfort in looking to the ones above and striving to get there, and to blame it’s struggles on the one below for being too heavy a burden tugging at our elbow.
Ambition has taken our society to heights that few could have imagined -and yet it has now turned us into a nation of bad Samaritans who would sooner cross the road to avoid a drowning man than get our clothes wet saving a life. We are led to believe that a drowning man will pull us down with him, and some of us believe it so strongly that we’d rather walk away than risk the gamble. Certain death or suffering is more acceptable than the possibility of social discomfort -as long as it’s someone else’s death or suffering.
We must be the change we want to see in the world; but we must also be willing to choose the right thing, no matter how small, and stick by that choice regardless of convenience. Occupy Wall Street may be confusing to many Americans while the concept of the 99% seems implausible in it’s inclusiveness -but this movement has already begun to accomplish the one thing that matters most to our future as a nation.
We are all cracking open the front doors of our minds, peeking out around the door frame, and wondering who it is that rang the bell. We are starting to pay attention to the things that have been wrapped in velvet curtains for far too long. We are beginning to wake up.
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