Monday, May 23, 2016

Being a Woman in the Time of Hillary-Haters



I’ve never been as involved in politics as I am this year, so I was unaware and unprepared for the pain that would come my way. I had a vague sense that Republicans hated Hillary Rodham Clinton, but I had no idea that so many of my supposedly left-leaning friends did.

I feel nostalgic for the assumption that Hillary’s successful campaign would lead to a mood of celebration. I remember the first time that I was put in my place about my support. I was having the best Women’s History Month ever. I’d helped the librarians at work in their effort to diversify the children’s biography section. I’d read Spinster and All the Single Ladies and gained a whole new appreciation for the contributions of non-traditional womanhood to civic life. I was newly embracing my own womanhood and delighted that we had made so much progress, hopeful that so much more could be made. I posted an exuberant status about the possibility of my nieces coming of age under a female presidency and my hope that I’d get to be there for inauguration.

I’m embarrassed to say how jarred I was by the “angry face” reaction I received from a friend. Having vowed to eliminate as much passive-aggressiveness from my life as possible, I wrote to the sender of the angry face, a lovely woman who used to be my yoga instructor, and asked her in the gentlest and kindest possible way what was the matter. The kindness was not reciprocated, and, as happened over and over in the coming months, I unfriended her for being sexist and mean.

It took no effort to learn the things about Hillary Rodham Clinton that made people mad. They were served up to me on a near-constant basis. And there are plenty of valid reasons, but to me those reasons felt drowned out in a sea of vague “distrust” and straight up misogyny. Typing that word even feels like a clichĂ© at this point, but I’ll stop typing it when it stops happening.

In a time that should have felt at least partly celebratory, my friend feed felt like an assault, a constant, vicious reminder that most people I know, whether they realized it or not, would prefer that women stay in their place. My Hillary-supporting friends reported that they felt bullied and afraid to speak out about their choice. I was talked down to, called a vagina voter, told that “everything I say is a lie.” I felt guilty every time I brought up politics, because I was making things “not nice.” I apologized to Bernie supporters, I’m not sure why, except that one of the prevailing emotions of joining this fight has been shame. That’s fucked up.

Even as pitching in on the PA primary campaign buoyed my spirits, I got angrier and more scared. I hate knowing that people out there are so disturbed by the thought of a woman with power that they would call me names, bully my friends, scream at disabled people, tear up a little girl’s sign.

Even if she is a poetic invention of Twitter, I think a lot about that little girl whose sign got destroyed by anti-Hillary protestors in Los Angeles. I think a lot about what really got taken away from her that day. The message she was given was one we all get, all the time, one so ingrained in our culture that it is invisible to many and also beloved by traditionalists: If we have any power at all, if we are safe right here in this moment, it’s only because they are letting us. The message is that we will only be rewarded by society if we fit the male ideal of what we should be: quiet, timid, meek, servile. Engagement, ambition, experience, tenacity, all of these things in a woman are angering to a certain segment of the population, and that certain segment has been in charge for, well, ever, which is far too long.

Once primaries have run their course, we’ll turn to face the real enemies: Trump and his army of bigots. Three days a week when I do my tutoring, the family has the news on, and every single time, it is Trump Theater. I hear the newspeople slavering for Trump’s approval even as he fear-mongers against Muslims and Mexicans, even as his people threaten the president’s life, and even as he mounts the most disgusting and aggressive war against women. (Trump is, in fact, an accused rapist. Google it.) He screams to rabidly angry crowds of white men that they should no longer be afraid of women and the implication is, I think, that they will take us by force. When I hear these things, I am at work, in a house full of man who are on my side, so I feel safe, but it’s honestly hard to keep walking around in the world. It’s as if the dark lens I have as a sexual assault survivor has come to life and there’s nowhere to escape.

As it became apparent who the nominees would likely be, I saw a new kind of meme, one that made me even more helpless with rage than the “vague distrust” themed ones: people I know and liked were saying they were “Straight Outta Options” because they saw Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton to be the same. A woman whose decades of real and thorough public service includes some drastic missteps was being equated with someone who ACCEPTED THE ENDORSEMENT OF THE KKK. This is how little some of my now-former friends think of my gender and in many cases, their own. It’s unforgivable.

It’s physically exhausting to be this angry all the time, this on alert. It feels like not only are my values under attack, but my body is too. It hurts very much to know how many people want to stuff us back in time, and it hurts even more to know that people I once liked won’t stand up for any of the groups Trump is targeting because they think they are somehow above the political process.
I know we’ll win. I know I’ll be at that inauguration next year sobbing my face off with my best friend. I know I’ll call and knock on doors and that I’ll be a better, healthier, safer woman for it. But I just wanted to take a moment to say this is scary, it hurts, and I want my body back.



Monday, May 2, 2016

The Day I Met Hillary Clinton



I’m pretty sure it was a thank-you note that did it. After our last round of canvassing the Saturday before the Pennsylvania primary, I had a melancholy end-of-camp feeling knowing that I might never see some of those amazing campaign ladies (and guys) again, so I sent a thank-you note over to my volunteer coordinator thanking her for the experience and letting her know I’d never felt this empowered to participate before. When she texted to thank me back, she asked for my information so that the Secret Service could screen me for Secretary Clinton’s photo line the next night at City Hall.

It was a surreal feeling to be watching Friends and playing weekend Candy Crush while being checked by the Secret Service. That’s April 2016 was, a quick swirl of the everyday and the profound, one minute shaking hands with a former U. S. President or the President of Planned Parenthood and the next being back to my flower pictures. I’d already pushed myself to the edges of my limited extroversion and was longing to be back to my comforting routine, but there was no way that I could pass up this chance.

When I got the text that I’d been approved, I asked if I was still needed for my volunteer duties, but the coordinator said “No need, just get your picture and have fun.” An email came with instructions for the VIP entrance and I switched around my tutoring schedule so I could go. I was NERVOUS the next day, so until it was time to (way too early) leave for the train I took the edge off by applying to summer jobs and cleaning out the downstairs closet.

Since the last time I took the train, Philly graffiti artists seem to have had an explosion, and I was blown away by the work I saw the whole way down. I vowed to stop being car girl all the time and take the train more, there’s just no excuse to miss that much art. As I crossed in front of City Hall, I remembered playing Scrabble on the steps on a day visit to the Occupy camp. I got to the entrance before some of the local police even knew what to expect, and I felt mortified to refer to myself as a VIP, which doesn’t feel very democratic. The entrance was where Market Street runs into City Hall, so the traffic and the tension of the moment were overstimulating. I practiced my deep breathing and ate a foil-wrapped sandwich for early supper, knowing food wouldn’t be allowed in the event.

Soon I was joined by a fellow early-bird, a nice lesbian of about my age or a little older, whom I recognized as one of Amy’s fellow data-entry volunteers. We bonded over our love of earliness and chatted about our pets and lives. She’d retired early from public service, listing disrespect from male supervisors as one of the reasons. “I can’t wait ‘til it’s thirty years from now,” she said, in terms of gender progress.  Next we were joined by a handsome young Iranian man who told us he’d been canvassing around Temple University, to little success. He expressed amazement that he’d seen young people at last week’s Hillary event, since we were by now conditioned not to expect them.

The VIP table was set up and when they found my name, I couldn’t help exclaiming “It’s real!” As the put on my bright green bracelet, I marveled aloud that this was probably the only time I would ever be considered a VIP, and I guess that sounded sad because a tall friendly guy in a “YAAAAAS” shirt said “Aw.”

We were led into a nice quiet room that looked like it might usually be used for jury selection—semi-comfortable chairs, small libraries of paperbacks, a water cooler that would definitely help me with my not-fainting goal.

The handsome college guy settled in to study for his finals and I chithatted with a striking woman in a grey suit who had a gorgeous tree of life tattoo on her leg, echoing the cherry blossoms out on the courtyard. This was not her first time in a VIP section. She’d been a super-volunteer on President Obama’s campaign and she said after she’d met him, meeting BeyoncĂ© and Jay-Z seemed like no big deal. She told me about an all-nighter that she and her fellow volunteers had pulled setting up a rally on Broad Street, a night during which she’d had to decide between an hour of sleep or a shower before the event. It occurs to me now that I should have thanked her for healthcare and marriage equality.

A purple-shirted group of SIEU members for New York City joined us. A shy man with a West Indies accent showed me his Hillary selfies from an event a few nights before on his cracked-screen phone. Everyone was worried about their batteries and I wished I’d brought a charged to lend.

When it came time to line up for the photos, getting there early had no effect at all on our place in line. There were hundreds of people with us by then and I wondered how in the world every person would get a picture, but we were assured curtly by staffers that we all would. I told my early-bird pal it was her job to make sure I didn’t faint, and I assured her I was doing my deep breathing. When Madam Secretary entered the room in her perfect blue jacket, I fully squealed, and was not the only one.

In an odd coincidence, the president of the teachers’ union was a few people ahead of me in line, accompanied by my own former union rep whose inability to see me as a person convinced me that I was the only one who could protect myself from the corrupt and scary schools. It was a harsh but satisfying moment when the union rep looked back as if she couldn’t quite place me and I met her gaze with an unbreakable glare. Who knows if she remembered me, but I’d survived.  This year of healing work and this campaign had given me a new sense of what a woman is, of who I can be, of just how much power I really have as long as I have the courage to take it.

When I was ten people away from Hillary, staffers took my bag. When I was three people away, a man in a suit said “Take three steps forward, please.” And then, I was with Hillary, shaking her hand and saying “Thank you so much for all you’ve done” with all my heart and soul and guts. I looked into her eyes and saw the same exhaustion I’d seen in Bill’s a few weeks earlier. How is she doing this? How is she getting through?” “We’re gonna do this together,” she said for probably the thousandth time that day, but it still meant something. She expertly moved me into the picture, I smiled with my face next to hers and it was taken. I thanked her again, picked up my bag, and walked out into the breezy passageway, stunned.

Someone guided me to the volunteer section on the bleachers, and a fellow volunteer gave me his mini American flag. I stuck it in my hair like I’d done with my rainbow flag on the first Equality Day. This has been both my loneliest and my least-lonely year.

A few weeks before, some of my friends had felt intimidated into not posting pro-Hillary statuses (and not for nothing, as I’ve lost or unfriended about 80 acquaintances in the past month) but here was real life again, being so safe and all-kinds-of-integrated and hopeful. The person who introduced the mayor and Secretary Clinton was head of a local GLBT organization and would not have looked out of place in a Tegan and Sara video. This was a different kind of Equality Day. This was a happy and peaceful crowd cheering for equal pay and reproductive rights and, as the City Hall bells coincidently but solemnly chimed, for gun control. Away from the sarcastic remove of the internet, here was a place where it was free to be hopeful and positive and progressive and sincere.


It’s a long time ‘til November and I know there are so many people who stopped listening to me a long time ago, but if I could convince one more person of one more thing, it’s this: You’re needed. You’re wanted. Though loud, bullying voices may convince you that you don’t have a right to participate, you do. As we move toward the general election, thoughtful people will have the chance to stand on the side of good and protect those who need it most. If you’re reading this, you’re probably coming from some place of privilege, and this is a good time to use that privilege to stand up for the people who would be hurt most by a Trump presidency. Plus, it’s really fun.

Yay April Checkmarks, Sooothing May Goals