Brain farts posted here

I am sick and tired of sitting on the sidelines and watching our rights disappear slowly, like we are being suffocated by a pillow in the intimacy of our own bed. We are being terrorized, but not so much by Arabs overseas who see their children or uncles murdered anonymously everyday. Women and “minorities” (funny how women, comprising roughly half of the population, are lumped into this category… how often have you heard this syllabic grouping?) are daily terrorized psychologically, economically, emotionally, and physically in what can be a subtle, sometimes overt, affront on our humanity. We are never fully equal, we are often separate, and we are divided against ourselves. Our society, whether we take an active or passively assenting part, campaigns to reduce blacks to violence, women to sex, Muslims to extremists, Latinos to poor immigrants, and children to being powerless, voiceless, and disrespected.

How is it not an absolute affront to women’s rights to revoke the right to abortion and reproductive health care in South Dakota and now Mississippi? And without even exceptions for rape or incest? Is it the accursed 1950s all over again? It really is taking kitsch too far… our mothers and grandmothers fought too hard to let it all slip away so easily. One president, two justices, almost two states and counting…

A new movement is in order, with complexity and multiplicity: passionate, heartfelt, personal, not didactic, not naïve, and not necessarily political. I am wondering more and more whether it is even possible to win when someone else makes the rules, as is certainly the case with politics. We need something larger and broader than politics: a cultural movement. Something to combat being apathetic, disenfranchised, or powerless. I do not know how to dream what this movement would look like, but I can dream of how it would feel and what it might accomplish through tolerance, acceptance, and truly embracing this country’s inherent diversity of race, sex, religion, economic status, and belief systems. In short, through love. What does love look like? Does it need a leader? If so, where is s/he? Is s/he here and we are deaf?

Is it materialism that stifles us now? Is it further definition and separation of the classes? Are we too content to have entertainment ease our sorrows and news boiled into a paragraph to lessen the shock? Is this democracy, when a society seems to consent to consent? What does radical mean? What separates us from the fervor of the sixties and seventies? How can we constructively compare and contrast the times, without nostalgia, and move on productively?

I am thinking, perhaps proposing, a gathering place called Feminist Artists’ Response. A general name to gather a multiplicity of creative people and their responses, to embrace creation, life, freedom, education, community, true democracy! Why let a government appropriate these precious words? Why let the proud word “Feminist!” be sullied by those always ready to call names like “man hater” or reduce the word to “angry”? As bell hooks has titled a book, feminism is for everybody! Let all work for the true cause of freedom, equality, sisterhood, joy, and love, thereby working to break the system of domination for all. At the base, sexism, racism, ageism, classism, and all forms of discrimination or oppression are built upon the same structure of power and domination. In reality it is impossible to work to free one group and not another; we are all bound in our human condition.

Shall this be a website? A publication? An exhibition or festival? Performance? All of the above? Entirely and always open to evolve as needed for those involved and according to current events and society? Just not another “political” organization – we have enough.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 17th, 2006 at 7:42 pm and is filed under Revolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.