Dependable Spirals, Uncertain Clouds

The following is a short essay written for performance that I shared with the International Women Artists’ Salon in New York City in August and wrote in a hurried day and a half on the topic of cross-generational engagement.

My cousin’s daughters are 6 and 8. They are building robots, learning Mandarin, and their bright red hair flies around when they learn to skateboard with their dad out back. They are smart and fearless and will grow up with so many tools that I didn’t have. Sisters exploring like I did with mine, but in a quickly changing and uncertain world. They live on a fault line that has a thirty percent chance of consuming their city within their lifetimes if the sea doesn’t rise to swallow it first.

When I think of women younger than me, I also think of Viola. When we met, she was 4 and precocious. The Jewish daughter of activists who work to end the Israeli occupation. She traveled with a group of us to the West Bank and between writing cheers about vegetables and proposing peace agreements, she played with all of the kids we met. Children who haven’t learned yet why their parents are so tense, so afraid, but who hear the talk and understand more than we think they do. As we walked past the wall in Bil’in, kicking spent teargas canisters, a young Israeli soldier peeked his head over the wall and Viola, from the vantage point of her dad’s shoulders called out, “How old are you?”

“20!” he yelled back.

And in a sudden shift in tone, she yelled back, “Then you’re old enough to tear down this wall!”. Despite her ferocity, her voice doesn’t carry well yet in its pitch and heft.

“What?” the young man replied.

This time, both fists raised, he heard her loud and clear. “We’re going to tear down this wall!”.

He retreated silently back under the wall.

With that kind of confidence, how can she go wrong?

At an open mic night just after my 25th birthday, a young woman of about sixteen walked to the stage with her guitar. It was clear she’d been playing for years, and it’s likely that she learned from Youtube, but performing seemed a new pursuit for her. She played a Fleetwood Mac cover in her emerging voice and then an original. Shaking slightly in the epic discomfort that is adolescence, she described the premise of her song. In love with her friend who doesn’t like her “that way”, she wrote it trying to look on the bright side of at least having friendship with this boy. I could feel again that stomach dropping, insecure wondering feeling and wanted to hug her. But then, I thought, how long it had been since I felt anything like that for myself. Years, for the first time. And then it hit me. I never have to be a teenager again. I whispered my epiphany to my date, a magical woman ten years my senior, “I never have to be a teenager again!” She twinkled and whispered back, “It just gets better!”. The same woman has vowed to become a crone, and a proud crone. Which brings me to…

The Fighting Crones. The women who didn’t pipe down, get weighed down by the world into “enough”, into acceptance or complacency or satisfaction with the world as it is. They aged, wrinkled, endured all manner of chaos and pain and yet refused to fade into the obscurity Hollywood has recommended for women over, say, 37. They are a spectacle–every ounce as feminine and vital and captivating as Kim Kardashian. One of their best qualities? They don’t give a fuck, in the best sense possible, and I love them for it. I think of Dorli Rainey, who at 84 took part in Occupy Seattle on one of those nights (and she’s seen so many of those nights by now and they all have) when the cops decided to get nasty. I cried when I first saw the photo.

She’s looking up, directly into the camera, eyes bright red from the pepper spray that still drips from her face in a white sludge and though she’s being supported on both sides by fellow marchers by the arms, her face hasn’t given up.

Her face says, “We know who you are. You pepper sprayed a little old lady. You’re a coward and you’re in trouble”. Her face says Rosa Parks–back and forth in a “no I won’t move” in the bus seat. It says Vandana Shiva battling Monsanto and saving seeds, a fitting task for revolutionary women, in India. It says Zapatista grandmother, First Nations pipeline resister, and all the women elders I work with who stood up against Vietnam, against the CIA sneaking and stomping about in Central America, against Bush in the Middle East–and twice at that!—, against Obama’s drones, and who are still standing. Their feet are sore but like Dorli they still have their combat boots ready. If you’re polite, some of them will even bake you a pie.

Somewhere in between, the women in my generation are bringing their ruckus to the centers of power—masked and wild performing punk protest in the cathedrals of Russia, topless and painted throughout Europe and beyond fighting the patriarchy as FEMEN, dressed in red and carrying sticks to bring street justice or at least a threat to rapists and abusers otherwise unpunished in India, smashing cop cars at the G20 in Toronto, existing and becoming educated and speaking out while undocumented as immigrants in the U.S. under threat of deportation, blockading equipment that would continue to accelerate planetary destruction, and taking over microphones from presidential candidates to spread messages that need to be heard. And those direct actions are being heard and rippling out.

Too often, we are scolded for being too brash, for wanting too much, too soon. It’s suggested that maybe we’re too young to understand how these things work.

When they say, “We’ve always done it this way.”

“You just don’t understand how much better you have it now.”

What I hear is, “someday you’ll grow out of your wild notions.”

At times, this conclusion is leveled with relative kindness and it’s easier to engage me. But if you’re an old white guy–particularly an academic–and you present your assessments with a silent (but we feel it) pat on top of the head and a patronizing smirk, all you’re going to do is enrage me.

Because while I respect the wisdom that comes over time and cherish my connections with older people (really! some of my best friends are old people!), when the respect doesn’t flow both ways, I’m out.

Some things don’t change. Youth rebel and worry their parents in a loop stretching back and forward through time. But the world around those dependable spirals does change.

By at least 1 and potentially 2 degrees celsius already, it’s changed for the hotter. As I write this, my city is surrounded by an orange haze of smoke from wildfires and dust blowing off the dry farms. Climate refugees, mostly Californian, are moving north and off the coasts to where we are, not realizing that it’s a center of drought too. To implore us to take it slow or accept half measures, thirty year goals for the U.S. and China that don’t cut right down to the philosophy of grow, extract, dominate indefinitely is to force acceptance of a possible 10 further degrees increase. We are observing the storms, changes of season, and unpredictability of one degree now. 3-4 is the most we know of in the geologically observable past and the last one took out nearly all large vertebrates. We would likely not live to see 10. So I’d ask those so eager to dismiss the demands to change everything, did you have to consider these possibilities when you made the decision to have children? Because we have. And for many of us, it’s forced us to consider other possibilities. Wild, imaginative, and bold ones that may be needed as the uncertain clouds roll in.

We see that despite the work of the civil rights movement, more black individuals are under state corrective control than were enslaved in 1860 and our culture is so lost that we actually need to say–and say over and over in every forum until it finally sinks in–that black lives matter.

And we see that despite the work of the first and second waves of feminist liberation, women are underpaid, disrespected, sexually harassed on the street and assaulted at school and in the military. The bodily autonomy that was fought for is under constant threat and our value always up for debate.

And we see that despite the anti-war movement that mobilized so many in the heart of the growing empire fifty years ago little evidence that our wars of abstraction and imbalance will ever end.

And how do we begin to change everything? To set things right and into balance?

My fierce, sensitive, poet sister had said a few months ago when she came to New York for the first time that all she cared about seeing was Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party”. I went this week to see it too and I think of it now as we tumble forward into pivotal history. Maybe it’s always seemed like the end of the world. But walking around that best-laid table, from the primordial goddesses to the Amazons, Greek women playwrights and philosophers, past plagues and wars and across continents; Sojourner Truth, Virginia Woolf, consider whose plates have been set since. Those that are yet to be lovingly forged, painted, and carried to the table. Consider also who will live on to bear witness?

One day, sooner than I expect, I’ll become a crone. I’d like to think a fighting one or maybe, just maybe, we’ll be celebrating a last-minute pivot–agile as Serena–that turned us away from extinction. I hope to take young women then around that table of history. Say not, “This is where it ends. You have enough now; be thankful.” But say, “We’ve built you this foundation. Keep building. We trust you. We love you. We need you. Keep building.”