You Do Not Speak for Me
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
The March
Yesterday, women marched on our nation in “solidarity,” wearing pussy and vagina hats and carrying crude signs. Hollywood elite showed up in force, giving rage-filled speeches, stoking the crowd into a frenzy like throwing fuel on a fire.
Ashley Judd recited a poem written by a teenage girl, “I’m a N-a-s-t-y woman,” she screamed into the crowd.
America Ferrera yelled into the crowd, “We march today for the moral core of the nation, against which our new president is waging a war. Our dignity, our character, our rights have all been under attack, and a platform of hate and division assumed power yesterday.”
What I saw yesterday was the exact opposite of dignity, character, or a show of morals. Crude signs dotted the landscape. “Pussy power,” “Rape culture,” “Pussies in Formation,” “Riot Girl,” “Girl Power,” Weak Men Fear,” “Keep your hands off my body,” “I didn’t come from your rib, you came from my vagina.” I could go on and on, but you get the picture in 3-D and worldwide.
However, the most disheartening visions were the children, both boys and girls dragged into this fray of mass hysteria. One woman said she was marching mainly for her two boys, “I want them to see girls in their classrooms as equals and potential leaders…I want them to know I stood up for women and it’s important for them to stand up for women as well.”
One woman brought her 13-year-old twin daughters, “I Feel Power,” and another girl, not old enough to know what she was marching for, spoke on camera about how men could not tell them what to do. It was a sad moment in our history.
The irony of the message was not lost on me. It was crude, offensive, bigoted, and hateful. It was bra burning on steroids and filled with division affecting all of us. Your theatrical hysterics hurt a nation, yesterday.
All The Roar
The roar of unsubstantiated charges included the threat of women’s rights being under attack. Roe vs. Wade[i] was as going to overturned, health care for women eliminated, rape culture would run rampant, voting rights overturned; and, if you believed the hype, women were going to be returned to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. As if, all the progress made by women were going to be swept away in an instance. Give me a break!
Roe vs. Wade was passed into law more than 40 years ago. Since its passage, many attempts to overturn the landmark case have failed, even with additional conservative Supreme Court appointments. In spite of the fact that, “About half of Americans (49%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong,[ii] while 15% think it is morally acceptable and 23% say it is not a moral issue.” Gallup Poll Graph.[iii] For all your hysteria, overturning the law is unlikely to happen.[iv]
Women have come a long way
From where I sit, women have come a long way. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely. To act, however, as if all the progress we’ve made is going to be wiped out because of an election is hysterical, fictitious, and divisive. Let’s look a few facts. Just ask the Pew Research Center.[v]
• “As the 114th Congress gets underway, a record number of women (104) will be serving in the House and Senate. Today women make up 19% of the Congress, about double the share from 20 years ago.”
• “In 2013, over half of managerial and professional occupations in the U.S. (52.2%) were held by women, up from 30.6% in 1968.”
• “As of 2013, about one-in-six board members of Fortune 500 companies (17%) were women, up from 10% in 1995.”
• “Since the 1990s, women have outnumbered men in both college enrollment and college.”
As for the newly elected President, Donald Trump, which you do freely accuse with plans to strip you of your “rights,” are not borne out by facts. He has for decades, employed more women than men in upper echelons of his real estate empire, and in many cases paid them more than men.”[vi]
He has either appointed or selected, to date, six women to either cabinet positions or high positions within his administration. They include Nikki Haley, former SC Governor, the Ambassador to the UN; Elaine Chao, for Transportation Secretary; Seema Verma, as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Betsy DeVos — Education Secretary; Linda McMahon — Small Business Administration; and, Kellyanne Conway as Counselor to the President.
So much for the President holding women back! Too bad, the facts don’t reflect your rhetoric. From where I sit, women have come a long way. Is there room for improvement? Absolutely, but, to act as if all the progress we’ve made is going to be wiped out because of an election is hysterical, fictitious, and divisive.
Marches have Consequences
Before you start patting yourselves on the back, let’s look at some of the destruction left in the wake of the “Women’s Movement,” most notably on the family unit.
- According to Pew,[i] there is no longer a dominant family in the United States. Marriage is at an all time low.[ii] In the light of the hate-filled rhetoric toward men, yesterday, I’m guessing that’s not going to be getting better anytime soon.
- “Fully four-in-ten births occur to women who are single or living with a non-marital partner.”
- “The share of children living in a two-parent household is at the lowest point in more than half a century: 69% are in this type of family arrangement today, compared with 73% in 2000 and 87% in 1960.”
- “In roughly three-in-ten of stay-at-home-mom families, either the father is not working, or the mother is single or cohabiting.”
- In addition, the Center for American Progress[iii] — “42% of mothers were the sole or primary family breadwinner last year. An additional 22.4% were co-breadwinners, meaning that they were responsible for between 25 to 49% of total family earnings.”
- With today’s, egg and sperm banks — women don’t need a man to have a child. In fact, the birth rate in the U.S. is steadily declining.[iv]
- In its 2014–2015 annual report, Planned Parenthood states its affiliates around the country did 323,999 abortion procedures in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2014, and that those affiliates received $553.7 million in “government health services grants and reimbursements” in the year that ended on June 30, 2015.
Maybe children aren’t on women’s agenda any longer. Congratulations on such “progress.”
Your “Solidarity”
Your “solidarity” weakened women yesterday. The very thing you condemned, you put on display for the entire world to see in all its vulgarity. You espoused “equality” yet, ostracize, condemn, and alienate those who disagree with you.[xi]
I am not less of a woman because I disagree with you. My life has not, now or ever, been hampered by being a woman. I am not a bigoted, racist, xenophobic, or a homophobic woman because I believe in different values or strong borders. As a woman, I consider the safety of my family of paramount importance.
I am not less because I am pro-life. I have seen up close, and personal the consequences of abortion and you did not sway anyone with your argument on abortion or the right “to choose” with your crude signs and verbiage.
I am a strong, well-educated woman. I took pride in my accomplishments and the example I was setting for my daughters. I raised my daughters to be strong and independent and hopefully, instilled in them the need for reasonable, careful consideration. Empowerment and strength comes from within. It cannot be forced or intimidated into reality.
Your march was not the face of democracy. The face of democracy was demonstrated on the 20th of January when our President was elected based on Constitutional principles. If you wanted so badly to have a different outcome, perhaps you should have voted.
You didn’t teach your daughters or sons respect. You normalized crude and degrading language, taught them how to be sore losers and how to throw a tantrum.
You and widened the gulf between men and women and put all men and your sons on notice. You replaced their loving images of mothers and sisters with snarling “pussy” images and rage-filled words about men. They will never look at you or their sisters in the same way, again. The words of contempt will forever ring in their ears. Good job mom!
You marched yesterday, but you did not display dignity, character, or leadership. You showed the world, your sons, daughters, and men, what a woman’s temper tantrum looks like in all its ugliness. For all the horror and outrage you expressed over vulgar words you filled the skies with your own. You did not create ”solidarity” yesterday. You weakened the fabric of decency and society. No, you are not the face of America, and you do not speak for me.
[i]. Roe vs. Wade — caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supremecourt/410/113.html
[ii]. http://www.pewforum.org/2013/08/15/abortion-viewed-in-moral-terms/
[iv]. https://www.reproductiverights.org/
[v]. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/01/14/women-and-leadership/
[vi]. http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/17/attorney-trump-companies-employ-more-female-execs-than-male-video/
[vii]. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/17/1-the-american-family-today/
[viii]. http://www.bgsu.edu/content/dam/BGSU/college-of-arts-and-sciences/NCFMR/documents/FP/FP-13-13.pdf
[ix].https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/reports/2016/09/13/143412/the-big-difference-between-women-and-mens-earnings-after-college/
[x].http://http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2015/01/28/u-s-birthrate-falls-again/#7dd813e83fdd
[xi]. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/op-ed/articles/2017-01-19/the-womens-march-on-washington-errs-in-excluding-pro-life-feminists
Children were never expected to interpret the trauma in a budgie’s past. 
It’s not easy, but it IS do-able.
Of course, present tense is an effective tool, when used very carefully. One of the first novelists to make regular use of it was the great John Updike; his Rabbit series, by purposefully eliminating all sense of foreshadowing, truly gives readers a sense that they are living a starkly real life alongside the protagonist. Furthermore, occasional use of present tense can stand out, from a novel largely written in past tense, as being either highly emotive to the narrator, or part of a tapestry of a life ‘then’ being narrated ‘now.’
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