Choices, part I

“Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.”
--Alice Paul

This election season, still rife with the stench of McCain's scurrilous choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate, has stirred up a lot of things for me. Shock. Frustration. Rage. Fear. Sadness. Confusion. Gratitude.

Initially, McCain’s choice sent me into a bit of shock. His insistence that in choosing Palin he was keeping the country’s best interests in mind threw us all for a loop. His declaration that she was a “partner and a soul-mate” after meeting her only once before selecting her as his running mate was equally as repelling and mystifying. Maybe it's the maverick thing. And it’s been especially frustrating to watch so much of the press, the American public and even Palin herself glorify her insufferable mediocrity into something better than it is, something even holy, and somehow suitable for the vice presidency, or, gasp, the presidency, should John McCain be elected and fall prey to the 3-1 odds of dying or being ousted for less noble reasons while in office. Do we really want a self-proclaimed “Joe six-pack” in the second highest office in the country? Is that good enough? Perhaps it is; perhaps George Bush has dumbed the office of presidency down so much that we would actually believe that Palin, extraordinary only in her ordinariness, would be good for the country.

Jon Stewart hit it on the nose when he likened the Palin-crazed press to a bunch of six year olds playing in a soccer game: “...nobody has a position, it's just, "Where's the ball? Where's the ball? Sarah Palin has the ball!"

There has been much about Palin’s reception into this presidential election arena that has angered me to the point of turning blue: the way those frighteningly idiotic conservative pundits have shimmied up to her, cast a glow about all her shortcomings (and there are many), and made her their poster girl for everything that is right in this world; the way she's been put on a pedestal, illuminating her supposed “family” values in a halo of godliness, and allowing her utter lack of experience and dearth of qualifications to fade into the background; the way she herself and many people have positioned and embraced her as a feminist, as someone who somehow represents women and all that we have worked for, while at the same time working underhandedly to destroy the very progress she lauds in speech after speech; the way this has pitted women against women, made many forget where we’ve been, and what really matters. If I hear Palin talk about how she is responsible for cracking the damn glass ceiling one more time, I’m going to hitch a ride to the closest McCain/Palin rally and SCREAM.

It wasn’t long before fear sunk in, the fear over the possibility that McCain just might get elected, because let’s face it, stranger, more ridiculous and surreal things have happened; fear that we could slide back into a time when women didn’t have a true voice or anything resembling equal rights, when government declared that we were not fit to choose for ourselves what was best for us, when access to family planning, comprehensive sex education, birth control, and safe, legal abortions was threatened and thwarted by Roe v. Wade up-enders, pro-life zealots, and others who insisted that they knew what was best for our bodies. It is daunting to think of how important, how pivotal this election is.

To listen to Palin speak, you’d think she’d been blinded by her ambition to the extent that the issues that really matter to women, the real family values--health care for all, a renewed commitment to education, laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, protection and conservation of environment, preservation of abortion rights, and access to family planning—have fallen on deaf ears.

Palin's impressive ability to dodge questions reminds me of my pathetic showing in Biology 101 at Williams as a freshman; no matter how hard I studied, I simply could not get my head around it. When I took the tests, if I was asked something that I didn't know, I had to resort to responding with anything that I could remember from what I had studied, regardless of whether or not it had anything at all to do with what had been asked. Of course, Biology 101 had been designed to weed out the pre-meds; I had no interest in going the pre-med route, I had simply been ill-advised, and so found myself in a class that I was ill-equipped to handle. I learned my lesson, and from then on, took courses better suited to my strengths as an English major. The trouble is, Sarah Palin is not content to bow out, admit that she is out of her league, and switch courses. She's going to try to wing it. She has far too much ambition to pretend she is anything but absolutely prepared to take on this job--and try to squeeze as much power and influence out of it as well.

It always makes me sad when things spin out of control like this--the overblown media frenzy, the distortions of the candidate's records, the sudden posturing that the candidates assume that makes them seem unreal, out of touch, and overwhelmed by their own egos. It shouldn't surpise me, then, that this election season, presidential politics has hit a new low. With all the lies, mud-slinging, hypocrisy, and downright nastiness whipping through both camps like a cyclone, it’ll be a wonder if the issues ever get talked about again. I found the way the McPain campaign vilified and diminished Obama’s years of community work and service, turned his record inside and out, scandalized his middle name, and made him into some sort of shadowy, untrustworthy figure to be particularly offensive, and decidedly un-Christian like, and I say that only because with all the fiery talk about God and Christianity simmering at the heart of the Republican call to arms, it strikes me as incredibly hypocritical. Isn’t there at the core of every religion the call to be a better person? To better your community? Where, I wonder, is that in all the talk of supposed Christian values? There’s something about the evocation of God when talking war (“a task from God”) and abortion rights that evokes the creepiest, most chilling aspects of the Dark Ages. And I certainly don't have anything against the average Joe, but I do believe that Palin's Joe six-pack speak flies in the face of the need for extraordinary leadership in these extraordinary times.

I squirmed throughout the vice presidential debate. I had a hard time watching Palin, working the camera with her smiling and winking (hey fellas! look at me!), dodging questions and never really saying anything of substance, and seeming to stylize her rehearsed sound bites after the Texas Tiger himself. Sure, she may have exceeded expectations (but just what, exactly, did people expect? A total melt down? An on-air confession that she really has absolutely no idea what she’s talking about, that she thought she could pull it off, but the pressure’s just become too much, and she’s realized that she’s better off hunting moose and shooting wolves back in Alaska??), but it seems that we’ve gotten away from the obvious: that her grasp of what makes this country run and how it functions in the larger, global sphere of things is strikingly inadequate; that her understanding of foreign affairs might well be limited to her thinking that Alaska’s proximity to Russia makes her better equipped than someone else, living in Washington, D.C., say, with many years of foreign policy experience, to go head to head with Putin; that her selection was not good for the country at all.

"As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where– where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border." –Sarah Palin

Despite all the dark thoughts flying through my head about Palin, I am exceedingly grateful for the way Obama has kept his, elevating himself above the desperate scare tactics of the McPain camp to demonstrate an amazingly strong center of calm these past weeks of economic crisis that has provided a glimpse of the kind of leadership we can expect from him. And that gives me heart.

There is, actually, much light in this election, and there is much to be grateful for.

Despite the polarizing forces at work inherent in the Palin choice, there are strong currents of women banding together to fight for what they believe is right (and isn’t), reaching out to other women and ushering in an intelligent dialogue about issues that matter to us. I feel much gratitude for the women out there who are making it easier for our voices to be heard over the loudspeaker of political noise. Check out http://womenagainstsarahpalin.blogspot.com/

As well, what would we do without the hilarity of the fake-news guys and the SNL crew, who keep it real with gut-busting humor that serves as a powerful system of checks and balances on the great political machine? After all, it’s humor, and that ability to laugh at ourselves, that periodically casts aside the weighty depression and lofty cynicism of the campaign and makes it possible for us all to laugh together.

Finally, the bulk of my gratitude has grown out of the notion that I actually have a place to air out my grievances, that I can speak my mind and not get arrested, bullied, or cast aside, and that I can take my opinions into the voting booth and put them on the ballot. This idea of choice, of deciding for myself what I believe, and who I want to represent me, is not lost on me. After all, it hasn’t always been so. Women didn’t always have the right to vote, and it’s not something to take for granted. No choices or freedoms should ever be taken for granted, particularly when the current crop of Republican devotees want to take away so many of the freedoms that women, in particular, have worked so hard to enjoy. Having a woman on the ticket should feel better than this. But Palin is dangerous in that she threatens to unsettle and unseat our most grounded freedoms. Thankfully, I don’t have to vote for her, nor do I feel the pressure to vote for her simply because she is a woman, though I would love to see a woman on the ballot who I felt really positive about. It’s a bit insulting that she, of all the women out there, is on the ballot, making a mockery of all the truly qualified women candidates that could have been. I suppose the feminist movement has in large part been about creating such choices for women, as well as the freedom that simply having choices facilitates, and suffragists like Alice Paul who worked so hard for the 19th amendment and the ERA understood this basic tenet of equality: that equality is a simple thing, a basic right allowing each individual the space to chose for him or herself, and experience therefore the consequences of such freedoms.

Learn more about Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the other women who risked life and limb to give us the freedoms that we now enjoy, and you, too, will feel immense pride and gratitude for all the suffragists who came before us and endured untold hardships—imprisonment, force feedings, beatings, death, and the infamous Night of Terror on November 15, 1917, when the Prison Warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered up a buffet of mistreatment for the women jailed for picketing in front of Wilson’s new wartime White House that made the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib look mild—just to push through the vote for women, for them, but mostly, for us. If you haven’t seen the film Iron Jawed Angels, put it in your queue! A wonderful retelling of the gutsy young pioneers in the US Suffragist movement who were willing to give up everything for the right to vote, it’s a very powerful and moving film, offering up great opportunities to rethink who we are, how we got here, and where we want to go.

I came upon this much forgotten chapter in our history thanks to women out there who have been circulating reminders of just how precious and hard-fought for our right to vote is, and how we must vote because we can. I thank them for the history lesson. Each time I step into that voting booth, I know now that it’s my chance to salute the courage and honor of the suffragists by casting my voice, my choice, into the fray. Read more here.

And just where would we go with Sarah Palin bull dozing her way through the office of the vice president, the job description of which, it seems, she is still trying to figure out? How far back in time would she take us? To a time when women who were faced with unwanted pregnancies were saddled with the option of either carrying full term, regardless of risks to their own health, or trying to end the pregnancy on their own, or at the hands of some back woods abortion doctor? To a time when church and state were one in the same, and religious freedoms were restricted to those who practiced the “right” religion and prayed to the “right” God, and war was declared in the name of God? To a time when women were not allowed to make choices about how many children they had, how they took care of their reproductive health, or how they lived their lives? Read Eve Ensler’s awesome piece, if you haven’t already.

But thankfully, we do have a choice.

I wonder, on this, the near 88th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, to chose for themselves, to be counted, to have a voice and be heard, finally, what I’d do and where I’d be without my choices, without my freedom to find my voice, speak and be heard, to vote and be counted, to be included in the process, to think for myself, to consider those less fortunate, those with subdued voices, or fewer choices than myself, and chose for them, too. And there’s more, so much more.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s not (just) the economy. Maybe it’s all about having choices, stupid. Thankfully, Obama and Biden get that.