The mid term elections are in the past now, but my nerves continue to jingle jangle like the spurs on my boots used to do as I anxiously await outcomes. I find myself turning to movies of questionable taste on Netflix to keep me from watching election news, but then cheating on myself by looking at my phone for hints about leaning this way or slightly that way. Maddening. I need a mental break before I have a breakdown. Good news: we’re taking a break.
Thank goodness I have a wonderful friend in California (which way is California leaning? Stop it!) who has a birthday this month – a woman I’d like to celebrate not only for the personal fun experiences we’ve shared over many years but also for the amazing contributions she’s made to the LGBTQ community on the west coast, her chosen home away from her native roots in South Carolina.
Happy Birthday, Audrey Prosser! You are a woman of substance, a woman I admire for all the right reasons. Your commitment to social justice for your community, your state, your country is inspirational to your friends in South Carolina who have had the privilege of sipping cocktails with you in foreign and domestic countries while we discussed, among other topics, the issues facing us as lesbians who cared about each other and creating positive change regardless of where we lived.
Pretty and I regret we won’t be able to attend the 80th. birthday bash with you and your wonderful wife Debra, but know that we will be with you both in spirit and in sisterhood. Rock on, Miss Thing. Whatever music is played at your party – you keep on dancing.
In 1968 Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress; she served in the House of Representatives from 1969 – 1983. In 1972 she became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States, the first Black candidate for a major party nomination.
Shirley Chisholm had spunk. Unlike Lou Grant (who told Mary Richards in one classic scene from the Mary Tyler Moore Show: Mary, you’ve got spunk – I hate spunk) I admire spunk so Rep. Chisholm is on my list of most admired people. I hear her voice with its crystal clarion calling out of truth to power echoing through the halls of the US Capitol today as surely as her footsteps walked those halls more than a half century ago:
“It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices. It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their prestige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang on to those jobs?”
Yep. Sure sounds like it, Shirley.
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Every vote matters – don’t sit this one out. Vote Tuesday, November 08th!
Oh well, gosh, golly. Now that you mention it – nothing, unless you count the one vote thing in the upcoming elections on November 8th. Each one of these American singers has one vote in the election which is now fewer than three weeks away.
Sorry, everyone. In a democracy we all get one vote. No matter how talented we are, how sophisticated or erudite or ignorant – we each get one vote. Our votes are our voices. Use them, people. No excuses, no regrets.
inflation, gas prices, gun crimes, too
bring us the headlines we all must view
but one thing’s for sure in 2022
the supremes took away our right to choose
Your vote, your opportunity to vote for a party that will respect a woman’s right to control her own body. Restore Roe.
A 22 year old woman named Mahsa Amini died on September 16th. in a hospital in Tehran, Iran while in the custody of the Guidance Patrol a/k/a the morality police who arrested her three days before for a violation involving “bad hijab,” the headscarf required by law for Iranian women. Amini was on holiday visiting relatives with her brother when she was arrested and, according to eyewitnesses, severely beaten. Police took her to a hospital where she was reported to be in a coma before her death.
The official statement from the police was that she died of a heart attack as a result of an underlying condition (remember George Floyd?), but her family said she had been in good health prior to the incident. They also said her head and body were covered in bruises, according to an article in The Guardian by Kamin Mohamaddi on October 8th.
Regardless, the death of Mahsa Amini has ignited a firestorm of protests by primarily women and children against not only the hijab law but also the ongoing repression of women’s rights under a hardline clerical regime. The slogan Zan, Zendegi, Azadi which translates to “Women, Life, and Freedom” has become the rallying cry for women’s rights that has now bubbled over to include other economic and social justice issues plaguing Iran. The Indian EXPRESS Journalism of Courage posted this AP photo with an explanation of the slogan on October 15th. The woman’s image on the banner is Mahsa Amini.
The connection between women (Zan), life (Zendegi), and freedom (Azadi) is not coincidental. Women are the creators of life and life itself cannot be free unless women are. (AP)
I hesitate to write about people, places, or events that have the potential to (1) display my ignorance of the world outside my life with Pretty or (2) unintentionally do more harm than good to the universe or (3) some combination. But the story of an Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Imini is one I can’t ignore because it tears at all my senses; I feel for her family and for the thousands of women, men, girls and boys who today protest her death, who ask for a better country – who are dying in the streets by the beatings and bullets aimed to stop the uprising.
The BBC News says Iranian Human Rights Activists estimated this week that 222 people including at least 23 children have been killed by Iranian security forces in the uprisings. From the youngest identified as a 12 year old schoolboy to the oldest known death, a 62 year old woman, tracking the identities of the victims is made more difficult due to the closing of internet access by the Iranian government.
With the Dobbs decision by the Supremes this summer which takes away a woman’s right in the USA to control her own body’s health, I see parallels in the struggles for the rights of women in Iran. Author Kamin Mohamaddi’s article in The Guardian on October 8th. makes the argument that what is happening today in Iran is really the frontlines for feminism in the 21st century:
“There is a power and energy to these protests. The sight of young girls with flowing locks taking down pictures of the two elderly ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, the current supreme leader, that brings tears to my eyes and makes even my cynical heart burn with hope. It is as if the Furies have been unleashed in Iran and these extraordinarily brave young women, who are prepared to walk into bullets for the sake of the right to choose how to live, have lost all the fear that has kept previous generations repressed.
I say cynical heart because, as a member of Iran’s huge diaspora, as a proud British-Iranian, I have spent a large part of my adult and working life trying to introduce my countries to each other, and it has seemed to no avail…
It seems that the death of Mahsa Jhina Amini has not captured the world’s imagination in the same way as the death of George Floyd did, and the subsequent global protests in solidarity with the Iranian uprising have had few column inches, in spite of mobilising some 500,000 people around the world in one day alone (1 October).
But now, as I watch the unity in Iran and the cry of this generation which carries within it the stifled cries of all the generations gone before, for the first time in many years I am allowing myself to dream that one day I too can enter Iran without fear gripping my heart and accompanying every step I take there…
I am quietly resurrecting the long-buried wish to one day walk down Vali Asr Boulevard in Tehran (the longest street in the Middle East) with my hair loose under the Iranian sun and to lean in to kiss my man without fear of being arrested or shouted at or slapped on the street, or taken to be beaten to death in the back of a morality police van. This is a fragile hope that I keep tucked in my back pocket.
Meanwhile, I hope that the world wakes up to understand that what is happening in Iran is the frontline of feminism right now: the simple expression of desire for equality, for dignity, for life without fear. And as such, it touches us all. Say it with me: Woman Life Freedom.”
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Women Life Freedom. Say it with me, and stay tuned.
I'll Call It Like I See It 
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