In the late 70s, when I first became involved with the Sojourn Shelter for Battered Women and Their Children, the first thing co-founder Ariana Manov did was to take all of us volunteers through an in-depth training on the wide-spread societal problem of woman abuse.
Ariana often began her trainings with “The Tale of Three Women” in order to illustrate the several ways in which an organization or a government could work to make these victims (or, as we later came to see them, survivors) safe.
The Tale: One day (she would begin), a woman was walking by the ocean and, hearing cries, she looked out and saw that there were babies in the water and the babies were drowning. Not stopping to think, she threw off her jacket, jumped in, and swam out to try to save the babies one by one.
A second woman comes walking along the shore, sees what the first woman is doing and, throwing off her sweater, swims out to save the babies. However, although the first woman is swimming back and forth in order to bring the babies to shore one by one, the second woman remains out in the ocean.
“What are you doing?” calls the first woman. “Can’t you see all these babies are drowning?” The second woman yells back, “I’m teaching these babies to swim!”
As the first woman continues to bring the babies to shore one by one and the second woman is teaching them to swim, a third woman comes walking down the beach, sees what is happening and turns around to walk back up the beach. “Where are you going?” the two women call after her. “Can’t you see all these babies are drowning?”
“Yes,” the third woman yells back. “But I’m going to see who’s throwing these babies into the water!” I have thought of this story many times in trying to find the best way to approach each of our many social problems.
Lately, I find myself thinking about the approach taken by this country’s wrecking ball of a president (yeah, the one who needed to be politely removed from photo-bombing the victory picture of Spain’s championship soccer team), which is to reduce all three of the ways that survivors of domestic violence used to be able to look to the government for help. It’s not just in the areas of service that involve women or violence, however, it’s across the board.
Lately, it has become crystal clear that the big orange babbler and his puppets in every department of government, are directing their energies toward cutting programs designed to do more than simply provide direct services or education (although many of those are on the chopping block, as well). They are slashing programs that, by providing oversight, research, regulation (excuse my French, MAGA) and prevention, work to stop these problems before they even begin. They waste billions on clean-up, a far greater expense after the fact than might have been spent to prevent the harm.
End research on global warming and spend a fortune fighting fires whose damage might have been mitigated.
Don’t look into the causes of homelessness. Instead invest in sweeps and temporary shelter and spend years promising to fund new affordable housing.
The problem has its worst results in the area of health. Don’t prevent corporations from polluting, or storing toxics in leaky tanks or failing to fix fire dangers in warehouses. Instead, just clean up after them, with OUR money, not theirs.
And god forbid we should recommend vaccines or inspect food for disease-causing microbes. Instead we just hospitalize, bury, and pick up the babies after they have been poisoned, sickened, and thrown into the water to drown.
It is this hapless, wrong headed, cruel administration that must be thrown into the briny deep, and the babies saved. They like to project an aura of omniscience. But they are weak and vulnerable. Jump in with me. And toss them off the boat.
The Great Rewind
Have you ever reversed that great show you recorded on your VCR and watched all the action slowly undo itself?
That image came to mind as I thought of the ways in which the Supreme Court and the Department of (in)Justice are gleefully unwinding as many civil rights gains as they can, case by case.
It unfolds for me like a wonderful Ken Burns documentary on all the progress we have fought for and accomplished during the last half of the twentieth century, backing up on slow rewind and being sucked backward into history little by little.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization: observe our ability to choose for ourselves concerning our own pregnancies, we move backwards through hospital halls, Roe v. Wade is announced and celebrated, women in Mexico or Canada or in their own bathrooms go through abortions that leave them sterile or dead, a stark shot of coat hangers, celebration of the invention of “the pill”, Margaret Sanger arrested for distributing information about birth control, and opening her own clinic, and into a montage of the many barriers in women’s lives before all of this.
Louisiana v. Callais: watch the states’ ability to guarantee fair access to the polls for all as everyone lines up to vote, celebration at the signing of the Voting Rights Act, Sheriffs at polling places turning away black voters, state gerrymandering maps guaranteeing a maximum of white districts, law enforcement demanding poll taxes and administering ginned-up reading tests, violence against black voters, white crowds tearing up ballots, signs indicating only whites can vote here and restricting primary lists to white candidates only, and winding up with images from the Civil War.
We watch Barack Obama sworn in as President of the United States, integrated schools, anti-discrimination laws, gay men holding hands in public, women at work visibly pregnant, people walking backward from Selma, being beaten, Fannie Lou Hamer’s speech at the Democratic convention of 1964, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and the little girls who lost their lives, alive and playing as our rewind continues backward, gay men beaten and shot as they walk down the street, whites only signs, women fired for being pregnant, black people stepping into the gutter so whites can pass, women suffrage rallies, and it gets faster and faster all the way back to the Confederacy.
Stop the rewind. Being honest about our past is as healthy for America (and, apparently, as difficult) as it is for a newcomer at their first AA meeting—and sort of similar. Let’s stand firm for truth and healing and justice and insist that our country return to its attempts to get better about equality and democracy and not worse. We can, and must, join together to hit the fast forward button again. Soon. And firmly.
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