Still Protesting, 2013

 

 

Here’s the T-shirt which says it all: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this crap.” It’s the all-purpose demonstration t-shirt I’ve been looking for, as I continually find myself on the Capitol steps with signs—the same old signs, I might add that  I held in the ‘60’s—in favor of rights for women and rights for the individual, rights which ought to trump the now resurgent "religious" dogma assaulting us from every side.

If you are a woman, you are especially singled out for second class status; make no mistake about it. Your body is not your own, but subject to endless legislation. In ever more states, decisions which should be made in private, decisions that are between a woman and her God, now reside in the hands of government. Her health, her well-being, is not considered, only the decrees of an evergreen crop of Grand Inquisitors. (Remember, gang, this is America,  supposedly "the land of the free.")

If you are a woman, your pay is routinely less than that of a man working the same job. Your work in the home, so lauded by the same crew of traditionalists: raising the next generation, care-taking aged parents, running errands, cleaning house, tending gardens and cooking, has no monetary value at all, except, perhaps, on  the sales pitch “Mother’s Day,” when someone might possibly remember to send you a card.  

If you are dying, living in pain for years, a burden to family and society, you are not allowed to cry “enough!” Even if your body has deserted you, you are still not allowed to desert it. If your plans to shed ego and flesh, to step alone into the final mystery becomes known, the police will come to your door and take you to an asylum. The law says you must be insane if you don’t wish to grasp the last agonizing straw of consciousness, if you don’t want to lose your mind and continue to breathe for months or years trapped in a torture chamber of tubes and pipes—but, I and others shout back, just who are the madmen here?  

Are our souls not ours to lose? And who are you, you back-scratching, on-the-corporate-take, lying politicos, hypocrites to whom no ordinary laws apply, to make our choices for us--we, individuals, each of us one-of-a-kind? How dare you tell us what to believe and who we are?

 

~~Juliet Waldron

 

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