Posted on 09/22/2008 3:17:56 PM PDT by pabianice
Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe its their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.
I dont like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country choose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of Gods plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palins view, is here to be t aken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, It was a task from God.
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapists baby or not.
She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be
the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course he r right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in Gods name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
If the Polar Bears dont move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, Drill Drill Drill. I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?
Eve Ensler, September 5, 2008
Sorry, but that is a very old photo of her.
Here is a more updated one.
Eve Ensler (b. May 25, 1953 in New York) is an American playwright, performer, feminist and activist, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues.
Ensler is a prominent anti-violence activist. In 1998, her experience performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, a global movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues.
The ‘V’ in V-Day stands for Vagina,and stopping Violence against Vaginas.
The Vagina Monologues includes a section entitled “The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could”. This portion of the play, as originally performed, has been criticized for including a lesbian “rape” scene of a 13-year-old girl by a 24-year-old woman who uses alcohol to lower the inhibitions of her victim. At the conclusion of the segment, the narrator (the grown-up thirteen year old girl) fondly reminisces about the rape, claiming that it helped to nurture her and help her grow as a woman, and finishes the play with the line, “If it was rape, it was good rape”. The segment received criticism not only for depicting any rape as “good”, but also for forming a double standard, as elsewhere in the play, male-on-female rape is depicted as not only inexcusable but the ultimate act of violence against women.
Enslers most recent Monologues spin-off has been the V Is for Vote campaign, which registers single women and pressures politicians to make ending the abuse of women a central — rather than special-interest — issue.
“I think violence against women in America has become ordinary — its been made absolutely acceptable. Battery and rape are such a part of the framework of our culture that we dont see them as outrageous. Just even trying to get candidates to talk about violence against women, it would be like getting them to talk about air. Its so basic, and how do you get people to see that its extraordinary and unacceptable?”
“I think what all of us have in common is that weve been taught and trained and programmed to focus on fixing and mutilating ourselves. Thats a core reason why women do not have power in the world. Its this huge distractor. Its gotten us off the path. The only way you can undo it is by looking at the insanity of the obsession of it.”
“How do we, as a culture, stop buying in? I think activism is the cure — the more you focus on people who are really in need, the harder it is to hate your body. I think its a huge antidote.”
“The idea of the V Is for Vote campaign was to say, Lets take what weve built as a vision of ending violence against women and begin to translate it into having an impact on the political system. But it goes beyond this election; I hope it will get political candidates to see that violence against women is an issue that needs to be brought into focus, that violence against women is at the center of everything.”
“We are the majority of the population, we raise the children, we keep the culture and the communities together, our bodies give birth to the future. When youve been violated, you dont feel a future in your body, so you translate that to your children. Society just breaks down.”
“There are two things going on. Theres the violence that comes toward us, and theres violence we do to ourselves — were picking up the magazines, were dieting, were getting the lipo. Why are women immobile? Because so many feel like theyre waiting for someone to say, Youre good, youre pretty, I give you permission.”
EVE ENSLER IS A BIG OL’ HYPOCRITE!!!
Ensler traces her efforts to end violence against women from her traumatic childhood in suburban Scarsdale, New York, as the daughter of a food industry executive and his homemaker wife. She said her father, now dead, abused her physically and sexually as a child.
“I don’t know if I had not been a person who had survived enormous abuse if I’d be committed the way I am committed to this,” Ensler said.
Ensler said that as a teen-ager, and in her 20s, she turned to drinking and drugs to blot out her pain.
Ensler met a bartender named Richard McDermott, who persuaded her to enter rehab and get sober, according to a February 2001 interview with People magazine. They married in 1978, and she later adopted his son, actor Dylan McDermott, star of “The Practice” TV series. (She later divorced Richard McDermott.)
It's. . .Ed Ensler!
.
LOL!
My eyes!
Oh the humanity!!
that’s a dude. or at least a she-he. (or is it he-she?)
bump!
LOL!
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