Posts by Jolisa
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Stephen, sorry. [Kicks self for misspelling a name, especially given frequently urge to kick other people for misspelling one's own name].
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Whoops, Steven got to it first. I'm just intrigued by the cultural aura that clings to each version of the word...
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Agreed, Kate and Danielle - Hillary's success (cool as it might have been) would have been a "first" only for the US. Whereas Obama's is way more symbolic -- on a par with, say, Nelson Mandela becoming President of the country that had locked him up.
And verklempt! That's exactly the word. Funny how in Yiddish it means all choked up, whereas (according to Wikipedia at least) the German word it comes from "emotionally inhibited in a convulsive way." I was feeling it in the Yiddish sense, for sure.
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By the way, am I the only person who, after reading the title of the post, is singing "You Sexy Thing?"
Y'all did click on my YouTube embed, right? I want the whole country up and boogying, now.
(Just trying to pass on my election ear-worm to the rest of you...Now how do I make it stop??)
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No, Danielle, I think you're onto it... I just get all tangled up when I try to figure it out, the warp and weave of different prejudices, and different reactions to being called on them. And how they're played off against each other too. The whole Hillary vs Barack thing being virtually a replay of the US suffrage debates of the late 19th C.
I agree that the "story" of women's civil rights is harder to write, in a way. I wonder if, because women are so thoroughly "integrated" in the ways that Kyle describes, they're more forgiving/amnesiac about the great wrongs of patriarchy past, and more inclined to think that sexism has been dealt with, or that any given incident can be written off as an anomaly?
Whereas it would be very hard, almost impossible I'd say, to be a person of colour in this country and not see any given slight (being followed around a shop, say) as part of the larger network of discrimination and oppression (because fully 1/9 of your brothers were incarcerated, as opposed to single digit percentages of white men, say).
I dunno, just thinking aloud. And I do think I'd have been moved to see Hillary on stage with Chelsea and her mum, and a crowd of cheering/weeping women and their cheerful men. I just don't know if it would have felt so universally moving, and I don't know that I'm happy about that, because isn't that insidious sexism at its best?
Or is it just that Hilary is such a chipper technocrat and child of relative privilege, whereas Barack is the ultimate unconventional-childhood success story, which adds emotional heft to his already awesome story?
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More delicious irony...
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I now believe, that if we all work together, there is nothing, nothing that we can't make be all about science-fiction.
Yes we can!
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Oh, it's pass the tissues all the time here. Just walking into my kid's classroom and looking at the faces of kids who now know they have an equal opportunity to the top job in the country... so great.
If you need more, Emma, this is doing the rounds:
Rosa Parks sat in 1955. Martin Luther King walked in 1963. Barack Obama ran in 2008. That our children might fly.
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Do you think that should change?
Well, "no taxation without representation" was the rallying cry of the War of Independence, so you'd think they'd have followed that through! I'd love to have voted this time, I really would. And the longer I stay in one place after years of being a nomadic student, the more I want a say in how the city I live in is run. It's weird to know the people in charge and yet not be able to support them (or kick them out).
How on earth would ordinary folk go about that over there?
I'm not sure, although it's happening in different places at different levels; here's one example.
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The thing that I pick up from your post is that even after 13 years of living in the US, playing taxes (I assume) and generally participating in day-to-day life you aren't allowed to vote without being a citizen.
Yep. I'm a permanent resident, with a green card (which was delayed for four years after 9/11 -- when they finally catch Osama bin Laden, he owes us several thousand in lawyers' fees to keep the application in the system, dammit!). I can work, pay taxes, teach American kids to think, but until I apply for and get full citizenship, I can't vote. Not even in local elections.