Feminist Monday

Last week sucked. I went from the glorious feeling that Americans were headed into a bright future where sexism was coughing up its last diseased gasp to the devastating knowledge that this country is sexist and racist as fuck and doesn't want to admit the truth. That's it, right there. If you voted for Trump, no matter your reasons, you're racist. You selfishly opened wide the door to racism. If you are white, consider yourself a liberal, and voted for anyone but HRC because Hillary wasn't the most perfect human being on the planet, you have internalized misogyny issues you have not faced, and you threw more than half the population of the United States under the bus as a result. The same goes for those 50% who couldn't be bothered to vote at all because they deemed the candidates "equally awful."[1] In truth, this was the first presidential election after the Voting Rights Act had been gutted. If you want a line drawn under a single cause, this is it. Nothing else. This election was decided with a very thin margin. Thousands were turned away and had their vote shunted into the provisional category. (I witnessed around twenty of these at the precinct where I worked on election day. That is an unusually high number. We also turned away at least five. And we weren't a busy precinct.) We are not "post racial." That is a bold-faced lie. So is the stance that we don't need Feminism. I've been saying that for decades. Stuff that shit.

Now, for something more hopeful. I'm going to write about what I feel is going on with this backlash we're having because liberals dared to vote-in a black president twice in a row.

Quite a while back I took a seminar called Money and You. The title was a bit of a misnomer. It was about more than money. It was about happiness, success, and how to make the world a better place for everyone. It was about allowing for the possibility that suffering isn't a requirement for life. It was about finding your purpose in life and living it--not because it's a nice, selfish dream, but because you were born on this planet for a reason. And that reason is vastly important, even if it may seem small. We're all interconnected, you see. Each action and inaction is like a stone tossed into a pond. It ripples out. Its energy penetrates more than the surface. That stone changes the entire pond.[2] It's more complicated than that, however. So, I'll take it a step farther than the seminar did. Every day, each of us is tossing in stones of varying sizes. It's like a rainstorm. And while others affect the effects your stones have, nothing is negated. 

​Now, I going to talk about things that hold us back from doing the things we must do for the betterment of all. Things like fear and anger. Each of us has trauma in our lives in one form or another and to varying degrees. Each time that happens, our natural inclination is to shelter that pain in order to prevent more injury--to give it space to heal. That's perfectly natural. However, when it comes to psychological injuries we often leave that armor in place far longer than is necessary. It's like leaving a bandaid on a wound and never changing it. It never fully heals. It becomes a weak spot.  For the purposes of this discussion, we'll call that weak spot a Yuckberry.

Stressful situations dump energy into us. Ideally, that energy flows through us and out. Think of it like the passage about fear from Frank Herbert's Dune: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” Make sense? Okay. However, when we have weak spots within us they become places where emotional charges build up. Those weak spots disrupt the flow of energy. The Yuckberry makes it difficult to allow the stress to pass through us. The Yuckberry becomes a clog. We freeze up. We get stuck. We get frightened.

The more stress we undergo, the more energy that Yuckberry collects, the more emotion builds up, and the bigger the Yuckberry becomes within our awareness. 

If this Yuckberry is in a critical spot--that is positioned in such a way as to be a significant obstruction to our progress--then it will gather more and more energy and become more and more sensitive, causing pain, frustration, and anger. This is the spot where people often get stuck. They deny what is actually happening. They load up more and more armor to cover the Yuckberry and protect it, but it's like plastering a cast on top of an infected wound. This is the dangerous part of the process. This is where real harm can occur to oneself and others. The more you pretend that Yuckberry doesn't exist, the longer you don't act upon it--the more pressure builds up until anger becomes rage and fear becomes terror. Frustration increases to the point of intolerance.

If we back away from the situation, that cast stays on the infected wound. The pain is amplified. However, if we stick with it, the pressure will eventually become too much for the Yuckberry to block. The clog is forced into movement.

Tada! We have an epiphany, and substantive change happens. Thing is, energy wants to flow through us. It doesn't want to be stuck inside of us, and we don't want to absorb it. We aren't meant to.

Anyway, this is what I feel is going on right now. Only, the name of the Yuckberry in question is Systemic Oppression. We can't move on to the next phase of wherever we're headed until we've completed this lesson. We have a choice. We can choose to learn or we can choose to make things worse. Frankly, I'm in favor of making things better. I'm in favor of learning, not struggling.

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​[1] Trump is proof positive that a white CIS male can be a blatant pathological liar, an ego-maniac, unqualified, ignorant, corrupt scumbag and still beat a woman out of an important job no matter how qualified she is. She'll be deemed worse, no matter what.
[2] Hence the pagan belief that what energy you send out is returned to you three-fold.