There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.
Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.
MY LAST HOPE IS to open up the road – literally. So far it’s been overwhelmingly masculine turf. Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.
Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.
Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River.
Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women’s movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.
Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn’t have to talk – and I had been both.
This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.
Gender is the remaining caste system that still cuts deep enough, and spreads wide enough, to be confused with the laws of nature. To uncover the difference between what is and what could be, we may need the “Aha!” that comes from exchanging subject for object, the flash of recognition that starts with a smile, the moment of changed viewpoint that turns the world upside down.
Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.
Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.
Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?
As I was to learn, avoiding conflict causes conflict to seek you out.
Nothing can replace being in the same space. That’s exactly why we need to keep creating the temporary worlds of meetings, small and large, on campuses and everywhere else.
Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing you teeth.
Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.
I still don’t see reports in newspapers about white supremacists who are trying to establish an armed and separatist homeland in the rural Northwest and parts of Canada, yet.
Having lived his life in the belief that something great could be just around every corner, did he realize for the first time that no more corners could be turned? p.18.
Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste – and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
Because we tend to treat others as we have been treated, a trustworthy system leads to more trust, corruption leads to more corruption, violence to more violence.