| Some women have told me that I am luck. They say I am "free." I can just be. Other women have told me that I have made "unwise" decisions which have curtailed my social mobility and freedom. On some days, some of these women have declared married life and raising children a challenge, imposing restrictions on their freedom. And so it goes in the nooks and crannies of everyday life. There's a war in Iraq. U.S. soldiers and Iraqis die daily. There are survivors of Katrina still struggling to up-right their lives. Folks have been laid off or have seen their retirement funds disappear. Civil Rights and gay rights are in jeopardy. Email spying and phone taping have eroded civil freedoms. Poverty is expanding, and education of our young is falling behind other countries. There's talk of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Forty million U.S. citizens are without health care. Then there are those women who came through the '70s and now talking about being "liberated." And I look around and try to see what they see. Sometimes I am afraid that our young women think the '70s women's movement allows them to dress sexy, spend small fortunes on hairstyles, and curse and drink with the boys at the local bars. There's this talk and walk, sometimes in the sexiest of gears, but where is the substantive change? Is it a video with a white or black male rapper surrounded by white, black, and Asian scantly-clad women? Thin is still good. The bodies of some girls as young as nine can show you this truth. Coloring gray hair is good still. It is all disguised as something new! New choices for women! The new looks and sounds like the old, the familiar. We are in new boxes with some very old walls, and there is little difference from those walls plastered with reminder letters from rich utility companies or from those with no walls but glass ceilings or bars. It is news around the world when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitts have a baby in Africa where women still die in childbirth. While Hilary Clinton shakes off her youthful "leftist" leanings and learns to forget to imagine the plight of those survivors of Katrina or Iraqi and US women grieving over the death of their sons and daughters, other women, too, move in spaces requiring them to forget, to relinquish an semblance of empathy that would compel action on our part. Entering spaces of forgetfulness impedes the possibility of considering alternative views and perspectives. Forgetting to remember our beginnings, and adjusting to already questionable prescribed values and perspectives, assures the permanency of the status quo. For no matter the social status or the decisions made, for most women, life is stressful. Yet, we have been listening to the voices outside ourselves. We have been staring and yearning at images we did not create for ourselves. We have suppressed our own voices and keep our eyes closed and walk and talk instep. In the niches of everyday life, detachment becomes armor to wear when manipulating and maneuvering our own or other's anger. Adjustments are made and divisions are re-established or re-enforced and the sales of Prada, Gucci, Hilfiger, and Jordache rise. This activity is good for business or the pharmaceutics complex in the long run. So when I hear some women tell me I am free and others tell me I made "unwise" decisions, I wonder how much better would it be if we used our mental energy to consider our unification once again. It is not an either/or situation or it should not be. Each of us could use our energy to consider what is it we fear, within ourselves and about ourselves as women, as we glance at each other. It is a matter of all of us living out our potential then maybe, we can address the issues I mentioned earlier with a view to recognizing and identifying with how they issues impact women's lives and what we can do collectively standing together, rather than enforcing the old-tired strategies of hierarchical thinking. In the June 28, 2006 issue of Capital City Hues, editor, Jon Gramling recalled phrases from the U.S. Constitution. These phrases proclaim that we (all now) are "created equal," and "are endowed by their Creator withcertain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Now if we could only work to dismantle the human creators' systems so that, as bell hooks writes, "the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires," we might have some like freedom for all. |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels What is this freedom thing? |
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