Written by Eve Ensler, author of "The Vagina Monologues"
"I don’t 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 God’s plan.
She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin’s view, is there to be taken 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 rapist’s 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 her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God’s 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 health care 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 don’t 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?"
6 comments:
So, what does everyone think of this?
Eek, I could go on and on. I agree with a lot of what she has to say, but I also think she's blowing the consequences out of proportion b/c I don't think the president can really do THAT much. I think the McCain/Palin ticket is terrible and I hate them and I have tons of reasons for that, and I think she's right about many of her comments, but I don't think these people are Satanic. And most of all, no matter how many right things Eve Ensler says, she has a really annoying way of saying it. To me. She's a little extreme for me. She just knows everything though, so I guess what else are you gonna do, other than inform us lowly dimwits, if you know everything like Eve does? I could go on...I will! Once I heard the Vagina Monologues on tape, read by Eve, with a prologue by Eve, and man she annoyed me. She was just full of herself and how important she was, and she really took things to the extreme. I saw the production in London though and it was really good. She was not in it. I'm sorry if you love her and this hurts your feelings!
This was about Eve Ensler and not Palin. I do not like Palin. I do not like McCain.
Well, I'm all for impassioned speach. If she is right (one of my least favorite things about popular writers is they very rarely cite their sources - how doesn she know how many wolves the woman has shot at?) Anyways, if she is right on all points, well done. If not, I still agree that this ticket is a horrendous choice. I got scared when D.B. McCain chose Palin. If he'd have chosen Romney, I wouldn't have been so scared (I severely dislike Romney, but he does have good financial experience that would at least add something besides Gender to the bill). Either way, I am diametrically opposed to everything that this ticket stands for. Evil? Maybe. That's basically how I feel about ALL politicans. Misguided and Dangerous? Definately.
I've spent a lot of time processing this whole Sarah Palin thing and trying to make sense of it. All I can ever come up with is anger and resentment. She is in direct opposition to everything that I stand for, both politically and as a proponent of my personal philosophy. The thing about her that cuts the deepest is her blatant distaste for women, the Earth, and the energy and resources that we have expended to attempt to create a society truly based on the principles of equality and respect. Not only will she continue to support the sad tradition of Bush-era social decline, I feel she will place us even further back.
I very much agree with what Eve Ensler said about our ongoing efforts to empower and build community among women. I, however, do not have a moment's pause at taking Sarah Palin to task. A lot of people seem to think that because she is a woman, that she is pro-woman. What a horrible misrepresentation of women.
Samantha, you haven't hurt my feelings in the slightest! I actually don't agree with some of the things she said, which is why I posted it, asking for opinions. I know a lot of people have posted this on their blogs and said it was the best thing ever written. I hate Palin and McCain as much as the next person, but Eve does take it overboard. As for The Vagina Monologues, I've seen it performed a few times (though not in London - so JEALOUS!), one of which some of my friends performed. That probably swayed my vote a bit, and therefor, I loved it. I should probably listen to her read it though, just to get a fair representation. :)
How do you guys feel about the things Palin has said about the dinosaurs? She thinks the world is only 4,000 years old (because that's what the bible says, of course), and that dinosaurs never existed. That's pretty scary stuff. I agree with Maynard, maybe not evil, but definitely dangerous.
Dangerous! Definitely. I try to imagine her (Palin) giving a speech the day after a big crisis. I can only imagine her focusing blame on the wrong sources, and asserting that America should take action in an irreversible way. I see her as President Bush. I see George W. Palin. Thanks to Dick Cheney, the vice president certainly has the power to change the world as we know it without accountability. The scarier notion is that McCain might croak or malfunction in office, leaving Sarah P. to lead the free world.
I guess the thing that bothers me most is the fact that someone with the same amount of apparent knowledge of leadership as our current president seems to be excusable because of her sex. I agree completely with Eve Ensler. Sarah Palin and John McCain are a very frightening prospect for women in America.
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