Circa 1990....

What I love about blogging, and why I think it matters:

There's a larger story here that I keep starting to tell, but it has so many layers, so many chapters that seem wildly tangential, but aren't. Time to write is a luxury for me, as is the opportunity to even finish a thought, but it's becoming a necessity, and I'll get these chapters up as quickly as I can.

I'm trying to get to the topic of rape culture, culture in general, the abuse of individual girls and women as a tool in the oppression of all girls and women, the high cost I have personally paid for the crime of being born female, and the price we all pay every day, female or not, for the systematic violation and control of women, and anyone else that can be wedged into a similar category.

I'm really really trying to get to the topic of victim-blaming, from so many angles. Victims of abuse and rape so often blame themselves, and the resulting shame isolates them, so none of us/them really suspect just how commonplace, how every day every where every body has a story of violation, of victimization, and a secret they've been keeping, usually their own.

I'm making progress with that, but can't seem to finish, because every day the topic grows. Today I remembered that this is a blog, not a book- I don't have to write the whole thing before I publish. I can explore the different facets I'm discovering day by day. Rape Culture and Really Big Secret Everybody Keeps is an important chapter in a much bigger story, and I'm not going to shortchange it due to time constraints.
This process is real-time, and interactive, and sometimes a reader's response can spark a tangent that becomes part of the story itself, something I had no idea was relevant until someone says something, like this:

An exchange from my Degree of Difficulty Facebook page, late last night:

Anon: From all the women in Saudi Arabia..Thank you for giving us hope maybe the day will come when we can join the fight

DoD: I'm humbled and touched....I hope each voice gets heard, and those of us who aren't actually risking our lives by speaking up need to forge the path!

 Anon: My sister is waiting to be arrested any time now she is an activist and she is going away for a long time as the secret police told her..they take ppl away and u never see them again
We are trying to deal but of course we cant..life seem unreal in this part of the world
......

DoD: I've been hibernating for a while, but I grew up on Amnesty International, ran a little chapter in my high school back in the day when letters need stamps! If someone is risking their life and freedom to for simple human dignity, the least I can do is raise my voice about it, and notice, as loudly as possible, if they go "missing"....

I forgot to mention that those Amnesty International days were back when Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned, and apartheid an evil so undefiable that resistance within its confines generally met with death. Winnie Mandela spoke through every channel she found, enlisting support wherever she could, including AI. And so we wrote letters. Once a week, a few at a time, and mailed off to dictators in foreign lands. Letters that carried no more power individually than a dandelion seed with a tiny tag attached that whispered "I know what you've done, and it's wrong."  Easy enough to ignore, and truthfully, for all I know every letter I wrote ended up in dictator's incinerator without ever being counted, or read. I imagine more than one postal official in a corrupt and violent land hid many in a desperate bid to not become the next executed messenger.
It's possible every letter I wrote never even reached the intended recipient, but that doesn't matter.
Because when the slightly older classmate I silently revered founded a chapter of Amnesty International in my American Bible Belt high school, I was drawn to join. I took over the chapter when she graduated, and had my first meaningful leadership experience- leading meetings and organizing campaigns and fundraisers, helping my best friend and my boyfriend start a chapter at their high school, overcoming my paralyzing fear of making myself visible in any way- those are the only moments of my first 20 years on this planet that I actually felt just a little bit "cool". In the midst of a conservative and self-absorbed dominant culture we created a little oasis, a subculture where social awareness and activism, even just writing a letter, was a ticket to "the cool kids' club". I didn't realize that at the time, I just felt, finally, a little less awkward. I found my courage in my cause, and spreading that cause gave me confidence, and multiplied the effects of my individual efforts, in ripples.

That confidence and the support of my teachers, and the kinship of my peers helped me to believe my college counselor when she said I should apply to Brown. I did laugh out loud (while doing an internal spit-take) when she mentioned my name and Harvard in the same sentence, before she mused that Brown might be a better fit. When I asked why she chuckled affectionately and said "it's where all the really smart weird people go", and I'd fit right in.
(spoiler alert: I did get into Brown, and attend, on academic scholarship, which still blows my mind to this day. And I didn't 'fit right in', although I could have, for many personal and painful reasons that I'll get to in another chapter, as it's a very long story and I've strayed pretty far from the point of this chapter already.)

My point is that the happiest chapter of my life until around age 22 was the year I found myself by following my passion for social justice, writing letters and recruiting a team. I wrote a letter to the South African government protesting the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, based on information provided to Amnesty International by his wife Winnie, who never gave up. I wrote one letter, and led one meeting that resulted in a couple dozen more. By then there were 3 local high schools with AI chapters, and I passed the information along.
We didn't have the internet in 1989 the way we do now, though I believe it was technically in existence as I was assigned an email address in college the following year.
We still generated a few hundred letters on behalf of Nelson Mandela, and mailed them off to South Africa, and I still have no idea if they were ever received by the addressee, and read, but I know that thanks to our 3 chapters of AI you couldn't be a 'cool' kid in any of our schools if you didn't at least know Nelson Mandela's name, and what apartheid was and why it was bad, whether or not you ever came to a meeting and wrote a letter.

I know that one confident, intelligent, humanitarian-minded girl inspired me, and when I followed her lead her encouragement made a leader out of me, drove me to suppress my terror and step out from under a cloak of invisibility, and multiplied my impact a hundredfold or more.

I know that this happened in the fall of 1989 and in February of 1990, after 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was freed, and became his country's first black President in 1994- less than 5 years after a black child could be killed on the street, legally (or at least without repercussion, so de facto legally regardless of the text of the law) for offending or even annoying a white person. Five years after resisting the system meant risking your own disappearance in the night, Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, and has continued to lead his nation and the world in various roles ever since, without inciting hatred, violence, or vengeance for the wrongs done to him.
Imprisoned for 27 years, now free for 23. People under 30 years of age have to actually look up 'apartheid' now. Racism still exists, and in many areas something resembling apartheid can still be found, but it is de facto, like segregation in America today.
Despite the fact that racism itself hasn't been eliminated worldwide, none of 'the cool kids' do it anymore. Peer pressure, social media, leading by example-- all tools in our workbelt to create and multiply pressure for change.

I don't know if my letter alone had anything to do with Nelson Mandela's release from a South African prison after 27 years for the crime of objecting to injustice on a massive scale. For the crime of defining and resisting his own oppression.
Mine was not the only letter, and not the only chapter of AI, and AI was not the only organization behind his cause. In 27 years the voices calling for his release, protesting the system of legally enforced apartheid had grown very loud, and spread very far, and from 1987-1989 there were films, benefit concerts, outspoken music artists organized a formal boycott....
My little conspiracy of iconoclasts may have been the last ones to join the campaign, the end result could have been predetermined long before we wrote and mailed our letters, en masse.
Or we could have been the tipping point, the last bag of mail that got delivered, shaken out onto a table somewhere in South Africa, the arrival of a few hundred letters postmarked from Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA the final straw in a dictator's dwindling grasp on power.

I can totally envision this, by the way, as a comic sketch, with dialogue like:

"Are you freaking kidding me? Where in the hell is that stupid-sounding town anyway? Somebody get me a map! Why can't these people just mind their own business? Why do a few hundred people from across the damn globe even know, much less care about my country's traditions? Fine! Fuck it! It's not even worth the damn effort anymore!
--mutter mutter stomp stomp grumble grimace stomp--
Guards! Release Mandela already, this apartheid lunacy is more trouble than it's worth!

....which is probably not how it happened, but it could be. It doesn't really matter what tipped the balance, apartheid fell.
I wrote letters, and made friends, and made those friends write letters, and I was happy, and apartheid fell.
1990 was a very good year.



I hadn't discovered Audre Lorde's writings yet, but it wouldn't take me long.
I close this chapter with two relevant quotations from her work, to foreshadow the chapters to come....

“Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.” 

“We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.”