This month I’m toggling between going deeper into my second retirement, or doubling down and going full tilt on my professional career for another decade or so.
Either way, I’m predicting I will be busy.
Facebook is continuously throwing “Retirement Planning” ads in my stream. My lifelong retirement plan has always been to be a burden on my children. I’ve been making excellent progress.
Well, well, well. Texas women are on fire this month. As a native of the Northeast, I didn’t know there were more than a handful of progressive liberals in the state other than those who occasionally “like” my liberal posts on Facebook.
Wrong.
I had the good fortune to meet with a group of high-powered Texas women at a downtown restaurant the day these photos were taken. One of the women has been active in national and local politics her whole life. She worked on campaigns for Ann Richards in the 70s. Something this tiny, beautiful woman said that night seared into my brain like a cow-branding.
“I was standing before the Capitol steps with all those women. I looked up at the Capitol, then I looked around at my friends with me who are all my age… it was like an epiphany! All I could think of is HERE WE ARE – FORTY YEARS LATER still talking about ABORTION!”
So wrong.
I wish I had more time to devote to this post, but we’re in a 24-hour news cycle, and the Cleveland kidnapping story will soon vanish from our short-term memory. For those of us who’ve lived through and narrowly escaped domestic violence, this incident is (yet again) a long-term memory reminder.
“So, you know, I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” What Charles Ramsey did – and I hope to God he is immortalized for it – is called “Bystander Intervention.” As Amy Davidson writes in the New Yorker, “For Berry and the others to be rescued, in other words, two things had to happen: she had to never forget who she was, and that who she was mattered; and Ramsey needed to not care who she might be at all—to think that all that mattered was that a woman was trapped behind a door that wouldn’t open, and to walk onto the porch.”
Please take the 20 minutes to watch this TED video of Jackson Katz who asks a very simple question, “Why is violence against women a women’s issue?”
Update: So, of course we now find out Ramsey has a domestic violence background of his own.
A Piece of My Mind 