Growing up my little sister and I had chores to do. We had two kinds of chore, the first being a list from my mother, which entailed cleaning up the interior of the house. Especially when company was coming, my sister and I would find ourselves with brooms, mops, and lots of torn up t-shirts used as dust rags. Then there was Daddy’s Day Off Chores. These CHORES, required lotsmoft holding your breath, pleading, and closing one eye at a time as my sister and I were usually digging out the fallen first from our back yard, reaching our hands into the drain at the bottom of the cellar steps, clearing out, God knows what lurked there, or finding our selves in the recesses of our basement, where my sister and I were certain, was a door way to Hell, a hibernation room for monsters, and almost every single species of spider known to man. My sister and i would first pretend to touch any of these spaces, but standing behind us was my fathers, booming voice, telling us “If you on scratch the surface, and don’t clean it all up now, those spooky creatures will come back again. Our choice then, was to do the job within thorough effort, or just give a small damn and wait until the NEXT time, when God knows what might be lurking, waiting!
So, now we have sexual harassment of women as the new pile of dirt lining up against the American way. We have moved from Black Lives Matter, to Gun Violence, to anti-LGBTQ discrimination, with the added touch of xenophobia, to the voices of women tired of being victims. The GOP, and now the Dem Party all are seemingly appalled at the emotional and physical harm, string and brave women have finally found the will, to come forward and SCREAM no more. But like most other cultural/religious habits, justified by God or Community, women have been harassed way beyond these newest revelations of powerful insecure men, acting in a menacing way. Women have been considered chattel for a long time, evidenced in inequality in pay, as in shined because they happen to be single mothers, perfected by anti-abortion, anti-choice laws and of course the insistence by mostly men that women’s reproductive rights are NOT AT ALL RIGHTS , women should have.
American politicians and the public who elect them have a choice, similar to my little sister and I when attacking piles of dirt, or crevices surrounded by large spider webs, just scratch the surface, pretending that enough talk, enough ringing of the fingers will be fine for now, or in fact just use all your energy and GET THE JOB DONE, by cleaning the bull shit, the soot, the ancient layers of dirt! Talk is cheap in this country, and with Trump we have found talk changes, and the truth of the matter seems to evaporate into thin air.
