{"id":11850,"date":"2017-01-21T18:08:20","date_gmt":"2017-01-22T02:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=11850"},"modified":"2017-01-22T07:39:17","modified_gmt":"2017-01-22T15:39:17","slug":"holding-it-down-for-anger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/21\/holding-it-down-for-anger\/","title":{"rendered":"Holding It Down for Anger"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the Womxn’s March (January 21st, 2017) I auctioned off the pussyhats my mom and I both made for the march. And before doing so, I gave a very brief rallying call to the attendees at the pre-march breakfast hosted by my friends. We raised about 700 dollars.<\/p>\n

Here’s the text as I wrote it the night before; my spoken version (no notes) was shorter. And the march? It was a thing of beauty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a call for positivity as we prepare for this march, and that\u2019s a fine thing. More flies with honey and all that. But I want to take a minute and hold it down for anger.<\/p>\n

Because I\u2019m angry. And I\u2019m willing to bet that you\u2019re angry too, it\u2019s why you\u2019re here. You\u2019re angry about racism, the unchecked police violence against our black and brown neighbors. You\u2019re angry about gun violence, that the lives of the children killed at Sandyhook and lives of the good people of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were not too high a price to pay for continued easy access to guns. You\u2019re angry about the way the protestors at Standing Rock have been treated, about the way Governor Mike Pence systematically attacked \u2013 and continues to attack \u2013 queers and women. About climate change denial and public lands pilfering and probably a hundred other things that I have not mentioned yet. We\u2019re here because we\u2019re ANGRY.<\/p>\n

I wanted to find good quotes about forging anger into action, so I went to the Internets, as one does, and of course I found the magnificent John Lewis taking about good trouble, the kind of trouble that makes change.<\/p>\n

But I also found Leymah Gebowee. She\u2019s a Liberian activist who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work leading a women\u2019s movement to end the Liberian Civil War. She intentionally returned to Liberia from Ghana where she\u2019d been living as a refugee \u2013 and she went on to lead Liberia\u2019s women in a SUCCESSFUL effort to end the war in her home country. What a great inspiration for us today.<\/p>\n

She had some things to say about anger, like this:<\/p>\n

I always tell people, anger is like liquid. It’s fluid, it’s like water. You put it in a container and it takes the shape of that container. So many people you see in prison, unleashing war on their people, they are angry, and they take their anger and put it into a violent container.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019re angry, but we are not here to put that anger into a violent container. I don\u2019t know where we want to direct it yet, I\u2019m still learning what to do next. But we\u2019re not here to turn anger into violence. That\u2019s the other guy.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one more quote from Leymah\u2026<\/p>\n

Activism is something that no one can fake. You get angry. You cry. But you never throw in your towel, because that anger is what is propelling you to further action.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anger into action. Yes.<\/p>\n

I hate talking on the phone, but I\u2019ve called my reps \u2013 and Speaker Ryan\u00a0 \u2013 repeatedly over the last several weeks.\u00a0 I knitted a hat, I made three, actually, and enlisted my mom to make the some, too. It\u2019s not much, I know, there\u2019s more to do, but I did these things because I was \u2013 am \u2013 angry.<\/p>\n

I have no authority to tell you to be anything, but I want you to know that I think it\u2019s great that you\u2019re angry. There\u2019s that bumper sticker philosophy that says if you\u2019re not angry, you\u2019re not paying attention and you, my angry friends, are paying attention.<\/p>\n

I want us all to turn that anger in to action, and into resolve, and into success. And I also want us to notice how exciting it is that so many people are expected to turn out to march today. Already, we\u2019ve have unity. And today\u2019s symbol for that is these crazy pink hats.<\/p>\n

\"\"I like the hats. I like that they take the awful words of an awful man \u2013 \u201cGrab \u2018em by the pussy\u201d and invert it. \u201cOh yeah?\u201d they say, \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to get past us first, and look, we are LEGION.\u201d And I like that they\u2019re funny and pink and silly. Because yeah, I\u2019m angry, and you are too but also, we need light and joy also.<\/p>\n

Emma Goldman had something to say about this too. A Russian Jew by birth, she was a badass activist for economic equality and women\u2019s rights. She was jailed for \u201cincitement to riot\u201d during the 1893 depression. But she was no killjoy, she did not think anger and joy mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s dance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few words before the Women’s March in Seattle, January 21st, 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":11851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-op-ed","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11850"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11858,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11850\/revisions\/11858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}