And Then There Were None.
Sunset in the Far Rockaways from a 60 degree day in January that was so calming and beautiful that, despite the global warming that made it possible, made me want to throw my life away and become a Starving Artist, walking the sands barefoot every night. It is here because it is once again giving me a sense of calm after writing this post.
It’s hard to articulate just how exhausting the news cycle is in 2020. I am writing this the weekend after Super Tuesday. It has been… a dispiriting week, we shall say. But I was still struggling to define what, exactly, it was about this particular moment that was bothering me. To be clear: there are many, many things that are bothering me. It bothers me that the Democratic frontrunner is an old white man who can barely make a coherent statement and has a tendency to give himself permission to touch strangers, especially young women. It bothers me that the second runnner-up, the one with the plans for revolution our country so clearly needs, is yet another old white man whose most vocal supporters treat him as infallible and berate anyone who supports another candidate for being Less Than. It bothers me that there is pandemic hitting the world and an entire sub-ecosystem of bills paid by crowdfunding and we still don’t have nationalized healthcare. It bothers me that NEW YORK DID NOT HAVE A WINTER THIS YEAR. It bothers me that millions of dollars were spent to end us up exactly where we started (looking at you, Bloomberg). It bothers me that it’s only March.
But the thing that finally made me cry was listening to a podcast this sunny Saturday morning and hearing a woman in California talk about how proud she was that the last two presidential votes she cast were for women. New York’s primary isn’t til April. I’m not going to get that chance.
I wasn’t strongly in one camp or another - I’ve spent the last few months vacillating between Bernie and Warren. They (and their supporters) both irritated me at different times, then won me over at others. And as more primaries came in it became clear that Warren wasn’t pulling in the votes she needed to stay. But the last few weeks have felt like watching a 2016 replay in slow motion, as another smart, educated, articulate woman who is very skilled at taking men to task without getting angry gets pushed to the sidelines to make way for the men who can do the job. And, turns out, that hurts.
It’s impossible to know how much misogyny played into Warren or Hillary’s campaigns; to quantify how much more or less successful these women could have been if their woman-ness was not a factor. Our disbelief and distrust in women runs too deep to be able to fully identify it. But I feel it. I feel it in every snake emoji, every conversation about Warren’s “viability,” every tweet accusing her of destroying the progressive wing of the party. Just because you can’t put numbers to it doesn’t mean its not true. It’s winking at me and sinking into my bones.
Of course - as another person on that podcast said - sexism played some part in all of this but also if she wasn’t a woman she wouldn’t be Elizabeth Warren. Because that’s the thing, right? There’s the misogyny that keeps women out of power and there is the great power of watching a woman fight. It is an emotional thing to watch a woman on the national stage call out misogyny. If Bernie had asked Bloomberg to let go of his NDA’s and said, “Why would she lie?” to Chris Matthews, it would have been a different kind of impactful. Possibly even more so because it would be old white men calling out old white men for their misogyny and - truly - you love to see it. But he didn’t. Because men usually don’t. After the debate, Biden also called for the release of NDA’s but, as previously mentioned, I don’t trust him either.
And maybe that’s why I’m actually sad. Because we just lost the last candidate who knows what it feels like to be oppressed.
Bernie sees oppression and works - admirably - to fight it. Women and minority groups feel it. Which is why watching the most diverse candidate pool boil down to these two is a particular kind of gut-punch. I’m going to get flack for this from Bernie supporters, telling me that his policies would make the world better for all oppressed people. And you know what? I agree. Universal healthcare, free college, better public education, the Green New Deal, equal wages - these are all things that will help women, as well as countless others. And I’m all for them. But there is seeing and there is knowing. Maybe its selfish of me to want to hear my name on the list but fine, I’m selfish. I want to hear it. I want to know that he is thinking about me the way she did. I want him to say the word “abortion” loudly and clearly and to say that restrictions are oppressive. I want him to talk about domestic violence and maternal mortality. I want him to talk about sexual harassment. Because you knew that even if she wasn’t talking about it, Warren was thinking about it, in the way that Castro thought about race, the way Kamala thought about race -and- gender, the way that Pete thought about homophobia, the way that lived experience makes you think about it.
So I cried.