The World is My Oyster!
May is my favorite month. Five of my oldest (length of time, not age), dearest friends in the whole world, my first lifelong, best guy friend, my first love, my dearest friend and college roommate, and my 20+years long-distance riding buddy were born in May. It's also the birthday of John F. Kennedy, a man I deeply respected as a young adult and still respect, even though he turned out to be just another human being, full of flaws.
May is a beautiful month in Florida. It promises 30 days of sunshine and the beginning of an intense heat that swells toward full-on, white-hot summer. I am indoors, enjoying that magnificent modern invention of air-conditioning and thinking about history, I've been watching a documentary on Anita Hill's testimony on Capital Hill and how it changed the trajectory of her life and women's protection from sexual harassment in the workplace across the nation.
It's a funny thing about history – the people who actually live through it don't really understand that it's something historic. Even if it's all over television and the newspapers (at least back then people read the papers. Now, in-the-moment, breaking news lives happens, around the clock, on the internet.
It's May, and the reason I always celebrate my friends' birthdays is because, between the four of them, they sum up the soundtrack of my early years. I remember exactly what I was doing when I found out John F. Kennedy cheated regularly on his beautiful wife, Jackie. I never recovered from that knowledge. When I discovered that my first husband had been cheating on me since a few months after we were married, I thought again about Jack and Jackie. I understood how she must have felt. The anger I felt was a different kind of heat. It burned through a brief period of my life diminishing and destroying everything to do with that marriage. It was as if it never existed.
This year, the heat isn't just meteorological, it's political. Perhaps, indirectly because of Anita Hill, a woman is running for president of the United States. It's not the first time, or the first time for this particular woman. However, potentially, it is the closest a woman – the same/only woman – has ever been to being successful.
Unfortunately, she is using the same old, tired mechanism for getting elected that men have been using for more than 200 years. For the women of this nation who believe a woman is very capable of running the country, she's not exactly an odds-on favorite. There are other women who should be running, and some feel there should be more than one woman running. Again, it's not the first time, this time. Not all women have the same political platform, background, or determination. It wouldn't be a bad thing for one woman to run against another. Fact: Men have also been doing that for over 200 years.
We've come a long way, baby! (Thanks to Gloria and Virginia.) It's heating up fast. But this is May. Politically, it will continue to get hotter. Thanks to women like Gloria Steinem, Lilly Leadbetter, and Anita Hill, we are acquiring a little bit more self-esteem, bravery in the workplace, and a few more pennies on the dollar every year.
As Baby Boomer babes begin to leave the workplace for retirement and the travel and fun dreamed about for a long time, those shoulders all of us stood on will continue to support the Gen Xs and Gen Ys we leave behind. I hope they will remember these women's stories and acknowledge the shoulders they stand on as they climb through the jagged opening of that shattered glass ceiling to take their place as women leaders of our nation. I hope they tell Anita, Gloria, and Lilly's stories to their daughters and granddaughters. And when the question of who was the best president ever has to be broken down into a three-part question: Who was the greatest male president, the greatest female president, and greatest ever over-all president, some of them can claim those women as their inspiration.
What did the good witch, Glenda say? There's no place like home? One woman who has lived in the White House as her home intends to move back in 2017. Where are the other women, smart enough, sharp enough, and politically-astute enough to run for and win the office of president of the United States? It's time they started stepping up to the plate.
The world is your oyster, eat it! With some fresh horseradish, red spicy sauce, and a squeeze of lime. Then have another! The planet is changing. Be part of that change. Happy Birthday to all of my dear friends, and to Jack, RIP.
