Goodbye our Darling RBG
Hurray! We'd protested! Successfully, we thought.
Boy, was all that energy wasted. I've sat here with a RESIST sign on the front of my house for months, still expecting to get egged or vandalized because my neighborhood is 1/2 redneck and 1/2 Don't-Give-a-Shit, and I YEARN for the days when I thought that was all that was wrong with the world.
Of course, I learned better and I was a much better focused raging liberal when I started teaching high school. 18 years of that had me convinced that crapping on education was a Republican conspiracy to dumb down our electorate--and all of my male counterparts thought I was delusional. Yeah. So glad I was right about that.
Not.
It's funny--I THOUGHT I knew about politics before 2015--but boy, the last four, five years have aged and educated all of us, right?
I saw the Ruth Bader Ginsburg movie (so good! Also, Armie Hammer...mmmm...) and, like the rest of America, grew to hope Bader Ginsburg lived forever in the pernicious tumult following Dumpster Fire's election. It was not to be--but it wasn't fair of us to wish for it, either.
When you're 17 you can put all your political faith in the guy who's gonna run for Student Body President next semester and fix a fountain--maybe, if you're lucky enough to have enough to eat, and a car (barely) and a job and the pale-skin pass to things like protests that doesn't get you gassed or shot.
When you're 50-something, even putting all your faith in the indomitable and amazing and stunningly brilliant and wise beyond even 87 years Ms.Ginsburg is something you know you can't do.
You can mourn her passing though. You can mourn the loss of a soul who understood that law and justice was for everybody, not just for the white and entitled few. You can mourn the loss of someone who understood that denying women their rights over their own destinies hurt men too--and hurt society and the world as a whole. You can mourn a person who seems to have embodied the best of us, someone who fought when it mattered, and who never, ever, would have put all that passion into a silly fountain when their were real dragons to be slaughtered, and not just windmills at which to tilt.
But you cannot let all your hopes die with her. When someone uses their platform and their power to fight for all of us, the least we can do is continue to fight in their memory when they're gone.
Goodbye, Ms. Bader Ginsburg. You have inspired us. May your warrior heart take its place at the hearth with your beloved husband, in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave and just may live forever.