i literally have chills all up and down my arms and legs after reading this... and my eyes are all misty... i LOVE what this woman has to say... and i soooooooooooo agree... do you?
Eve Ensler, the American playwright, performer,
feminist and activist best known for "The Vagina Monologues", wrote the following about Sarah Palin:
Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last
night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore
the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular
thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or
their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen
one in person or touched one.
Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on
ice.
Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.
I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have
spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop
violence against them.
It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice
was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made
this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists
But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices
is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story --
connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and
war.
I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the
most dangerous choices of my lifetime,
and should this country chose those candidates the
fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many
areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the
impact that duo would have on the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the
bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this
as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes
or gets better or evolves.
She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the
arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the
pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is
fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears
are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered.
Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi
war, "It was a task from God."
Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion.
She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or
not.
She obviously does not believe in sex education or
birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how
many babies that makes.
Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I
gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with
people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment
of ambiguity and difference.
This is a woman who could and might very
well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one
of the most diverse populations on earth.
Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom
Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has
shot hundreds of wolves from the air.
Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right,
her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector,
when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied
in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing
of everything America has ever tried to be.
I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold
this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not
just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether
we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for
humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and
diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion,
undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining,
coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from
dependency and destruction.
It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or
whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine
whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear,
fundamentalism
and aggression.
If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your
power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled
the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill."
I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction.
I think of domination.
I think of military exercises that force mindless
repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent.
I think of pain.
Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the
ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust
between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this
precious thing we call life?
Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008