Getting mad does more good than getting depressed or feeling helpless.
Here’s another timely book. Add it to your list. Righteous tenacity is needed, and it requires our being Good and Mad, the title of Rebecca Traister’s just released book, subtitled The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. Rebecca had a conversation with Amanda Marcotte, who writes for Salon, though I saw this in Reader Supported News. Traister took on Orrin Hatch, the Republican Senator from Utah, who when women shouted at him as he got on the elevator, after the Kavanaugh vote, he brushed them away with a wave.
“Grow up,” he said—and I personally felt like grabbing him in a headlock, and taking him down, all the way to the basement.
For Traister his most infuriating phrase was: “We shouldn’t have to put up with this.”
He said this to fellow Senators when a woman who demonstrated at the Affordable Care Act vote, shouted that she would die if they canceled the ACA. He called her a loudmouth. He preferred she die quietly.
Traister observed, “Now, he said the exact same thing three weeks later talking to reporters in the senate building about these accusations being made against his Supreme Court candidate, and he said, ‘We shouldn't have to put up with this.’ That sums it up for me.”
That's it. That's stripped of its window dressing. We, the men in power. Me, Orrin Hatch — who has had the same goddamn seat on the Senate Judiciary committee since 1991 when I treated Anita Hill like shit — we shouldn't have to put up with challenges to our power. We shouldn’t have to put up with repercussions. We shouldn't have to put up with consequences, or with anybody interfering with our ability to exert authority over this nation.”
That mindset runs loose now, unchecked in three houses of government: Power should come easily to those entitled to power. That was the message.
Power belongs not to the sick and the scared, not to the traumatized, not to the female in any shape—by any name, in any condition but bent over, or on her back. No, LOCK HER UP—whether Hillary or Diane as in Feinstein, or Christine Ford, or Anita Hill, or ….Wait!
Lorena Bobbit?!! Put down that knife! What are you doing here? Don’t look at her face, John Wayne! Those snakes! Holy Medusa!
