Headed to the guv!

Fast on the heels of my excitement over New York's marriage equality (June brides? How 'bout June PRIDE?) comes something I've been coveting for quite a while.

I think that sending me back to the state coalition in Springfield is a "capital" idea! I'm so stoked to serve my center and the crisis cause by working with the statewide organization. Best of all, it doesn't conflict with my classes (who says you can't have it all?) and I can learn from the delegates coming from the other crisis centers. I really love the networking and learning all about the sister centers all over the state (and then bringing it on home), so this is going to be one terrific opportunity.

This is going to be an awesome fiscal year....

Happy Pride Month!

Well, this is surely a wonderful piece of news...

On the 42nd anniversary of the Stonewall Riots* that got the whole gay liberation movement started off, marriage equality is finally the law in New York! (Which is the same place the riots occurred and got the ball rolling.)

This is the biggest state where this has happened, and I'm super-excited for my sisters and brothers in the Big Apple. Let's hope ALL the other states follow soon, or better yet, that DOMA is finally repealed so we all can enjoy equal marriage rights!!

You got to dance with them what brung you

Dear Molly*,

We might have been without you for 4 years, but I miss you and your incisive commentary still.

I just wonder what you would say about all the crazy political and social happenings that have been going on in the four years since you left us. Wherever you are, I hope that you are at peace and that your influence lives on.

Peace be with you, sister.

In solidarity,

Revel

*Molly Ivins (1932-2007), political columnist, journalist, and progressive extraordinaire. I would read her column religiously from 2000-2007 and own all of her books.

The Bridge Poem

The Bridge Poem
By Donna Kate Rushin

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things

Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody

Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me Right?

I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the Ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends' parents...

Then
I've got the explain myself
To everybody

I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip

I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf you your better selves

I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self

Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die

The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses

I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

--This is one of my favorite poems! It opens up the feminist classic, This Bridge Called My Back, by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, and it sounds even better when you read it out loud! Any self-respecting feminist or anti-racist activist really should read it, since it really drives the point home. I read it in my first graduate class, and I loved it so much I've had everybody I know read it too. So now that I've crossposted it, perhaps more will know it as well!