With the Morning

There are a lot of things that make me cry. Battlestar Galactica. Doctor Who. Space. The Night Circus. The movie Atonement. However, I emphatically am not a crier when something goes wrong in my personal or professional life. I can't do it. I always hear my daddy's voice in my head asking me if crying will make things better and no, it never does, so why do it? 

A few days ago, I attended a seminar on "The Status of Women and Girls in Minnesota." I attend seminars like this for work a few times a year, and normally I manage to handle them pretty well. I go, network, take a bunch of notes, and  bring the information back to my professional writing. This conference though, it was different. It was the first time I sat down in a room full of other smart, dedicated, passionate women and heard that the status of girls and women in Minnesota isn't getting any better.

Let me repeat that. Girls and women in Minnesota are not much better off than we were two years ago, the last time this report was published. More than that, the statistics I read were shocking. In a state that I love enough to consider calling home permanently, the status of women and girls is actually worse than I had anticipated. One in three of us will be sexually assaulted by midlife. Minnesota is in the top twenty worst states for child prostitution. Given equal qualifications, equally sized organizations, equal everything, I still make only 80% of what a man makes in my line of work.

There were more statistics, many of them as depressing as the ones I've just shared. At the end of the presentation I booked it out the door, got into my car, pulled my sunglasses over my face, and wept.

I pulled myself together eventually. But the knowledge that the past ten years that I've spent working for women's equality have, apparently, been for naught was exhausting in a way I've never experienced. When I came home for work the day after the conference, I wanted to do anything except think about the status of girls and women in Minnesota. In fact, I wanted to do anything except think, and in my pursuit of something fluffy, I happened across one of the most devastating articles on global warming I've ever read.

I closed my laptop and started crying again.

I've never been the kind of person who's inclined to despair. I'm not even inclined to bad moods. I have a ridiculous impulse to keep on sunny side of things, as it is, but in this instance I felt like I had been sucker punched. I've devoted my life to nonprofits. To making the world a better, safer place for girls and women. To building a sustainable, just world where everyone has enough to survive. For years, I've believed that if I just work hard enough, if I just convince one more person to take the bus, or that they don't really need a giant flat-screen television, if I can get one more girl to camp where she can learn self-dependence and self-respect, the world would get (albeit slowly) a little better. Here I was confronted with definitive proof that all of my actions, all of my incandescent light bulbs and bus passes, all of the money I've raised for women in crisis and all of the advocating I've done for girls and young women amounted to, essentially, nothing.

I immediately started entertaining  all kinds of maudlin and macabre thoughts. "When food shortages start, will the world turn into something resembling my nightmares inspired by Cormac McCarthy's The Road? Should I move back to Wisconsin now, because when fuel prices go through the roof, I might not be able to make it back? Why bother to have children, because I'll be bringing them into a science fiction novel world, a world I had never intended to raise a family in?"

While one part of my brain was furiously steaming through worst case scenarios, the other part was occupied with "Well, clearly my actions aren't making a difference, so why bother? Why continue to work long, exhausting hours for comparatively little pay? Why take the bus to work? Why compost? Why bother with any of this?"

These thoughts have been with me since the latter half of the week and I haven't been able to shake them. Then this morning I woke up with an answer. Washed up on the shores of my dreams from last night were two pieces from flotsam, left over from my years as a Catholic. The first was a line from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, an activist who was arrested on a picket line in her 80s:

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that. No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do. 

I got up this morning and wrote letters to my senators and the president about climate change and the drastic changes that are necessary to ensure that this planet is here for my children. I wrote a letter of inquiry to request funds to make some major repairs on a camp for girls. I made a donation to a battered women's shelter. I bought a new bus pass. It may be that these actions will have no effect on the status of women and girls or climate change in the long run, that the changes we need are so profound, huge, and long-overdue that we cannot make them in time. That's probable, but it's not for me to say. For the time being, I need to continue to do go through the motions of building a more sustainable world brick by brick, shepherding  this state along to true equality step by tedious step.

The second piece of Catholic debris that came to me out of my sleep last night was a line from the psalms:

Weeping may last all night, but joy comes with the morning.

Amen. Alleluia.