Just want to give the HRC room a big hug!

[calimary]

24. Welcome to DU, Gamecock Lefty!

Glad you're here! And not just because you gave me a shout-out, either.

Hey, let's be practical here. I LONG for the days when idealism really does carry the day. Politically. Spiritually. Socially. Economically.

BUT WE AIN'T THERE.

Or, to put the most hopeful spin on it - we aren't there YET.

And I am, again, very happy to vow that if Bernie Sanders is "it", then I am ALL-IN. Eagerly, enthusiastically, and gleefully! But I want a woman in command, for a change. There is so much going on these days that all boils down to rolling back the progress that the woman's movement achieved during the 60s and 70s. We called it Women's Liberation. Women's Lib. Which meant we the believers or advocates of same became "libbers." It pushed all sides and corners of the proverbial envelope in the cause of justice and equality and fair play and a level playing field for women. Evening things up a little. Applying some corrections, pushing boundaries, defying conventions, challenging set ways and attitudes, rewriting and redefining just a freakin' boatload of assumptions about women. Assumptions that some ahead of my generation by maybe seven to 12 years were breaking through and rendering outmoded and increasingly irrelevant. Like, for example, the convention that a woman's place was in the home. Pretty much exclusively. She was to buckle down to baby-making and home-making. Anything else was not the norm.

As I was growing up, there was this prevailing notion of the "career gal" - the odd woman out, at the office, usually the kind of sassy young exception-to-the-rule featured in a series of Doris Day movies. The "career gal" was the label given to the young woman who did not go straight from college or her family home into the arms (and bed) of a husband to set about bearing the children of her new lord-and-master-in-training. The "career gal" was the oddity, the exception, the other thing that some women were venturing out to do. I saw that in my husband's family. They welcomed me but still, I didn't follow the conventional path. My husband's brothers all had wives who either got pregnant straight away or planned to do so in the first year or two of getting married. I was busy working. They even referred to me as the "career gal" of the family.

We've since evolved enough that the phrase "career gal" doesn't even come up anymore. But women are still, somehow, ridiculously, incomprehensibly under siege. The early fruits of the "Women's Lib" movement included the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment (sheesh, the opponents decried that women would be forced to go into combat! When we today have women just about everywhere in the military including all the hot zones), Roe v Wade, and more jobs opening up to women. It started in the 60s, in general, with the civil rights and anti-war movements - that by the 70s had begotten the woman's movement. It's because the 60s stirred things up and compelled us to start looking at things differently. There was a whole new post-war generation growing up and coming of age, and looking at things differently. So we had change - which in so many cases is now being rebelled against - on steroids. I wonder if maybe people who didn't want change tried to hold their tongues or cope or understand what was evolving and changing all around them and finally just couldn't deal with it anymore. Which seems to me is what we saw with the rise of the teabaggers in response to the very idea that there'd be a black man in the Oval Office who wasn't the janitor.

Seems to me we're seeing that rebellion against the constancy of change. Change is the only constant. Things WILL NOT stay the same as they always were. Things CHANGE. Things grow, evolve, stretch, stretch out of shape - or stretch into some new and more workable shape. And if you don't change as the times change, and change WITH those times, you become irrelevant. As Exhibit A, I give you the GOP platform with all its regressive, increasingly irrelevant and out-of-touch, outmoded, reactionary planks. The fact that they seem to be growing worse and more extreme and more Neanderthal by the day, I'm guessing, is some pretty good anecdotal evidence of how badly that side of the aisle hates change. How extremely that side of the aisle hates change. Hates being shaken out of their comfort zones. Demands that things be the way they've always been, now and forevermore, amen - despite the changes we see everywhere around us, in every institution, indoors, AND outside, too.

WAY long-winded rant that routes back to why I really want a woman in charge next time. Especially since we finally have a candidate who's seriously and credibly AND REALISTICALLY up to it. Women have YET to be fully-represented, OUR needs and OUR issues fully represented and integrated and responded to, even in this day and age. In the 21st Century forcryingoutloud. And that simply has to change. We MUST outgrow this shit we're in now.

And women's issues aren't just OUR issues - they're EVERYBODY's issues, crossing state lines, races, ages, faiths (and the lack thereof), economic strata, gender identity, ALL of it. Hillary is NOT perfect. So what? I'm not a perfectionist. I like to think I'm a little more of a realist, even if the reality isn't the ideal I'd prefer. And I'm voting for the next Supreme Court picker. So whoever it is, that candidate is gonna have a "D" by his/her name.