wildfire/06_chap2.html

<h1>CHAPTER 2</h1>
<h2>A Better <i>Today</i></h2>
<p>After the demise of the ERA in June 1982, everywhere I went in this country women were asking desperately, "What shall we do <i>now</i>? What shall we <i>do</i>? a relentless refrain that over the next few years took on a peculiarly nightmarish quality for me; I heard it in my dreams, echoing off the walls and along the corridors of my mind. If I had believed in myself and
other women seriously enough then, it would have taken me only a short time to figure out that it was the wrong question, and why. The clue was that we <i>couldn't</i> answer it. Women are brilliant, individually and together. If we couldn't answer it, it had to be because it was not answerable; it had to be that it was the wrong question.</p>
<p>As I thought about that, I began to understand that it was an unanswerable question because we can't postulate a new paradigm standing in and saturated by the old one. How, for instance, can we devise plans, how can we even <i>imagine</i> what women would do if we were free of patriarchy - free in the cells of our bodies, our genes and chromosomes, every atom of our brains? We haven't seen women feel and act free for over 5,000 years. Even if we could remember back before patriarchy, there has never been a time on this planet when women have been in the situation we are now in, so even our species' memory contains no model. The only way we are going to know how free women behave is to become free ourselves and watch our own behavior. Only then can we say with authority, "<i>This</i> is what free women do!"</p>
<p>But in the meantime, we can't think from bondage into freedom, we can't ask, "What should we <i>do</i>?" because if we do, we have none but the old conditioned answers; the horizons of our imaginations are limited by our old blinders.</p>
<p>We <i>can</i> think, however, "How do I want to feel, how do I want to be in the new world?" It took me four years of thinking about it almost continually to reach the conclusion that those were the relevant questions, the questions answerable in non-collaborative, changeeffecting terms: "how shall we <i>be</i>? How shall we feel about ourselves? What kind of a world
do we want for ourselves <i>right now</i>?" It took me another year to understand why those are the relevant questions and why resistance is profoundest collaboration. It took women's insistence that I explain myself more fully, that I offer more satisfactory reasoning for the
conclusions I had reached with intuitive leaps. Through the whole process, I learned that if I could ask the right question, the answer followed almost at once.</p>
<p>Working to clarify my theory, I remembered that shortly after I became a feminist in 1977, I attended a feminist event where I heard an idea that made tears of relief pour down my cheeks and that now seems to me basic to any discussion of how to make the new world we long for. The woman speaking said, "A fundamental feminist principle is that the means are the ends; that <i>how</i> we do something is <i>what</i> we get."</p>
<p>The tears of relief were from realizing that I wasn't stupid after all and I have since figured out why I had always thought I was, how much of my life-long feeling of alienation that principle explains.</p>
<p>I went through the entire male educational system feeling intellectually inferior to men, as if a part of my brain weren't functioning. I endured countless agonizing moments of being terrified that others would see through my disguise of intelligence to my true witlessness.</p>
<p>I remember sitting in one graduate seminar after another, the men in their tweed jackets with leather elbows, pulling on their pipes - English departments are incredibly stuffy - talking, as I trusted then, eruditely about their ideas, taking themselves very seriously. I felt humble and wormlike in their presence, full of gratitude to be allowed to sit at their
feet. But there was often a place in their discussion where reason seemed to skip a beat. At first I would interrupt and say something like, "Uh, Arnold ... I didn't follow that. Would you please, uh, <i>recapitulate</i> a little?"</p>
<p>Every face in the room - and in those days most of the faces were male - would turn slowly toward me. With pained looks everyone would sigh as if to say, "Why did we even allow
them to learn to <i>read</i>?" A couple of such humiliating scenes was all it took to silence me. After that, when they came to the places in their discourse that I couldn't follow, I simply faked it. Like everyone else in the room, I looked wise and nodded my head and murmured, "Um hum, um hum." Over the years I got so good at faking it that sometimes I'd even nudge the fellow next to me with my elbow and murmur, "Interesting, hmm?"</p>
<p>So I faked my way through a master's program and bluffed my way through a doctorate, thinking the while that everyone else must be very smart to be getting the connection I always seemed to be missing. I got so good at faking it, in fact, that I forgot I <i>was</i> faking it. But on some level, I knew I didn't get it at all.<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
<p>But recently I have come to understand much more fully the implications of what I learned in that feminist gathering that night. Not just that I was right all along, that reason <i>had</i> skipped beats, my colleagues <i>had</i> missed connections. But more significantly, the reason I hadn't got the point of their arguments was that they <i>weren't gettable</i>. The very structure of male thought is faulty.</p>
<p>Now that I have become aware of it, I hear men's spurious cause-and-effect, goal-oriented, five-year-plan, means-to-ends "reasoning" a dozen times a day. But of the multifarious examples of it, the one that illustrates most clearly how it skews and distorts reality is this:</p>
<p>Men say that, their goal being peace, naturally they are going to have to bomb and bomb and massacre and rape and pillage and torture and lay waste and then - this is the place at which I used to feel as if I were the only person on earth who hadn't caught on - suddenly, miraculously, there will come a magical moment, a moment when some sort of alchemy takes place, and - <i>voila!</i> - peace!</p>
<p>Hey guys, run that by me again, will ya?</p>
<p>Women have always known on some level that there is only one way to have peace and that is to be peaceful right now. We have understood that, because the means are the ends, <i>how</i> we behave is <i>what</i> we get.</p>
<p>But as I thought this idea through time and time again during the last couple of years, I found that it wasn't enough for me that some feminist had once asserted that it was true, or that my intuition - that I call "my wise woman inside" - had shouted, "Yes!" when I'd heard it, or that it explained so much that had been inexplicable. I wanted the theory, the how and the why of it. I wanted to get it with all my faculties, feel more intellectually satisfied with it. I needed to think it through for myself.</p>
<p>I found that the key to understanding it more satisfactorily came from atomic physics, the idea that in our atomic universe there is no such thing as linear time.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a> Atomic science tells us that, contrary to how we have been conditioned to perceive it, time does not move from here to
there, it is <i>not</i> like a river, it is not "passing," not going anywhere. Instead, it simply <i>is</i>, like the ocean, and we are in it as fish are in the sea. Time is our medium. We are at any moment in all the time there ever was or ever will be, surrounded by time in the form, paradoxically, of, at once, only an instant and also eternity.</p>
<p>Because there is no past or future separate from the present (since all time is together here right now), the past and the future exist only in the present. There is not a detached blob of time somewhere out in the ocean called "future ocean," or a partial blip of ocean left behind called "past ocean." Like the ocean, all time is together and now.</p>
<p>This is immensely important for several reasons. For one thing, it means that since this moment is the only time we have, the only time we have the power to change or create anything is right this moment. One of the crudest crimes of patriarchy has been to teach us to project our thoughts into a future that will never come (getting together our vitae and our five-year-plans) or focusing us back into a past that is only memories of a present, keeping us unaware of the locus of our power in the present moment and effectively imprisoning us in time.</p>
<p>But an even more crucial reason for understanding time as an ocean rather than as a river is that if all time is together in this moment, the present and the future are not separate. More than this, since the future is in the birth canal of the present, we can predict the future by what we are doing in the present. What we are doing in the present is <i>creating</i> the future, <i>is</i> the future.</p>
<p>For me the implications of this are stunning. It answers the question of how we go about making a new world right here in the putrid debris of senile patriarchy: we <i>do now</i> what we want to be doing in the future, we <i>be now</i>, <i>feel now</i> how we thought we could be and feel only in some future time.</p>
<p>This means that if we want a future world in which women are not afraid - of rape and poverty and humiliation and other male violence - there is only one way to create it and that is by being unafraid now. We can't first try to change the men so women don't have to be afraid of them. If we do this now, we make the future one in which women, in fear, continue to try to change men. We can't get to fearlessness from being afraid; a magical moment of alchemy when fearlessness appears is as impossible as peace appearing out of rape and pillage. We make a fear-free world by being unafraid in this moment, the only moment we live.</p>
<p>Because what we are doing and feeling now determines the future, we can make a world in which women are not sacrificing our time and energy, our needs and desires, for someone else's better world down the line somewhere, by not sacrificing now or ever again.</p>
<p>The wise old woman who lives inside me told me this emphatically in my early days as a feminist, but I didn't take her seriously then. When I first came into the Women's Movement over a decade ago during the ERA campaign, I attended meeting after meeting in which speakers, trying to pump up flagging enthusiasm, said something like, "I know you're exhausted; so am I. We've all been working so diligently and bravely, nearly burning ourselves out. And even though we know we probably won't see the results of our labors in our lifetimes, I for one say it's been worth it. It's been worth it to make sure our children have a better world than we had. So I'm not going to give up, and I know you're not going to either. Right?" And the audience would fairly scream as one, "Right! We'll never give up!"</p>
<p>Though my innards were complaining, "Yuk! I don't want a better tomorrow; I want a better <i>today</i>!" I would squish this renegade feeling and shout, "I'll never give up!" right along with everybody else, knowing, none better, that how long you could put off present for greater future gratification was one of patriarchy's prime criteria for true adulthood. I don't believe that any more, of course. Cause and effect, as men have perceived and taught it, simply does not explain my reality and never has. Neither does their hatred and fear of pleasure.</p>
<p>I have also stopped believing the lie that the change we want takes a very long time and will happen sometime, somewhere out there in the future. I am certain that the future is now, that what men erroneously call "the future" does not exist. Because it does not exist, there can be no cause and effect, no getting there from here. There is simply being there, being now the way we want to be and the way we want women to be in a new world, not doing other "interim" things in some futile effort to <i>get</i> there. Doing "interim" things makes a future in which women in vain continue to do "interim" things.</p>
<p>This means that if we want a future world in which women are not on our knees pleading with men to be a little kinder - economically, politically, legally, religiously, personally - we must get up off our knees right now. There is no magic moment when groveling suddenly becomes self-respect and independence of spirit.</p>
<p>Neither is there any moment of alchemy when getting women into office will change the system, because what women have to do today to get into office <i>determines</i> what they will be doing in the future. There is simply no getting to a feminist value system by acting out of the old patriarchal values of competition, expediency, hierarchy. Another way of saying that the means are the ends is to point out that we can't touch filth, even while trying to clean it up, without getting it on our hands.</p>
<p>Women say, "But if I can get in there, I can subvert their system for women's ends." But since the only genuinely subversive act for prisoners of war is to get out, the very fact of staying in prevents a woman from being subversive. Thinking of the women who got "in," I consider that I haven't seen one instance of their subverting the system. Any liberal man could have done as well or better for women since he wouldn't have been seen as not being objective, as favoring his own group. I wonder, when I hear a woman say that <i>she</i> will succeed in subversion where others have failed, what makes her think she is the exceptional one? I wonder why we can't honor other women's experience, learn from it, and say, "If they didn't change the system, it's because they couldn't. If being as they are -  strong, smart, courageous women - they couldn't do it, it's because it can't be done." Thousands have tried and failed. I suggest we thank them for making clear its futility and move on.</p>
<p>There is no getting to integrity from not having any now, from voting for the least offensive candidates, for instance, knowing that at best their vision is reformist and that reform is collusion. Voting for either men or women in this system is voting <i>for</i> the system, for patriarchy, which is based on the hatred of women. So there is no way on earth for selfloving women to vote without compromising our integrity. We are living in the future this moment, creating it breath by breath. What we do and how we do it right now is the world of the future.</p>
<p>Some people were shocked that I didn't vote in the 1988 election. I was shocked that they <i>did</i>. The day after, I overheard a conversation on a plane in which one man was lamenting to another: "It seems to me that we never have a decent candidate any more, that we have to vote for the lesser of two evils every time. I can't understand it." If he had realized that by voting for the lesser of two evils, he helped create a world in which he would always have to vote for the lesser of two evils; if he had understood that by voting for evil <i>at all</i>, even if for a lesser evil, he was still voting for evil, and that since everyone who voted, voted for evil - either a lesser
or greater one - surely there was no possible way to get anything <i>but</i> evil; if he had understood that what he was doing every moment of his life was determining future moments, he would have been shocked to see his collusion in the deteriorating political situation that he deplored. We cannot compromise our integrity and have a reality with integrity anymore than we can have peace by waging war.</p>
<p>It seems to me, therefore, that if we want a world in which women have integrity and are independent, self-governing, and untamed - and patriarchy cannot survive women's being any of these - we have to have integrity, be independent, self-governing, and wild <i>right now</i>. The new world, the feminist world, is not somewhere off in a nonexistent future. That world is either right now or it is never. To the degree that this moment we feel independent of men and their system and do not participate in it, we live in a world where patriarchy cannot exist. Men cannot do patriarchy without our fear and dependence.</p>
<p>I want the new world to be a place in which everyone is guided by the integrity of their own self-loving inner voice all the time. So when the woman under the tree in Michigan asked me if I thought she was being irresponsible, I told her, "You don't have to believe a word <i>I</i> say. I could be on the wrong track altogether. You don't need to listen to or believe anyone else on earth. But it seems to me that to have integrity you must believe your own voice, the voice that just spoke to you through your body."</p>
<p>Because our bodies cannot be either in the past or in the future as our brains can, but are anchored firmly in the present - the only time we are alive and therefore the only time we have power - they are absolutely trustworthy messengers. Men have tried manfully to disconnect spirit and mind and body to prevent our having integrity, to keep us from piecing together our shattered voice. But the truth is that we are whole - spirit and mind and body intimately interwoven with one another, each existing in and informing the others. When our bodies speak, they make us privy to the intentions of our spirits and deep minds.</p>
<p>Our bodies are easy to understand if we will listen to them and take them seriously. What does that really mean? Many women feel the rightness of what they are thinking and doing affirmed somewhere in their bodies, in the pits of their stomachs, for instance, or in their chests. I experience the "right" or "go" signal very strongly in the high center of my torso, between my abdomen and back ribs, and often simultaneously all over and throughout my body. Sometimes my skin prickles.</p>
<p>I explained further to the woman in Michigan my belief that when we are doing or thinking things that are truly freeing, or when we are being free in some way, we feel free right that moment - light, buoyant, full of hope and energy and love - that's how we know we're on the right track. "When did you expect to feel liberated, and what did you think it was going to feel like?" I demanded of her. "Whatever and whenever, the feeling you just described to
me - <i>this</i> is <i>it</i>, the time and feeling you've been longing and working so hard for and thought was far off in a mythical future somewhere."</p>
<p>When I have this feeling, I hold on to it as long as I can. Its very gloriousness has much to teach me about reality. Anytime I want it back, I remember how I got to it in the first place. I "am" in the present the way I hoped to be sometime in the new feminist world. I practice seeing and feeling the vibrant colors around me, feel the breeze on my skin, breathe deeply and often, touch everything, wake up, come alive, be unafraid, forgive myself, love myself madly, be joyful. Patriarchy cannot exist in the presence of life and joy and fearlessness and love of self, so all the while any of us are experiencing these feelings, we make and hold a space in the cosmos where there is no oppression of women. When enough of us create such a space inside and around ourselves, when enough of us feel free of the imperatives of this system, moment by moment, freedom will become reality for all women in the world.</p>
<p>The principle that the means are the ends provides more - and more conclusive - evidence that resistance is not only futile, but that it literally and actively strengthens the things resisted. Our failure to understand this principle earlier explains to me why the Women's Movement has not yet created a new world, let alone transformed the old one. I understand
now why women's resistance - our protesting, demonstrating, lobbying, demanding - did not and cannot change patriarchy.</p>
<p>Resistance is the other, essential half of the war model: attack/resist; it takes both attack and resistance together to make war. Resistance, therefore, <i>is</i> war, and since the means are the ends, war can only produce more war, never peace.</p>
<p>The bumper sticker says it all: "What if they threw a war and nobody came?" The men are still throwing the age-old, all-out, global, gynecidal war against women, but I'm not going, and if I don't go, they can't use my resistance to keep the war going. If enough of us don't go, they can't throw the war at all. I want women everywhere not to go to the war anymore. I want us not to turn up on the battlefield thinking we can win when we can only be slaughtered.</p>
<p>For this reason, I no longer think of myself as a "woman warrior" as I once did. I am not fighting anything or anyone anymore, not mimicking men's old deadly pattern. I think of myself and other like-minded women now as the goddess,<a href="#fn3">[3]</a> creating a new pattern, creating the world afresh.</p>
<p>As soon as enough of us - and it doesn't need the majority, just the critical mass of us - feel right now how we thought we were going to feel down the road sometime when the men had changed and when bit by bit we had knocked down the patriarchal fortress, the moment the small number that is the critical mass of us is able to live moment by moment in the new mind, that is the moment when that mind will become the general mind of the planet. Living in that world is the way it can become reality, in the same way that living in the patriarchal mind moment by moment has been keeping patriarchy real. Just as there is no way to have peace but to be peaceful right now, there is no way to have joy, fearlessness, and freedom except to feel them right now.</p>
<p>From these feelings will come behavior that will move us into a reality organic to those feelings, consonant with them. Acting out of feelings of self-worth, for instance, we immediately create a world in which we are worthy. We can tell when we truly love and respect and honor ourselves because we are no longer able to behave like slaves. We do not have to plan how not to; we simply find that when we respect ourselves we cannot, for instance, beg men, cannot lobby them. Appropriate new behavior comes out of appropriate new feelings.</p>
<p>Acting out of fearlessness, we create a world in which we do not need to be afraid. As Elsa Gidlow says, "My observation is that the Lesbians who suffer are the ones unsure within themselves, always fearing they will be condemned. <i>They thus attract what they dread</i> [italics added], as weakness cruelly invites and encourages the bully."<a href="#fn4">[4]</a></p>
<p>Acting with integrity, we create a world in which we can be whole. We know when we have integrity because we are unable to compromise ourselves, and we can monitor our internal revolution by how much we are able to participate in the present woman-hating system. Future reality is transformed when we change our feelings about ourselves - and hence our behavior - in the present.</p>
<p>So if we want a world in which women love and trust ourselves and one another, <i>right now</i> we must feel that love and trust. Women's learning to respect and honor women is the basis of a spiritual revolution that is changing what it means to live as human beings on Earth.</p>
<p>The old saying that tomorrow never comes is literally and absolutely true. If we want a feminist world, there is only this moment to have it in.</p>
<p>A couple of deeply entrenched bits of conditioning make my practicing this theory, my living in this new place moment by moment, very difficult. Generalizing as usual from a sample of one, I assume that if these are troublesome for me, they are troublesome for many other women.</p>
<p>One of these pervasive messages is that change can only come about through struggle, that we aren't making any difference unless we're batting our heads against concrete walls, unless it's all very difficult and we are miserable. We've been taught, in fact, that we can gauge how much change we're making by how much we're suffering.</p>
<p>I can't think of a better example of patriarchal reversal because the truth is exactly the opposite: all we can get by struggle, by pain and misery, is more struggle, more pain, and more misery. But because of our socialization, we have a hard iime <i>feeling</i> - though we may believe it - that anything as wonderful as feeling wonderful can possibly bring a new reality into being. That out of feeling wonderful will emerge <i>action</i> of such transcendent difference, brilliance, and power that we cannot begin to imagine it.</p>
<p>Our inability to accept this is largely a matter of guilt - feeling guilty for not suffering when others <i>are</i>. This is the other recalcitrant chunk of conditioning. Surely if we feel joyous and free while all over the world so many of our sisters are wretched, we must be racist and classist and ageist and able-bodiest - we must not care about anybody but ourselves.</p>
<p>Diana Rabenold addresses this when she writes:</p>
<blockquote>The <i>fact</i> of women's subordination as a group becomes internalized in individual women as a belief that their personal needs are not important: that to ask for what they want or to get their needs met is selfish, that they are only good and OK if they always put the needs of
others first. Indeed, the accusation of "selfishness" - however subtly communicated - has ironically been perhaps the greatest barrier to women's development of a strong sense of Self with which to <i>be</i> "Self-ish!"<a href="#fn5">[5]</a></blockquote>
<p>Elsa Gidlow, working-class woman, life-long Lesbian, puts it this way:</p>
<blockquote>Have you ever wakened to the realization that you were happy? It's hard to put into words where it comes from, the sudden awareness that the day is somehow transformed by radiance. Like this morning... why am I visited by this sense of all being well? All is not well, as every newscaster will tell us. Should I listen? Or shall I allow the uninvited happiness to illumine the day while outdoors the rain incontinently pours down and everywhere people suffer? Do I have a right to it?... Must we <i>deserve</i> a rainbow?<a href="#fn6">[6]</a></blockquote>
<p>The answer is yes, that's what we've been taught, that we must "deserve" a rainbow, that we get the rainbow only if we work for it, struggle for it, suffer for it, sacrifice enough for others. But the truth is that our simply being alive, simply being <i>us</i> gives us a right to rainbows, and it is neither necessary nor useful to continue to try to earn happiness by rescuing first everyone else who is suffering.</p>
<p>Women have asked me if I mean that if we all just go sit in our hot tubs and think about our careers and be contented, everything will come right with the world. I was on a NOW panel with a friend who couldn't resist a little jab at "those who believe we should just contemplate our navels."</p>
<p>I'm always surprised by such misunderstanding, perhaps since I know that all my thought and behavior is focused upon bringing into existence an actual new global society, that this is what I believe women are here to do, the reason we were born, and that this is anything <i>but</i> passive. In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of more radical action than this.</p>
<p>Perhaps one of the reasons for the misunderstanding is that what I am saying seems to echo the political contextlessness and passivity of the New Age Movement, a movement that daily subverts the Women's Movement and steals adherents from it by mimicking women's culture, by glossing the surface with woman-like rhetoric while seething underneath with the same old misogyny. The fact and history of male domination of women and of <i>any</i> oppression and suffering is denied and erased under the headings of "Be Here Now!" and "Whatever is, is right!"</p>
<p>My daughter, Kari, tells me on the telephone that a great deadness has fallen upon the town where she lives since so many people are living lives with no politics, no context, no history - New Age lives. One day as she and an acquaintance were talking on the street, a man walked by, eyed Kari up and down and said suggestively, "Hey, Chick!" Bored, not even turning to look at him, she told him to "fuck off." Her friend was shocked. "If you were living in the present," she said, "you could see that that guy, deep down, is really a fine person. Why can't you take it that way?" The idea that living in the moment means that whatever is, is right, that there is no history, no context for behavior, is wrong-headed and dangerous hocus-pocus.</p>
<p>The New Age concept of "being here now" seems to me grossly reductionist, reducing the moment to its smallest, most drastically exclusive denominator, as if it is all there is of history, of truth, even of sensory possibility. In this process, everything - all acts, thoughts, and perceptions - becomes totally relative and of equal importance, equal good, and judgment becomes an undesirable, even antisocial, act.</p>
<p>When I speak of living in this moment, I am not talking about living any old way and saying that any way is as good as any other way. I am not speaking of ignoring or denying political reality, oppression and pain. I am saying that we must live <i>as if</i> we were free, <i>as if</i> we were in every way the women we have dreamed of becoming, <i>as if</i> the world were as we wish it to be, and in saying that, I preserve history, provide context, expand the moment to its largest inclusiveness, I make judgment a moral necessity, I imply transcendence.</p>
<p>The suffering of the women of the world, past and present, has haunted my waking hours and my dreams since the night I woke to it in a Mormon church meeting, the night a dozen years ago that I became a feminist. I have not forgotten their suffering for a single second since. But I have had to face the difficult truth that all the things women have done to try to make the system work for them only made matters worse: every statistic describing
violence against women has soared in the last 20 years; the government itself tells us that by the year 2,000 the entire poverty population of the United States of America will be women and our children.</p>
<p>I for one am no longer willing to keep on doing harmful things for selfish reasons - to keep my conscience comfortably salved or to prove to others that I really care about women. Regardless of any risk to either my conscience or to my reputation, I am determined to make a world and live in it right now in which violence against women is unthinkable, in which poverty for women and children is unthinkable. I understand now why we can't stop these in the ways we've tried up to now, and I can't bear to keep on making them worse.</p>
<p>The best I know to do is to invite all women of every race and class, every age, every sexual
proclivity, every physical endowment, who are looking for another way, all women who can't stand the ugly vicious system one moment longer to join me and thousands of other women in this country in making a new world. And I mean this literally: <i>to make a new world - physically, economically, socially, in every way.</i> I am determined above all else to try to live feminism, as I understand it better daily, and to live <i>in</i> feminism every moment precisely because I <i>do</i> care, precisely because I <i>do</i> love women. I know I can't free anyone but myself, but my inner voice tells me that in freeing myself, I make freedom more accessible to all other women.</p>
<p>The assumption that we show true concern, real love, by trying to rescue others is a particularly perverse patriarchal tenet-another reversal. "Rescue" is the other side of "victim," essential to it, a component part. There must be rescuers for there to be victims, and visa versa. Some say white women are racist if we do not continue to try to rescue the women of color in the ghettos of our cities and of the world. But the Lady Bountiful attitude of white women in believing that women of color need us to rescue them, that they can't do what they need to do for themselves - <i>that</i> kind of condescension and need to control others is what seems to me to be racist.<a href="#fn7">[7]</a></p>
<p>What I hear women of color saying to me is that what I can do for them - and for myself - is to wrest racism out of my soul. To make the space inside and around me nonracist space, adding this space to the other nonracist spaces on the planet until ultimately that is the space that prevails.</p>
<p>I don't hear them asking me to take care of them; as far as I can see, they neither need nor want me to. Women of color the world over are freeing themselves in most amazing ways, and their rising is the very foundation of the global Women's Movement, the single most significant and transformative event of this age. I can be grateful to them, I can listen to them, and I can support them in every way open to me, I can care and love and applaud, and when I can, give of my resources. But I can't make the system work for them. It's just not going to work for women of <i>any</i> color or class.</p>
<p>I have given up rescuing so that I do not help create victims. I am not even trying to save the world any more, not even focused on trying to save myself. I am simply determined to find freedom, right now, by changing myself. As my friend A. E. Dropper puts it:</p>
<blockquote>It means that the world as one knows it falls apart completely when you change yourself. For a radical feminist, patriarchy falls apart. And a few years down the road you might try to get patriarchy back for the sake of making conversation with a radical feminist in your kitchen, and damned if you can't get it back. But you can't. It's a little dizzying, but you can't forget that you haven't suffered for awhile, and that all your days and nights are filled with meaning. (Correspondence, December 11,1987.)</blockquote>
<p>What I am doing now is walking by the side of any woman who is traveling in my direction, listening to her ideas about how we can practice being free, sharing with her the fullness of my heart at having her company in this greatest of all human journeys, the journey to transcendence that never ends, widening and clearing the path as we walk, clearing resting places.</p>
<p>Sometimes women quote the well-known "When they came for the Jews" passage<a href="#fn8">[8]</a> as evidence that we must rescue others in danger or else when our turn comes no one will come to our aid. They give the necessity to stop the Hitlers of the world as one reason why we must fight wars. To these women I reply:</p>
<p>Every day patriarchy comes for <i>you</i> again, to get your mind and heart again, to destroy you, body and soul. If you cannot extricate yourself from its grasp, if you are imprisoned, how can you expect to free anyone else? The first step is to get free ourselves in all the ways we know are necessary. And as we break free, we make a hole in the paradigm that others can escape through with us. Somehow, in ways we're just beginning to glimpse, we help make liberation possible for everyone when we liberate ourselves.</p>
<p>When we free ourselves, we destroy patriarchy at the root. Trying to clip off its buds has not been successful. In stopping Hitler, we did not in any way impede the propensity for patriarchy to produce Hitlers; there is now a potential Hitler on every street comer. In fact, in fighting against Hitler, others became like him. Though Hitler is responsible for millions of hideous deaths, every country that fought him also killed millions of innocent people in terrible ways. In trying to stop a tyrant, they had to become tyrants. We become what we resist.</p>
<p>None of this means that we should stand by while others are hurt and not do what we can, but if resistance is the most powerful collaboration, the question is, how can we truly help and not hinder?</p>
<p>Denmark approached this problem with exquisite creativity. Not to hide the Jews - because in hiding them they would have made a world where Jews must be hidden in order to be safe - but to make Jewishness extra visible: every Dane to wear a yellow Star of David, every Dane to be a Jew. If enough countries had done this, there would have come into being a world in which being visible as a Jew would be the greatest safety.</p>
<p>This was not civil disobedience, it was not resistance; it was living in the kind of world right then that they wanted to have in the future.</p>
<p>It is women's destiny to create a world in which Hitler is unthinkable and therefore impossible. Another world, right now, right here, a safe, joyous, healthful, loving place, <i>home</i> for our species and all other living things. This is what I think we are about, those of us women fortunate enough to live at this time. Often during my speeches I ask the women in the room who feel as if they were born to do an immense work of great consequence to raise their hands. More than half always do and I suspect that the ones who don't very likely would if I were to ask them again in a few years.</p>
<p>I take women seriously. If we feel that we came specifically at this time to work wonders, I trust that that <i>is</i> why we came. And I trust that one of those wonders will be our leaving the patriarchal state in smoking ruins behind us, reduced to ashes by our passion for freedom.</p>

<hr>

<p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Did <i>you</i> get why men adore <i>Moby Dick</i>? <i>M. Dick</i> is the most boring and pointless book I ever forced myself to read in my life, and that's saying a great deal since I forced myself through tons of their grim "great" books.</p>
<p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> Like many other women, I am hearing the concepts from atomic physics not as if I am learning them for the first time, but Hke echoes, like memories - like not-quite-accurate memories. I'm pretty certain from my own experience that during archaic women's times all of us understood and felt time and space and our place in the universe in a completely different way, that men are only now beginning to suspect the existence of that mode of consciousness, that they have so far to go and so much to revise that women must leave them to it and rush on ahead <i>experiencing</i> it.</p>
<p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> I explain what I mean by this in my book, <i>Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation</i>, The Crossing Press: Freedom, CA, 1987, Chapter 1.</p>
<p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> Elsa Gidlow, <i>Elsa: I Come With My Songs</i>. Booklegger Press: San Francisco, 1986, p. 252.</p>
<p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> Diana Rabenold, <i>Love, Politics, and "Rescue" in Lesbian Relationships</i>, p. 5.</p>
<p><a id="fn6">[6]</a> Elsa Gidlow, <i>Elsa: I Come With My Songs</i>, p. 306.</p>
<p><a id="fn7">[7]</a> I am not suggesting that all "helping" activities are "rescue": useless and/or collaborative. Teaching women in Nicaragua, for instance, how to build their own houses, or set up clinics, helps all women involved to discover their power. I <i>am</i> suggesting, though, that unless we are fully conscious as we participate in them that we cannot rescue anyone, that unless each Nicaraguan women does her own internal revolution, these activities will not only <i>not</i> change the world but will ultimately aid the patriarchs of Nicaragua, who still own the women and all they produce. We need also to remember that if we do not attend to our own personal internal revolutions at the same time that we are helping others, we are not really helping anyone, either ourselves, the women of Nicaragua, or any other of the women of the world.</p>
<p><a id="fn8">[8]</a> Attributed to Martin Niemoeller, the entire quote is: In Germany they came first for the communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. They came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.</p>