Sometimes all the anguish and disappointment we’ve managed to muffle and suppress over the years can come to a head in a single event. E. Jean Carroll taking Donald Trump to civil court and accusing him of raping her more than 25 years ago feels like such a moment.
Carroll knew Trump would defend himself by brutalizing her, by questioning her veracity, her motives and her reputation as a highly regarded journalist and long-time advice columnist. She knew Trump’s defense attorneys would use every dirty trick in the arsenal of misogyny to belittle her suffering. And yet she had the raw courage, the altruism and social generosity to seek justice for herself and by extension champion every woman who’s been dragged into the dungeons of the patriarchy.
Watching her being battered on the witness stand had the power of a dark epiphany. I felt for a moment a paralyzing sense of grief for the world of care, justice and respect my generation had hoped to build, a world deeply damaged and all but left behind in the 1980s.
It was the clarity of Jean Carroll’s struggle, though, that lifted the darkness. The world we hoped for in the ‘60s and ‘70s was not stillborn. It lives on in her, and in many millions of others, young and old, who have refused to crumble and retreat. Jean Carroll transformed her grief into a model of tenacity and empowerment. Her example is just what we need in this moment of history when everything we’ve all worked for seems so beleaguered and threadbare.
With all the deep cultural successes of the feminist revolution, the renewed attack on women today has demonically accelerated. In states across the country, women are losing their right to reproductive health care and abortion. There still isn’t an equal rights amendment in the Constitution despite decades of trying. Misogyny still taints the workplace. Equal pay for equal work remains a distant goal. And #MeToo has shown us that the patriarchy not only continues to sanction sexual abuse and coercion in the workplace, it revels in it.
Homophobia is meaner and deadlier than ever. It’s become the hate of choice in militant conservative America, even threatening the civil rights, mental health and human dignity of transgender children struggling with their identities.
The news coverage of the merciless slaughter of innocents in Ukraine and Sudan masks the more than 45 armed conflicts terrifying the Middle East and North Africa, 21 wars and extended skirmishes afflicting Asia, including struggles between India and Pakistan and India and China, not to mention the numerous cartel wars in Mexico and Colombia.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons, delivery methods, the growing number of nuclear states, puts us closer than ever to unthinkable but all-too-possible horror of any kind of nuclear exchange.
Prolonged drought, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding rain, murderous rises in urban temperatures around the world show that climate change is gaining in destructive power, despite over 40 years of warning by international agencies and the world’s scientific community.
Racism continues to rage in our country. Xenophobia has reached an hysteric pitch. Seventeen mass shootings, taking the lives of some 88 people through April this year, make America feel like a war zone. Being shot by a gun has become the leading cause of childhood death in America. Schools are sites of massacres. If you find yourself at the wrong address it’s not all that unlikely you’ll get your head blown off. Crime, road rage, attacks on basic civility have made all our lives feel frighteningly precarious. Homelessness is intractable in most major cities. Military industrial pollution continues unabated. And our political institutions have become cacophonous with satirical screeching and snarling, with rudeness a newsworthy act of political righteousness.
Everything seems at the tipping point. No wonder so many of us are overwhelmed by sadness and grief for a world we hope for that hasn’t come true.
Then, the other night at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, at an event sponsored by the Leopold Writing Program (LWP), grief and sadness felt drastically out of place. The LWP, named for the famed New Mexico ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold, sponsors an annual environmental writing contest for school kids. As always, the contestants’ winning essays were about the varieties of empowerment that come from altruism. At a dinner after the event, I met an array of wonderfully energized and focused teachers and activists in their twenties and thirties. They were generous enough to engage with me, sharing their visions of the future.
Like Jean Carroll, at age 76, these young environmentalists were brave, intelligent, and filled with a generosity of spirit. They were working as hard as they could for a better world rising from the chaos of the present. As a teacher for over 40 years, I recognized in myself the renewed energy that escaping our generational silos can bring us. Whatever wisps of nihilism that had crept into my thinking dispersed in the evening’s conversations. I recalled a line from Tennyson’s Ulysses that my friend Richard Fox, one of New Mexico’s most astute political scientists, loves to quote,“T’is not too late to seek a newer world.”
I saw that Jean Carroll’s generosity and personal sacrifice might well, indeed, take the patriarchy down another notch. Carroll and the young teachers and environmentalists helped me remember that our long struggle on so many fronts is ongoing and by no means over and lost. They proved to me again that pursuing the principles of care and conscience almost inevitably reveal new and fruitful avenues of effort. And most important of all, they deepened my understanding that the altruism inherent in their ideals is an energizing force that is not, as the cynics would have it, juvenile and pollyannish nonsense. It is, rather, the indispensable bedrock in which all seeking of “newer worlds” is rooted and upon which all courage is fortified and ennobled.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
I can’t lose hope. It’s true and it’s tragic that the world we fought so hard for most of our adult lives hasn’t materialized. But it’s no less true that every struggle, every effort, by Carroll and others like her, keeps the flame of hope alive. Even those battles we lose in the short run contribute to change. We have no alternative but to continue to fight for justice in every single arena.
I was raised to believe that those who commit negative acts need to be held accountable, regardless of who they are. Sadly, I am beginning to lose hope that such people will ever be held accountable, or that they will be forced to face the consequences of their actions. Being a fairly recent grandparent, I need to hang on to the hope for a better world for all innocents. But more and more, it seems that evil is becoming harder and harder to vanquish with the power of good. My core beliefs have been shaken.
I just returned from a while in France and its Springtime. Not once did I worry about being in a crowded shopping area. Not once did I check out my surroundings for men who might have a weapon of mass destruction. I was relaxed and happy, along with Parisians, finally outside again, making their rounds to all the flowery public gardens. Also, I never for one moment felt afraid or diminished because I’m a woman….(make that an old woman) who had just celebrated her 80th. I visited some sentimental shrines from my bohemian time in Paris in the late 60’s. I spent some thoughtful time walking around Notre Dame. It was surrounded by a handsome wall on which one could read a dramatic history of the site while walking around it, a history starting around the year 1150 right up to the catastrophic fire 4 years ago. There were displays of wood trusses that had finally fallen after 8 centuries of support work. There were cranes and large lifting machines and swarms of construction workers. I had wonderful conversations with strangers about love, death, art, medieval architecture, and the retirement age.
Dear V.B.
Thank you for your powerful piece. It is full of love and hope and anchors us in the terrible light of suffering. I have felt overwhelmed by the situation here on the U.S. border and the plight of children and families at our local Refugee shelter and the many thousands in Juárez and elsewhere. What can we do, what can be done? The violence continues in so many ways. We must take those small steps, and persist. Thank you for your dedication, your truth and your spirit of justice and love.
In Solidarity,
Denise Chávez
Thank you, VB for bringing the hope and persistence that filled and overflowed the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center 2 weeks ago. I was fortunate to hear these young environmentalists and the totally inspiring Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) that night . I look also to Greta Thunburg who shared this thought that keeps me going too: “Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action.” i am sharing your writing this week with a friend and suggest others spread the words. In action, joan robins
Bravo, Barrett. And thank you for a ray of hope at a bleak moment in our history.