International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day, and it seems fitting to be thinking about the place of women's history and women's lives in the context of independent publishing. First and foremost, I got into independent publishing, because I have felt so disenfranchised and marginalized by the "publishing establishment", and just about every single one of my interactions with traditional publishers has left me cold, cold, cold. It's to the point where I now consider traditional publishing a "hostile environment" for someone like me -- someone who is more concerned with the truth, than with sales, someone who's more invested in investigating life, than controlling it, someone who takes the bumps in the road of human existence with a grain of salt and doesn't get freaked out, when I don't hit my numbers -- and never want to get freaked out about it.

My publishing is for me very much a labor of love, and I wouldn't be doing this work, day in and day out, if it didn't feed my soul. It feeds me, so I feed it.

WE need to feed it, as well. As in, all of us. As in, every dispossessed individual who feels disenfranchised from life, who hasn't been offered a place at the table, but aches to participate in this life, in this world, in creative and generative ways. We now have at our fingertips the means (for FREE) to create and propagate and promote our visions, our dreams, our connections, our hopes. In ways that were never possible before we had personal computers, we are now able to manifest our wonder at the world and take steps to make it more of what we want it to be.

The time for bitching and kvetching and bemoaning our sad fate as oppressed women, is long since passed. We now have the means by which we can promote our own agendas and make our own ways dominant in our own lives. Computers are a big part of that -- and so is learning. Learning to use computers, learning where to find computers, learning how to make the most of the opportunities computers offer us. Now is the time for us to step out and take our power -- for personal and public and international transformation. Now is the time for us to cease bewailing our sad fates, and actually do something about it. The time for inaction and passivity is over, gals. Now is the time to act. No excuses, no delays.

That goes for all you men, too. That goes for each and every person in a dispossessed "category" of society, in the corners where the light of social acceptance and support doesn't often shine. That goes for each and every individual and little group of kindred spirits who have been kept from their dreams (not just the American Dream) by corruption, control, and not having the status required to get adequate health care, legal representation, food, or housing. That goes for each and every person out there who thinks they don't have a voice. You have a voice. You were created with a voice. You just haven't figured out how to use it, yet. You just haven't figured out how to put it out there.

Well, the time for staying back in the dark corners, feeling sorry for yourself and bemoaning your sad fate, is gone, gone, gone. Don't talk to me about your misfortunes -- 16 years ago, I was briefly on the streets of Center City Philadelphia, looking for a doorway to sleep in on one of those bitter cold Philly winter nights. I have lost everything that mattered to me, a couple times over, and I'm still here. I'm still here. Nothing that anyone can say to me about their sad state, will hold up against the light of my own experience. My experience tells me, we each have within us the resources to overcome whatever places itself in our paths. We human beings are trasncendant, and our job on this planet, from what I can tell, is to transcend whatever gets in our way. Whether it be war, poverty, hate, violence, prejudice, oppression, exploitation... you name it. We're not here to wallow. We're here to transcend. And every moment that you spend feeling sorry for yourself and telling yourself, "I can't...!" is a wasted moment of your precious life that you will never, ever, get back.

YOU CAN! It's a fact. You can get your voice out there, you can make your voice heard. You can put your own dreams into action, and you can make it so. Only you can do it. No government or social agency or sponsor will do it for you. You need to do it for yourself. Because you can. You need to honor the divinity within yourself and realize, you are indeed "a little less than angels" and you have within you the divine capacity to dream and figure out how to make those dreams become reality.

If nothing else, that's what the PEAPOD Mix project is about -- finding ways to get the word out there, to get creative thoughts and ideas into manifest form, to create... no matter what.

And now, a word about women's history, past, present and future

I went to a great presentation on "Suppressed Histories" by Max Dashu last Friday night -- a slideshow about women shamen (or is it "shamans"?) and ecstatics and healers... lots of slides from the world over, along with plenty and plenty and plenty more information about these female figures and their places in the societies where they find/found themselves.

And it strikes me, in retrospect, that these histories needn't be suppressed any longer. Because there are people out there who are talking about them. Women coming up with research and revealing a whole lot of information about other women, past and present, who bear studying. So long as there are women out there who are willing to do the work (all of you/us, raise your hands!), there need not be any suppression of our histories.

But I've also been thinking about the roles that we women play in the suppression of our own histories. It strikes me that the world is full of oppressed peoples, and everywhere you turn, there is someone trying to suppress or oppress or repress another person, for whatever reason. That has always been the way of the world, and no group has ever been exempt from the fact of oppression -- not even straight, white men.

The key to making this right, however, is not railing against our oppressors, but going to tremendous and great lengths to ensure that we ourselves do everything in our power to countermand this oppression/suppression/repression. It's no good, telling the dominant culture that they shouldn't do such-and-such, because that's how they got into power, and they're never going to let that power go. It's no good, making rules and passing laws, that supposedly curtail the impulses of bad people, because there will always be bad people and we will always be fighting for our survival, no matter who we are. Even members of the ruling class have to struggle for their survival.

What we need to do -- as women, as feminists, as responsible citizens -- is take it upon ourselves to do the exact opposite of the suppressors -- to speak out and speak up and band together to define the kind of world we want, to support its existence, to teach each other and the men and children around us, about this world we insist on creating. It's not enough to say NO! to what we don't want. We have to say -- even louder -- YES!!! to the world that we do want.

If our histories continue to be suppressed, even when we have information to break it out of its hold, it is our own damned doing. So long as we have access to the histories and the information and the means by which to educate ourselves and each other, and we have the means by which to speak out on our own behalf, and reach out to others like us... if we continue to be voiceless and faceless, when we have so many resources at our fingertips, and we can easily learn to use them (FOR FREE, I might add), it is our own damned fault, if we remain in our silent little caves of pitiful oppression.

Enough of our victimization. The time for excuses is long past. Get educated, get out there, get online, and get over the past. The best is yet to come!