I barely heard the knock on the door, but when I opened it, a young girl I knew from the neighborhood gave me a sly smile and told me she had become a journalist and was writing her own newspaper. “Would I like to subscribe?” was 9-year-old Margot’s question. I asked if she would have any good news in it because I was eager for better news than I was reading and hearing from my other news sources.
She hesitated, looking a bit uncertain about what to say, glancing at her mother in the nearby golf cart. “I’m not sure what you will think is good news,” she said, “but I just write about what I see.”
With that assurance of her eyewitness reporting, I paid for two months in advance, and she handed me the first edition of “The Serenbe Scoop,” written in color pencils with a hand-drawn image of an ice cream scoop on the front page.
Inside, I found a story about a woman who didn’t scoop after her dog’s poop (bad news), and a story about new cookies at the general store, “Get them while they are warm!” (good news), that was as close as this young journalist came to editorializing. I am very much looking forward to my next month’s “Serenbe Scoop,” as it just may be the only news I can consume these days without falling into despair or rage, and usually both.
For example, this morning an editorial in the Vancouver Sun newspaper literally left me weeping. It’s called “Farewell to my American Friends. It's Over,” and if you take the time to read it, I believe it will remind you of what you, too, might love about America and what is being lost.
What we love and what we can’t lose — that’s on my mind this Valentine’s Day. Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers (I’m sending her a Galentine today!), wrote about love in a late-night post that made the rounds right after the election. It read, in part:
The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving. You may need to grieve or scream or take time off, but you have a role no matter what, and right now good friends and good principles are worth gathering in. Remember what you love. Remember what loves you. Remember in this tide of hate what love is. The pain you feel is because of what you love. - Rebecca Solnit
Not surprisingly, on this Valentine’s Day, I am also thinking of (and grateful for) many other Galentines I will be sending to people I love whose work inspires me. Top of the list every year is V (formerly Eve Ensler), who launched a global movement to end the epidemic of global violence against women and girls on Valentine’s Day, 1998.
Now, all these many Valentine’s Days since, V-Day continues to inspire women all over the world and raise collective consciousness about gender based violence by shattering taboos. With over $120 million raised through V-Day activations and partnerships, supporting locally led anti-violence groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and safe houses, V-Day engages the power of art and love as a transformative force for healing and social justice.
Want to attend a V-Day event or get involved? Check out their map of events happening around the world this month. Learn how you can get involved by signing up for V-Day updates and follow V-Day on social media.
V and this movement will never surrender a woman’s right to live free of the fear of violence, even though the US Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) has removed from its website all information on current funding opportunities and directs visitors not to finalize any applications, certainly pointing to the escalating threats to nonprofits that work to help victims of gender-based violence. You can join me in sending an important Galentine to V and the V-Day movement with a Valentine’s day donation to VDAY.org.
Another organization receiving a Galentine donation from me today is Vow for Girls, an organization that works to create a world where no child is ever a bride. Vow for Girls champions girls around the world without the rights, resources, and choices to decide their own futures. This week Vow for Girls launched its ‘Every Girl Deserves Happily Ever After’ campaign – which rallies the romance fiction industry to ensure that every girl can be the protagonist of her own story.
Yes, it will take more than messages of love, but love is where we begin to heal and prepare for a unstoppable response, as Solnit encourages in her first post of her new blog, Meditations in an Emergency.
We are in an emergency right now. That emergency is… an attack on the long emergence of a new society, and I do not believe they can stop it no matter how much they harm it. Trump's promise all along, to "make America great again," has been a promise to make time run backward, to restore the old inequalities, repressions, hierarchies, and silences, to make most of us shut up and knuckle under.
Time does not run backward. And we do not have to surrender.
How can we surrender hard earned rights and freedoms when 9-year-old Margots everywhere are counting on us to save everything — or at least to save what we love… our families, our friends, our country?
“Love is the bridge between you and everything.” - Rumi
Onward!
- Pat
