Gratitude Monday: First Monday in October

The final day of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was kind of the high point for me, to some extent because hearing Anita Hill talk about the Past, Present and Future of the #MeToo Movement resonated so deeply. She wasn’t exactly the antidote to the previous day’s shitshow in the Senate Judiciary proceedings, but her measured discussion of where we are gave me heart.

One of the things that struck me most deeply was when Hill assured Christine Blasey Ford that she is not alone; the audience burst into applause at that. There cannot have been a woman there who was not channeling personal experience into the clapping of her hands. Further, and stating the blindingly obvious WRT Brett Kavanaugh’s pucker-faced, flouncy angrylittlebitch performance, she commented, “No female candidate for the Supreme Court would ever have the license to cry or get angry at her hearing.”

Again, a wave of concurring applause.

Hill’s message would have been relevant even had it not coincided with the SCOTUS hearing, although I’m pretty sure that the timing accounted for the session being at capacity and GHC having to livestream it. (Most of the conference’s 22,000+ attendees were not born when she testified at Clarence Thomas’s hearing in 1991; from what I observed, the preponderance were focused on finding internships/jobs at cool companies, getting cool company swag and going to cool company parties. I suspect that they heard someone cool was speaking, so they wanted in on that, too.) But coming as it did within 24 hours of that entitled white male attack on Ford and the cringeworthy meltdown of Kavanaugh, Lindsey Graham and other entitled white males enraged that non-entitled, non-whites and non-males are calling bullshit on them—well…

On the one hand, it’s just heartrending to realize that we’re 27 bloody years on from the Thomas hearings, but we’ve appeared to regress to decades before then, to a time when entitled white males had everything, ran everything, took everything, destroyed everything without fear of questioning, much less of accountability. The arrogance of Graham, McConnell, Hatch and the rest of the Republicans representing the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries as they steamrolled this nomination through what they claim is a Sacred Process (although of course it wasn’t for Merrick Garland) attests to that. I experienced a wave of nausea at that realization.

On the other hand, I believe these little pricks with their hissy-fits and their patently desperate attempts to pervert democracy so they can retain all the power have woken a sleeping giant: the monstrous regiment of women they’ve feared for millennia, and our allies, who have had enough of this shite. Nemesis and her lieutenants, the Erinyes, are suiting up for this battle, I can feel it. And I’m ready to serve in their ranks.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: we are taking on these angry bitches with dicks—on the Senate floor, in restaurants, at their offices, on elevators; every single place they are, we’re in front of them. And we’ll take them down, however long it takes.