You Want a Revolution? Try Changing 6,000 Years of Patriarchy

Hope is a powerful drug. We need hope. Breaking through worn out paradigms is great: It gives hope — the elixir of imagination. But we also need people to stick around and work in mundane ways. The kids I see at Bernie’s rallies want him to fix it all, now, like the ones who worked for Obama did. Many of the kids I know can’t be bothered to vote in the mid-terms: they don’t want to have to find out who the good judges are, or what propositions to vote for, so they can fill out a ballot intelligently. I love their passion, energy, optimism but in conversation I find them ahistorical. Conversations about modern popular cultural are great, and I’m amazed at their skill on social media, but I’m not about to consult them about medical plan options, tax code, or our foreign policy. All those topics are what governing is really about: a million mundane details.

I can see they are attracted to the sexiness of Bernie’s word, “Revolution.” It is so hopeful to think a lot of things that burden you will suddenly be changed. But revolutions are messy and often usher in tyrants: after the system is torn down the vacuum of power favors a strong — often brutal — man. I say man because I don’t see women stepping into that vacuum. Not in China, not in Egypt, not in Cuba after its revolution.

Women excel at the gradual, which is the more common force in the natural world. It is what you want when you use the word, “sustainable.” You don’t want kids growing 5” in a week, or trees suddenly doubling their size — you want gradual growth. Incremental actually, which is a word that keeps being hurled at Hillary as an insult.

Slow growth allows for re-direction and self-correction more easily than sudden action. Volcanoes are powerful but erupt and are over; their power pales in comparison with the steady growth of the plants of the world. Hurricanes blast about but the greater force is in daily tides. The erosion of the Grand Canyon, the building of the Great Barrier Reef: these are done by small steady acts — one of eroding, the other of accretion. Small daily acts are what is needed to raise babies to become children, then teenagers and finally adults. It is daily acts that keeps the hearth going. It is planting, tending and bringing in crops. It is studying for classes every day. The heroics are ordinary, mundane. Women don’t start wars — the hurricanes of social life. They don’t much fight in them. Across the planet they are mostly busy with daily life, from studying to working to birthing to wrapping their kin in winding sheets.

I’m really tired of men discounting this. They are in love with speed, progress, violent change. Because they aren’t the same as women they don’t notice crucial issues. Asked about the 100 greatest inventions, men will include airplanes, automobiles, and nuclear fission but leave off safe contraception for women — arguably one of the most important inventions of all time. Because of that invention half the planets population is not defined by their fertility and all humans on this globe are affected. Women can move into the worlds they have been excluded from: in this country they’re graduating at higher rates than men in education, law, and medicine. This is a real revolution. A sustainable one. It will slowly change everything about the way we live, in every country, whether under capitalism and corporate power or socialism, communism or something else.

Hillary is the epicenter of this change. Twenty years ago she developed a plan for massively expanded health care and she was castigated for it. Bernie does something similar and everyone loves him. In another case, a book she wrote was about how raising children in an inclusive society is better for everyone. Sounds like something Bernie would say and everyone would cheer. Hillary was promoting this idea in the 1990’s. She got slammed by the Republicans who wanted the debate centered on families — not villages — raising children, since that fit their keep-women-in-the-home-breeding agenda.

Kids in college are in love with the idea of going tuition free, and it is a wonderful idea. Most haven’t started families, which is where Hillary has always concentrated her social change platforms. That’s not such an immediate concern when you’re racking up huge student debt; you’re not thinking about how to get little children access to dental care. You’ve just left home and gotten away from your parents for the first time. She’s seems like the mom who doesn’t want you to go to the party where older kids will be drinking, whereas Bernie is passing out lollipops of no more wars, free tuition, and universal medical care without a plan in sight of how to get there. When asked he says, “We’ll have a revolution.”

Revolution sounds so cool. The Black Panthers are getting a new wave of attention for being revolutionaries. They were cool, they were bad-ass: the iconic picture was of a group of men with black berets standing together with rifles and bandoliers of bullets across their chest. They had attitude and it was infectious. They looked like revolutionaries.

Note I said men, because the women in their movement weren’t given the same importance by the press or the public. And still aren’t, judging by the comments that all the Panthers are dead. The men are; some of the women are still alive. It is typical that the work of the women was ignored. Take the Free Breakfast for School Children program of the Panthers. The pictures were of these sexy young men feeding children or passing out bags of food. But does anyone think they did that for years? That their revolution was for young men to feed babies? Or wipe their runny noses at their Free Medical Clinics? Of course not. That’s not what a cool revolutionary does once the camera is gone. That is what a mom, or grandma, does. You know, those women who were always feeding those children, without any heroic pictures. But you don’t want to know that — it doesn’t look so revolutionary when your mom does it, right?

I think many of the young women in Bernie’s crowd, women who consider themselves progressives, are there because they can’t see Hillary as heroic; she is too much like their mom. They can’t see what their moms do as heroic. None of us can. We are too wedded to the 007 version of a lone guy saving the world, instead of the keepin’ on keepin’ on idea of a hero. Even if it is a female protagonist: we want Rosa Parks to be the solo carrier of a movement, and her act to be a singular one. We don’t tell the stories of all the women who mixed batter for pancake breakfasts in all the basements of black churches in Montgomery; who took their one day for relaxing and ran bake sales and rummage sales to raise money for the civil rights movement; who walked to and from their jobs cleaning white people’s houses when they were boycotting the buses, which finally brought the city to the bargaining table. No. We want to hear that Ms. Parks was tired and she sat down and that was how our laws were changed. Forget the decades of resistance from thousands of individuals, the millions of tiny, incremental acts that led to that moment on a bus.

Going back, let me say I don’t want to denigrate the Free Breakfast Program — it was a great idea. It changed national policy by becoming Head Start. What I want to do is point out that was seems so cool for a man to do, so revolutionary, is so invisible when women do it. When Bernie is says, “We want an inclusive society!” the crowd cheers. I know he’s been saying it for decades but it was a whisper compared to how Hillary was pilloried when “It Takes a Village” came out. Why are they supporting him with such fervor when she has consistently championed women’s and families rights around the world, for decades? The rights the young women in his audience are free to enjoy have been won by millions of small, brave acts by women like her, and me, and my friends, who created a culture where they can pursue their dreams of career and/or family.

We screwed up on some things, like landing them in such debt, but we were fighting on many fronts and lost some. It will be all of our work to fix that. But not by picking a gladiator, even one as sweet and righteous as Bernie. We will create lasting change by picking a target and doing some small thing for it every day. Every once in awhile a big, cumulative cultural leap will happen.

Bernie’s hill to die on is fighting a few hundred years of corporate malfeasance; Hillary is up against 6,000 years of global patriarchy and mysogyny. Come on folks, which is the more revolutionary fight?

Jill Littlewood
March 29,2016