{"id":55957,"date":"2012-04-14T03:42:33","date_gmt":"2012-04-14T07:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=55957"},"modified":"2012-04-14T03:58:54","modified_gmt":"2012-04-14T07:58:54","slug":"when-the-old-is-new-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/when-the-old-is-new-again\/","title":{"rendered":"When The Old Is New Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Seems like we’re going over things we’d thought long resolved to see if that’s how we want them to remain. There is wisdom in that, of course. Pluto’s retrograde will give us some needed time to sit with the most recent decisions regarding government’s role in our lives: what it has promoted, what it has allowed, what it has failed to provide. We’re just beginning that thrill ride, of course. <\/p>\n

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The long-range transformative powers of Pluto are legion, and we can count on every scrap of our power structure to go through a process of assimilation before we’re done. The disparity of the voices in the national conversation is disorienting, though, just as it’s often hard to decide which historical era we’re reviewing, especially as it seems we’re reliving the worst of each.<\/p>\n

Just the “re-do” agenda of the last weeks has been exhausting. The Trayvon case has shown us to be as conflicted over race, though not as overtly, as we were 151 years ago when the Civil War commenced. We’ve replaced slavery of a specific race with ghettoization of the whole working class to funnel good to the “Massah on the Hill.” Plutocracy is as hard-wired into our laws and banking system as it was when Teddy Roosevelt thundered against the corrupt captains of industry. And apparently — though you could knock me over with a feather — we’re as confused by the role of women in modern society as we were back in the ’50s, when only trash got knocked up but sometimes even nice girls forgot to hold that aspirin between their knees and ended up “in the family way.”<\/p>\n

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For the last few days the nation has been suffering yet another round of the Mommy Dialogues, perhaps necessary in the post-feminist ’70s but tedious and lethargic in 2012. Even the pundits brought to the table to discuss Dem strategist Hilary Rosen’s ill-advised commentary about Ann Romney look listless. But the GOP will not miss an opportunity to paint the Dems as vicious radicals ready to pounce on a decent family. With Romney soon to be declared their presumptive, even as the conservatives disdain Mitt as their candidate, they must admit that his lifestyle is exactly the one most coveted by his party, and his pretty wife the quintessential woman of their dreams.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to get a grip on this level of disconnect against powerful women, as if we hadn’t seen Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton step up to bat in the last decades. It’s as if the Republicans have yanked us all back into an era so full of pretense and delusion that some of us are still suffering PTSD. You can catch up with it in AMC’s Mad Men<\/em><\/a><\/em>, should you need a play book, but those of us who lived through it can only scratch our heads and ask, must we have this conversation yet again? Haven’t women come farther than trying to step on each other’s necks over the question of being either a bread winner or a bread maker?<\/p>\n

It took about a nanosecond for Sarah Palin to step in, always eager to defend her territory as Mama Grizzly, and slam Dems for perpetuating a “war on women,” a move as opportunistic as when she carted newborn Trig around under her arm like a sack of flour to campaign for VP. And since the left is not the party treating women like potential barnyard stock<\/a> or blatantly insulting their intelligence,<\/a> Neanderthal-like, how did this assault on the female identity become theirs? I suspect the movement was born the moment it was verified that Obama had a twenty-point lead due to the Republican assault on women’s healthcare; hence Mitt’s turning to the Good Wife to deal with the ins and outs of female economic challenges.<\/p>\n

The whole of Christendom then turned on unsuspecting Hilary Rosen, decrying her insensitivity. As usual, none of this outcry appropriately addressed Ms. Rosen’s comment about Mrs. Romney’s life experience. In case we need to confirm a bottom line, then, let’s do: this is a conversation about class — not gender roles, not mothering-styles, not working ambitions or moral equivalences among women. In the world of the Romneys, whose social status places them in the upper half-percent of the upper one percent, there is no financial struggle to justify Mitt’s confidence in his wife’s financial expertise.<\/p>\n

Ann Romney has surely had her share of challenges, like any human being. No one raises five teenage boys without tearing out some hair, sits as mate at the side of an ambitious politician without stuffing down one’s own ego-needs, or deals with ongoing health challenges without agonizing over body limitations and mortality. All of this makes Mrs. Romney an admirable woman, but let’s be very clear: she is not one who’s had to live lean or make choices between feeding the kids or herself. If she is Mitt’s adviser on women’s economic needs, we’re all in trouble.<\/p>\n

Obama was forced into the conversation almost immediately, lest Independent women felt slighted by the left. He and I agree that anyone who has raised one child, let alone five, is aware of the amount of work required, the kind that you can’t leave behind when you shut the office door. This is labor of the heart, shared by mothers everywhere. But let’s not kid ourselves that Ann Romney studies the latest data about latch-key kids or has agonized over her children’s future. I’m quite sure she has not experienced concerns over housing and clothing her children, over finding means for doctors’ appointments or time out of a breathless workday to help with homework; she hasn’t agonized over providing money for music lessons, for birthday presents, for food. And now, let’s be realistic and take gender out of this equation: this is the overwhelming burden of working class parents today, both women and men.<\/p>\n

Still, the talking heads continue to blather like we’ve got a red\/blue cat fight going on. I heard one young pundit, a conservative stumping for the Romney camp, raging that women who make the choice of staying home shouldn’t be unfairly attacked, intimating that only cruel, anti-life Dem women would stoop so low. Choice? Really? That’s a word I keep hearing out of conservative mouths and it makes less and less sense each time. Being gay is not a choice, being poor is not a choice, and being able to stay home to take care of the kids is very rarely a choice.<\/p>\n

Few of us have the option of staying home today, so tossing that emotional hand-grenade is going to let loose a lot of unresolved guilt, regret and envy, perhaps even fury in a nation politically conflicted over the needs of mothers and children. So why don’t we have THAT conversation, instead of pitting ourselves against each other in some anachronistic contest for social superiority?<\/p>\n

I hear people protesting that this issue is simply a diversion from more important things, but I’d suggest that’s only in approach. The “working mom” topic is in the general vicinity of important but not quite on target, so let’s move over to the left an inch or so and find something valuable to thrash out. Let’s talk policy, let’s talk the social contract. Let’s talk about child care for working parents. Let’s discuss early childhood education and afternoon programs. Let’s talk about education, mentoring, child nutrition. Let’s talk about what a mother’s time is worth, why don’t we? Let’s take a closer look at the wage gap and pay equity,<\/a> vital to families and particularly to single mothers. Let’s talk about the substance of the issues facing this nation, rather than table this conversation for another decade, unresolved.<\/p>\n

The woman who resurrected this national conversation has children of her own. She is a lesbian mother of twins who stayed home when they were small, and obviously now works outside of the home, which means she works in both venues but gets credit for only one. We seem only intent on protecting the virtue of stay-at-home mothers in this argument, making no provision for those who juggle both roles as best they can. Shame on the Democrats in this tussle. We should have had Rosen’s back from the get-go.<\/p>\n

With expected vitriol, the Catholic League<\/a> has announced that Ms. Rosen is NOT a “real parent” because she hasn’t given birth. Well, pardon me, but none of the clergy who denounce her has given birth either, nor have they been — so they protest — tempted by the process, so they’ve got nothing to offer in this conversation. They need to put a sock in it. Besides, who do they think will be adopting all those babies they’re saving from the vicious feminazis? Most good Catholic families are using birth control to limit their own social and financial load.<\/p>\n

Hilary Rosen has been thrown under the bus of a kind of political correctness I’d hoped not to see any more. Those who think this is a diversion from more important issues have missed the point, much as those who think this is about working moms vs. those who stay-at-home haven’t a large enough political vision to understand the stakes. Rosen has larger concerns for women and children than the Republican presumptive intends. She knows that as many as a third of all American high school kids drop out before graduation, guaranteeing them a life of poverty and want, and robbing the nation of their undeveloped talent. She’s aware that well over a quarter of all children are raised in single parent homes and that over 20% of kids live in families who report income under the federal poverty level. That’s a lot of human suffering and confusion, a black hole of need being ignored by an uncaring, uninvolved political machine. I wonder how much that information resonates in Ann Romney’s world view.<\/p>\n

Still, the question isn’t what Hilary Rosen knows that Ann Romney doesn’t; the question is what will Mitt Romney and his party do to help the millions of women and kids who struggle for basic needs in this, the richest country in the world. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars go into airing political news each day, but I’m pretty sure that having a national conversation that misses the whole freaking point is a waste of resources. It’s time we stopped avoiding real issues by spinning off into cultural nonsense and political posturing, and began to solve some of the challenges of this new century.<\/p>\n

The children are waiting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Seems like we’re going over things we’d thought long resolved to see if that’s how we want them to remain. There is wisdom in that, of course. Pluto’s retrograde will give us some needed time to sit with the most recent decisions regarding government’s role in our lives: what … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55957"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}