Are We Sliding Backwards?

I was digging in my garden yesterday morning, digging being for me and maybe for some of you a prime use for the energy of frustration. Yes, it does contain a knot of vital energy, although we sometimes fail to use it in ways that benefit us.

So I was digging in a narrow strip of poor soil outside my studio, making holes in which to plant some small annuals, annealing the soil first with my beautiful good-smelling compost, the fruit of my long sequestering of vegetable and fruit remainders.

As I dug, I listed the examples of our sliding backwards since the beginning of Covid:

1. Increasingly aggressive drivers, honking if I stop for a second to look for a street address.
2. More cars breaking speed limits and running stop signs.
3. More cars with noise-increasing mufflers. The roaring can now be heard blocks away.
4. More women I know dropping back into victimhood.
5. Fewer women’s faces on broadcast news now dominated, once again, by middle-aged white men with a few darker skins to make things look better.
6. More desperate writers who can’t find agents or publishers if they don’t live in New York.
7. More examples of ageism directed against women.
8. The assault on our bodily integrity as more states ban or restrict abortion.

Now I sound like an old grump, but I don’t care. I dig away on my knees until my fingernails are black with dirt, the little seedlings are planted and watered, and even the fragile Cosmos I yanked out of its pot with only its bare root attached is beginning to straighten up.

Some explanations: The car problems may be specific to this town, but I doubt it. As we women fall back into silence and obscurity, obnoxious noise seems to be filling the space we once filled with our obnoxious (to some hearers and readers) written and spoken words.

Dropping back into victimhood: this has always been a threat, especially for women of my generation who never developed a passion for anything other than their children, now grown but in various ways troubled and making trouble. I find some middle-aged and even elderly mothers sacrificing their peace of mind to endless worrying and attempts to “help” when disabling “help” may have been part of the problem from the beginning.

The absence of women’s faces on broadcast news: there are exceptions of course, but they are exceptions; especially during our regularly recurring crises—mass murders, police brutality etc.—when male faces and voices emphasize the ancient prejudice that only males can deal with crises. And in Congress, where we have finally succeeded in electing a bunch of women, they are not appointed to important committees and so we don’t hear their voices or see their faces.

The desperation of writers who don’t live in New York is not new but whenever the country goes through a convulsion as it is doing now, the old limits are reinforced: what matters is what is said and written and read in New York, with a nod to Los Angeles, resurrecting the odd provincialism that has always been a characteristic of this relatively new country.

Ageism is so subjective that it is almost impossible to quantify but I notice it most in groups of people where there seems to be more pushing, shoving and rushing ahead; perhaps you’ve witnessed this too.

And the reversal of Roe V. Wade resurrects the eternal problem of male insistence on their ownership of female bodies. This is not said or written—we’ve moved that far—but it’s a powerful underwater current moving oceans of opinion and action.

And some women, avid as always to “hitch their wagons to a star”—or what we imagine is a star—are countering their own best interests by hitching to the anti-choice garbage truck.

I think Covid did go a way toward creating this state of affairs. Finally women were really doing everything: working at home, teaching children at home, cooking, cleaning, shopping. Some men did pitch in but because this old stereotype defines who we are—serving, always serving—and because we didn’t complain (or only a little) our culture coalesced around our “selfless sacrifice.”

But a selfless sacrifice is a sacrifice of the self.

Am I pessimistic? Maybe so. But it’s a pessimism that I think is appropriate. After all, there have been few attempts to analyze why the endless acts of violence are caused by young white men.

Entitlement, anybody?

[For an additional unexpected reason, please see the follow-up to this piece, An Unexpected Reason for Our Sliding Backwards…]

In Women Santa Fe Women Writing