My Published Articles for ViewsHound: Have You Heard of Pantsuit Nation?

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Have You Heard of Pantsuit Nation?

I was reading my FB page the other day and I heard for the first time a group calling themselves Pantsuit Nation. I was very curious so I googled it and here's what I learned about the group.

Who We Are:
Stories spark change. Taken individually, a story can create a tiny opening in a once-closed space. It is a glimmer. It can shine as something that is true and raw and beautiful. But one story - a single voice telling a single story - is often all too easy to ignore, to shout over or drown out. A single voice can be targeted or silenced.

Pantsuit Nation exists to harness the power of collective storytelling. Millions of voices telling millions of stories. We amplify the voices of those who have historically been underrepresented or excluded. We listen. We empower our members to speak with honesty and without fear of attack. We are strong in our diversity. We invite conversation - true conversation - about the issues that are most fundamental to us and our identities.

We believe that feminism is intersectional. We believe that “women’s rights are human rights.” We believe that progress around racial justice, LGBTQ* rights, rights for people with disabilities, religious freedom, and the fight to combat hatred and bigotry in all forms is most effective when emboldened and humanized through first-person narrative. We believe that politics is personal, and that progressive movement occurs when the empathetic potential of a story is unleashed. Collective storytelling amplifies the voices of those who have been marginalized. We empower our members to speak with honesty and without fear of attack. Stories give meaning to action and meaningful action leads to long-term, sustainable change.

What We Do:
Pantsuit Nation is a lens through which we learn about the lives of others, often in a deeply personal way. Our members actively create and promote a culture of interest, respect, and empathy that directly translates into a better understanding of how policy impacts marginalized people in our country. If we can be driven to care about the stories of others, we can be driven to care about the policies that affect them. Take action. Pantsuit Nation members are committed to carrying out thoughtful, forward-thinking actions, whether it’s confronting a bully, volunteering at a local nonprofit, donating money to an important cause, or extending a simple kindness to another person. Through partnerships with national and local organizations, the collective impact of our stories and the actions they inspire has the potential to change the world.

What’s Next:
Pantsuit Nation, after one month, has expanded from a small group of friends to include over 3.7 million individuals all around the world. To say that this movement has potential is, we think, an understatement. We have so many ideas, and we’ll be sharing some of our next steps with you in another blog post later this week. In the meantime, share a story, listen to a story, and join us in being thankful for all that Pantsuit Nation has represented and offered to us over the past several weeks. There’s so much more to come! Source: http//:pantsuitnation.org

A Relative Story:
The following story is from the FaceBook Page of my wife's closed relative. You probably know the identity of the Mom described in this story. I did have permission from the author to re post the following story.

I just discovered "Pantsuit Nation", a FB group with millions of members functioning as sort-of online-therapy through personal stories in the aftermath of the election. I encourage you all to join, but for those of you not on it, they just approved my post. I thought I'd share:

I’m a Filipino-American guy who was raised as a kid single-mother/single-child. My mom is a nurse who worked night-shifts in San Francisco and I often slept in an empty hospital room to save on babysitters. She later remarried but for my entire lifetime, she was always the bread-winner of the family. She and I are largely the same in nature: she’s a tough woman and I became the “tough-guy”.

It’s not common in our family to say “I love you” the way it might be in a more nuclear family and both she and I rarely cry. I guess I’m posting here because I was devastated by this election and I’ve spent hours reading all your stories and it makes me feel better. My mom worked as a nurse in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Later she took a particularly active political stand in the takedown of the terrible dictator Ferdinand Marcos during the “People’s Power” revolution in the Philippines back in the early 80s. So with all due respect to everyone in Pantsuit Nation, to me Hillary is only the second most powerful woman in the world, after my mother.

So here I am, a tough guy raised by his tough mother, crying with you all in Pantsuit Nation in the fight against hate. Thank you for all your stories.

Note: The author of the above story told me his mother called him after Trump was announced the PEOTUS and cried. His mother rarely cry but the defeat of Hillary was such a devastation and disappointment it made her cry.

Hillary's defeat made me sad and disappointed but I did not cry. How about you? If you are a Hillary Fan, I like to hear from you!

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Have You Heard of Pantsuit Nation?

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