Do I need me some inspiration as I face the new year? Heck yeah, and I’m
getting it from a few good women.
Did
you see Ursula Le Guin’s remarks as she accepted the Award for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters at the 2014 National Book Awards the other
week? The clip is on YouTube, but in the meantime, picture a small,
silver-haired woman with a kind and deeply lined 85-year-old face lobbing a
grenade into a roomful of tuxedoed publishing-industry bigwigs. Those people
didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. I promise: it’ll be a long time before
that much truth gets told inside of six minutes again.
“I
think hard times are coming,” Le Guin said, “when we will be wanting the voices
of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our
fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being.”
Mostly, she said, “We will need writers who can remember freedom . . . who know
the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of
an art.” Not even her own publisher was spared; the industry had caved in, sold
out, and now suffered under the lash of its corporate overlords, who, predictably,
were stalking editorial offices. She challenged writers to be brave enough to
resist and reminded them that “the name of our beautiful reward is not profit.
Its name is freedom.”
I also got some uplift the other day from the
regal Jane Goodall, who at age 80 still travels the world on behalf of primates
and the rest of the planet. She was in Atlanta to accept the 2014 Exemplar
Award from the Captain Planet Foundation, the organization founded by Ted
Turner and now run by his daughter Laura Turner Seydel.
Goodall is worried
about worldwide deforestation—and the two forces that drive it: poverty and its
evil twin, consumption. “When you’re living in poverty, you’re going to cut
down trees to grow food for your family,” she told the AJC’s Jennifer Brett. “You haven’t got much choice. You’re going to
buy the cheapest goods and not care how they’re made. On the other hand is this
materialistic, wasteful culture. If you have a date, you must have a new dress.”
Probably not a remark we care to ponder
as we sort through the season’s new sweaters, shirts, and socks, but Goodall is
one of the people keeping the big picture in focus.
Then there’s good old
Elizabeth Warren. You remember a few weeks ago when we were all so relieved
that the $1.1 trillion budget bill passed. The House passed it. The Senate passed
it. President Obama signed it. Yay! The government is working. It fell to
Elizabeth Warren to point out that the government was working exactly like
CitiGroup wanted it to—by passing a budget bill that included a provision to weaken
the rules of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. The provision was
pretty much written by Citi lobbyists—who clearly have balls of steel, since it
wasn’t that long ago that Citi made off with $500 billion (yes, billion) in
bailout money.
Senator Warren took the floor on December 12
to rail against the relentless accretion of power by this Wall Street behemoth:
“And now
we're watching as congress passes yet another provision that was written by
lobbyists for the biggest recipient of bailout money in the history of this
country. And it’s attached to a bill that needs to pass or else the entire
federal government will grind to a halt. Think about that kind of power,” she
said, “if a financial institution can become so big and so powerful that it can
hold the entire country hostage.” Tell it, sister.
Needless to say, any survey of the women I’m
counting on to help me get out of bed during the new year has got to include The
One Who Matters—Dede, who for many years to come, I hope, will amuse me (even
when some of her funniest lines are about somebody she calls “Peepaw,” whom I
don’t believe I know); instruct me on an astounding number of subjects—do’s and
don’t’s, let’s call them—about which I am often very fortunate to receive such
instruction; and love me almost unconditionally (all bets are off if I forget one more time to turn down the
thermostat before I come to bed).
2015. Bring it on.
