So, we live in a time of great fear. No revelations here. We are terrified we won't have enough money. Once we get enough money we're terrified someone will take our money. Fearful our mate will leave us or scared blind that won't find the love of our lives. We're in lock-down with our children, no child left behind in the spectrum of all possible catastrophes; 'don't get hurt playing football!' 'Why doesn't my child want to play organized sports?!' We're conversely in turmoil that people are thinking too many things about us and that not enough people are thinking about us at all.
And today, talking to a powerful and intelligent man, a man who is in the 'know', we drifted to the conversation of women being sisters to each other vs. women who back-bite and claw. In his line of work, a trial lawyer, he admitted that he frequently sees the mean version of female. In my line of work I see just the opposite. Feeling myself get defensive (for not much of a good reason in this case, for this is a man who thinks my gender is beautiful inside and out) I told him my reality is the norm. Really...more often than not women behave like sisters toward each other. Statistically and anecdotally, women support our own kind more often than we back bite and steal, lie and cheat each other. Media doesn't want this truth to be know, for it doesn't sell as many issues as the other personification of women. In this day and age the only power available to us is the vicious kind, the kind we wield over each other like a sharp-edged saber. But that is the patriarchal concept of power: power-over. Women, in vast numbers all over the world, wield the female version of power: power-with.
Of course, we are human and if we perceive our lives to be threatened and we don't readily see the power of deep sisterhood in our lives, we will respond the way People magazine would have us believe is the norm. If we believe that our very survival is effected depending on whether that man loves us or this company hires us, and we have no other input to negate that fight or flight fear, we will respond accordingly. We will play dirty. But even with global living conditions for women heading ever-increasingly into the toilet, even though public health statistics for women and our babies show us to be in deeper mortal threat than even fifty years ago, most of us, most of the time, choose sisterhood. I've seen it in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, in South Africa amidst the AIDS pandemic, in that part of Mexico now referred to as Texas...in fact, all over this world. Sisterhood.
And, just to let you know the power of this truth? Sisterhood is the next revolution. The only one. Sure solar power is great. Removing George Bush is still important. But if, as an intentional global practice, the women of the world stood together, cried together, told the truth together, raised our babies together, perhaps even lived together (yes, with out men), well...I do wonder where the world would be right about now? It's a beautiful thing to contemplate.
