Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll identifies a few PHRASES AND “RIGHTS” I COULD HAPPILY LIVE WITHOUT. She writes:

I will start with just two, and save some others for another column. First: You go, girl!

Dear Lord, spare us from any more “firsts” for women. It was one thing when Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court Justice in 1981 (appointed by President Reagan, just FYI). She had faced actual discrimination from law school on and it was a milestone worth celebrating. But now there is not one “first” that a woman has not done, achieved, or become since then – astronaut, General, Admiral, Fire Chief, Police Captain. Give it a rest. Okay, we’ve never had a woman President of the United States. Boohoohoo. Given the options, I can only say “Thank God.”

I am a woman who even knows what one is. I am not interested in the first “diabetic wise Latina” on the Supreme Court. Or the first dancing Justice of color who doesn’t know what a woman is. Clearly, we will have to have the first Supreme Court Justice who is PRETENDING to be a woman – and then the first Autistic Inuit Justice. Ya basta! Enough! How ‘bout “brilliant Constitutional scholar and Originalist” as a sole criterion and let the diversity chips fall where they may?

The other thing that bugs me about “You go, girl” is that it’s not as though women have been held back since the beginning of Time and still are. There were ALWAYS women who strayed from the path of “permitted” or “traditional” female roles. Always. Cowgirls, country doctors, novelists, poets, Marie Curie, Pirate Jenny, Ma Barker, Calamity Jane, you name it.

Okay, there have traditionally not been as many female persons in STEM. And though females still lag in Science and Engineering, they currently predominate in both Law School and Medical School. There were two very bright young women from my dorm in the 1964 Engineering class at Northwestern University, one in Mechanical Engineering and the other in Electrical Engineering. Neither young lady made it to Sophomore year. Was it from sexism or just because Engineering was a darn hard subject?

In fairness, both of the young male Engineering majors I dated Freshman year ALSO flunked out, for which I take at least minor responsibility. They preferred to spend time with me over studying and really who could blame them? One transferred to a college in Idaho. He succeeded wildly and went on to become a Chief Executive of a major defense contractor. (Lucky for me, I don’t think flunking out of Sociology is even possible, let alone legal. My next and last boyfriend was an English major, not an Engineer.)

The notion lingered that ANY lack of success for females had to be the result not of personal qualities or efforts, but of discrimination, “sexism,” “male chauvinism,” and immutable obstacles. This led the “Second Wave” Feminists of the ’60s to make the preposterous claim that all little girls had been physically PREVENTED from playing with the trucks in Kindergarten and were herded into the doll corner. I have only two memories about Kindergarten, neither involving trucks or dolls.

I had assigned seating at a little table for four. I sat upon a tiny yellow chair and an icky boy named Keith sat across from me. Perhaps today he would have been diagnosed as being on some sort of “spectrum” because every single day he would spit copiously on the table and wipe it around with his hand. I never liked the name “Keith” after that, apologies to the many blameless non-spitting “Keiths” who might be reading this.

Oh, the other memory was that we had to bring in a rug upon which to take an afternoon nap. If you didn’t nap, you didn’t get milk and a cookie afterwards and I quickly learned to feign sleep. This valuable lesson served me well in grade school when my mother would check on me at night and I had been reading under the covers with a flashlight before I heard her steps in the hallway. So Kindergarten was not a total loss despite the electrified fence topped with razor wire around the trucks and blocks.

I am 78 years old – which means I’ve been alive a powerful long time — and I feel very fortunate that I cannot remember a single thing that my parents told me I could NOT do because I was a “girl”– from getting top grades to playing sports. DADDY wanted his little girl to be able to catch and throw a ball and later to learn to bat. Alas, there was no danger that I might become some kind of Hermione Killebrew. I was an average batter, at best. But, I made up for it by being an extremely slow runner and terrible fielder.

The main reason I got to play with the boys in the neighborhood was that I claimed we owned the vacant lot next to our house which we made into a baseball diamond. We did not own it, in the technical sense of having a Deed, but no 10-year-olds knew how to check the property records at the Courthouse. I also had a nice Louisville Slugger and glove, so they let me play, even if chosen last. “Equity” was not a recognized value in 1956. My nickname was “Easy Out,” which they would chant in unison.

Everybody Has The Right To Be “Seen”

Well, no. This ludicrous made-up “right” was actually used by a nutjob from an Alphabet support group to justify the murder of several children and teachers in the Christian school attacked by the young woman pretending to be a male. According to the murder-approving nutjob, that poor assassin had no other way to be “seen” but to do what she did. (We expect her Manifesto any day now. No, really.)

For many millennia, almost nobody was “seen” in the way the “15 minutes of fame” people mean it. People were born, lived nasty, brutish lives, and died of old age in their 20s and 30s. Later, of course, largely due to white males and Western Civilization, humanity slogged through wars and revolutions, famines, floods, and pestilence and extended their lifespans by several decades. Some people were plucked out for greater fame and fortune, but for hundreds of millions of people, you were born, lived and died “seen” only by loved ones.

Why, as late as 1951 when I was a kid, there was a pretty song called “The Three Bells” in which the lyricist said that a church bell rang but three times in celebration of “Jimmy Brown’s” life – at his birth, his wedding, and his funeral. That WAS life. In fact, often a happy life well lived, consumed with work, family, children, worship of God, community, and more work.

“Jimmy Brown” did not shoot an insurance CEO to be “seen.” He did not attach enormous udders to his chest and teach school. He did not torch a Tesla or even a Ford. His daughter did not become an OnlyFans hit by setting a record for accommodating the most male appendages in a 24-hour period. His son did not become a cokehead and Ukrainian consultant for $83,000 a month. Like all the rest of us, he just lived. May we all live long and prosper, carefully avoiding being “seen” for behaving like some sort of circus freak. (Apologies to actual working circus freaks. I imagine the field now has a glut of bearded ladies driving down fair wages.)