Ideas for protest offered and dissed
Last week, I requested that sisters suggest gestures to express, in the manner of athletes taking a knee on playing fields, their responses to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. There were many, many responses, mostly from women, a few from men. These are difficult issues:
One woman, an early responder, suggested that women hold their hands over their mouths while the national anthem is played, taking them off only when the last “O say does that...” is sounded, at which time the women should sing out loud as they can. This is to illustrate the fact that we won’t be silenced, she said. That’s before she asked me not to use her name, as it might cause problems at work.
A supportive guy wrote to say he wasn’t a sister, “but some of my best friends are sisters.” He described watching an athlete take a knee at a minor-league ballgame, and then wrote that women “ought to be angry about Kavanaugh, but so should any decent man. Women need to lead here and men need to just shut up and follow their lead.”
Not quite shutting up, he wrote that women should express their feelings by voting. That was the consensus of many responders, among them Pat White and Linda Naughton. Holding one’s hand over one’s mouth was also suggested by Mary Hedley, Leslie Earl and Joanne Blossom.
“Whereas some folks remove their hats during the anthem,” suggested Maureen Futtner, “how ’bout if sisters temporarily don pussy hats?” “How about raising a fist with our car keys tucked inside,” wrote Sue Kotchou, “the car key point extending between our middle two fingers, just like we would do walking to our cars in the dark?”
Meghan Sweet and Pam Stearns suggested turning one’s back, a gesture Stearns worried might be too negative. Kate Gurke said women should stand tall during the anthem ... unless they want to sit. “In other words, don’t rise to Trump’s bait.”
The solicitation of suggestions for a woman’s protest gesture wasn’t met with universal approval. An African American man observed: “White women kneeling during the anthem to protest ‘rape culture’ is hijacking a movement you took no risks for. You didn’t kneel in solidarity to protest the murder of Black people, don’t co opt & make it about your victimization. That’s white supremacy in the name of feminism.” This statement was atop a Twitter thread with a variety of positive and negative responses.
Adda Dada, who votes in Switzerland, says he’s voting yes for a “Dignity of Animals” bill that would pay farmers not to cut the horns off their cows.
The Madera Tourism Alliance of the Madera Chamber of Commerce has announced that this year’s eighth annual Pomegranate Festival (on Nov. 3) in the Central Valley town has been renamed the Eighth Annual Madera Pomegranate, Fruit and Nut Festival.
Planners of Fog Design + Art, which benefits SFMOMA and will be at the Fort Mason Center from Jan. 17 to 20, have announced that this year’s Innovators Luncheon honoree is Pamela Joyner. With her husband, Fred Giuffrida, Joyner is an advocate for and collector of work by artists of African descent. “We are very laser focused,” said Joyner in an interview last year for a Sotheby’s publication. “The collection is mission driven, and the mission is to rewrite art history.”
Anti-gun demonstrators have been turning out for years at Crossroads of the West, the gun shows at the Cow Palace. On days of the shows, says Margo Freistadt, “People come out of there with wagon-loads of ammunition . ... so many guns.”
In the past six months, she’s been among a small group of women who have been attending Cow Palace Board of Directors meetings, to ask that the issue of the gun shows be placed on the board agenda, so as to be fully discussed. (They’ve been unsuccessful; the subject hasn’t been on the agenda.) At the last such meeting, three of the anti-gun activists made threeminute speeches. There was no give-andtake. As they left, the board began talking about what seemed like the meeting’s major issue: fees they could charge if they opened the Cow Palace parking lot to the public on days there are no events there.
“If they can make as much money renting parking as they can at the gun shows,” said Freistadt later, “I’m totally fine with that.”
PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Everybody who goes to Hawaii doesn’t have a house in Mexico.” Young man, overheard at a restaurant in Sebastopol by Jack Jackson