Vote for Change!

Someone e-mailed this to me, and I have been trying to gather all my thoughts about the subject to write on it--and here theya re!

Thanks to Eve Ensler!

*******************
> Eve Ensler,
> the American playwright,
> performer,
> feminist and activist,
> best known for "The Vagina Monologues",
> wrote the following about Sarah Palin:
>
> DRILL, DRILL, DRILL
>
> I am having Sarah Palin nightmares.
>
> I dreamt last night that she
> was a member of a club where they rode
> snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned
> and starved polar bears around their necks.
>
> I have a particular thing for Polar Bears.
>
> Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness
> or the fact that they live in the arctic
> or that I have never seen one in person
> or touched one.
>
> Maybe it is the fact that they live
> so comfortably on ice.
>
> Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.
>
> I don't like raging at women.
>
> I am a Feminist and have spent my life
> trying to build community,
> help empower women
> and stop violence against them.
>
> It is hard to write about Sarah Palin.
> This is why the Sarah Palin choice
> was all the more insidious and cynical.
>
> The people who made this choice
> count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.
>
> But everything Sarah Palin believes in
> and practices is antithetical to Feminism
> which for me is part of one story --
> connected to saving the earth,
> ending racism, empowering women,
> giving young girls options, opening our minds,
> deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.
>
> I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one
> of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime,
> and should this country choose those candidates
> the fall-out may be so great,
> the destruction so vast in so many areas
> that America may never recover.
>
> But what is equally disturbing is the impact
> that duo would have on the rest of the world.
>
> Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
>
> In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept,
> the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.
>
> Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution.
>
> I take this as a metaphor.
> In her world and the world of Fundamentalists
> nothing changes or gets better or evolves.
>
> She does not believe in global warming.
> The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying
> our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers,
> are all part of God's plan.
>
> She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list.
> The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered.
> The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered.
> The oil is here to be taken and plundered.
> Iraq is here to be taken and plundered.
> As she said herself of the Iraqi war,
> "It was a task from God."
>
> Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion.
>
> She does not believe women who are raped
> and incested and ripped open against their will
> should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby
> or not.
> She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control.
> I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence
> and we know how many babies that makes.
>
> Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking.
> >From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library,
> has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently.
> She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference.
>
> This is a woman who could and might very well
> be the next president of the United States.
>
> She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.
>
> Sarah believes in guns.
> She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle.
> She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip.
> She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.
>
> Sarah believes in God.
> That is of course her right, her private right.
>
> But when God and Guns come together in the public sector,
> when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are
> denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and
> state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.
>
> I write to my sisters.
>
> I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands.
>
> This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of theU.S.,
> but of the planet.
>
> It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make
> it forever
> uninhabitable for humans.
>
> It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the
> world
> or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack.
>
> It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning
> or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency
> and destruction.
>
> It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare
> or whether we build more and more methods of killing.
>
> It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society
> or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.
>
> If the Polar Bears don't move you to go
> and do everything in your power
> to get Obama elected,
> then consider the chant that filled the hall
> after Palin spoke at the RNC,
> "Drill Drill Drill."
>
> I think of teeth when I think of drills.
>
> I think of rape.
>
> I think of destruction.
>
> I think of domination.
>
> I think of military exercises
> that force mindless repetition,
> emptying the brain of analysis,
> doubt, ambiguity or dissent.
>
> I think of pain.
>
> Do we want a future of drilling?
>
> More holes in the ozone,
> in the floor of the sea,
> more holes in our thinking,
> in the trust between nations and peoples,
> more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?
>
> Eve Ensler
>
>
>
> September 5, 2008
>