By what I count as remarkable good fortune, this Saturday afternoon I happened to turn up the California Channel on television during a broadcast of the Governors’ and First Ladies’ Conference for Women. Several outstanding women gave wonderful speeches, but the most excellent talk I ever heard on gender relations and world situation was given by Jane Fonda. You may shrug and think you know her as a ridiculous, wild leftist to be scorned and ignored. That would be totally mistaken, totally out of date. Jane is one of those vibrant people who for seventy years has continued to learn and grow, lifelong. She is now one of the most brilliant people you can hear speak on the human equation and what prevents its solution, such as “toxic masculinity.” The encultured, stiff-necked recalcitrance of our anciently established gender roles continues to generate and sustain the most difficult troubles our world faces. She urges men to drop the machismo and become “vagina literate.” She hopes women can stop being self-effacing, little sweeties and recover the wholeness they had until puberty, before they got mashed down into the expected role for their gender.
Anna Quindlen gave a near-second best talk emphasizing the importance of feminine outlook that needs to influence the world much more pervasively than it yet does, and on the importance of charitably loving care for others without loss of personal power and authenticity, for these are the source of good judgment and just action.
But my hat went off thoroughly to Fonda. She nailed everything she spoke about. Later, Google gave me several, relevant pages on her life, activities and thinking. Comment strings on some pages are still plagued with yesterday’s wrong opinions. They continue to be held and posted by war-mongering, ultra-conservatives whose brains quit growing after grammar school. Learning is what they became most conservative about. They grew up to be backwardites. Jane is like lightning, compared to which they are second and third echoes of thunder from mindless, loud speakers. I hail Jane Fonda as one of the best people among us, compared to whom Dick Cheney is spiritual trash. I’m sorry for him. He had a chance to be somebody vastly beneficial to the whole world instead of merely high on evanescent status and power in this country, where his sad legacy is one of lasting intellectual and institutional rot.
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*“Pop” of course has no connection with anyone’s father. It is the first day of an ancient Meso-american calendar cycle. At the end of a year, or a 260-day cycle, or yet a 52-year great cycle, the priests “set pop,”announcing the orderly start of a new era.
<http://www.quickbrightsharp.com/radworld.php/?e=56>
<http://silverevolution.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/jane-fondas-inspiring-speech-about-lifes-third-act/>
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