Free to Be You and Me (Lawrence/Hart, sung by Sara Bareilles)

March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020

RIP RBG! (Rest in Power, Ruth Bader Ginsburg... 💙)

I have had this blog post in draft form since August 1, when I finally got around to watching the documentary about her, and something always came up to push it back.  Sadly, it can no longer be delayed.  With all the strength, intelligence, grace, tenacity, wisdom, courage, and fierceness she displayed throughout her life (fighting cancer multiple times, falls incurring broken bones, etc.), RBG finally did something we honestly never thought would happen:  she died, from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer, at the age of 87.

From The New York Times (full obituary here):  

Remembrances for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg poured in.

Justice Stephen Breyer called her “a great justice; a woman of valor; a rock of righteousness.” President Trump said “whether you agree or not — she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lauded Justice Ginsburg and said the fact that her death had touched off a political furor was a sign of an unhealthy democracy.

Americans paid their respects to Justice Ginsburg from the Supreme Court, where a crowd recited the Jewish prayer for the dead, to the steps of her Brooklyn high school and courthouses across the U.S.  A mother who urged her to constantly be independent. Teachers who encouraged her. Having selective hearing in a marriage. 

Justice Ginsburg, the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court (in 1993), earned her late-life stardom with pointed and powerful dissenting opinions. 

Ginsburg dictated this statement to granddaughter Clara Spera in the days before her death: "My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed."

I know this sounds dramatic, but the fate of the free world is at stake, making the difference between a 6-3 and a 5-4 power balance of conservatives vs. liberal judges.  The fight is on.  My daughter Sarah, her friends, and I were brainstorming yesterday morning via text as to what we could do to honor RBG, and potentially stop a Supreme Court nomination/appointment until Biden is elected.  I supplied the quote, and Sarah's friend Didi, a Photoshop genius, came up with the graphic below.  Please share liberally, and call the number listed to protest.  Let's tie up those phone lines.  We can do this!

P.S.  If you have not yet seen RBG, the documentary, find and watch it immediately (I believe it's on Hulu, and CNN has been running it the last few days as well).

SONG:  Free to Be You and Me by Lawrence/Hart, sung by Sara Bareilles

BOOK:  Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon, Shana Knizhnik

POEM(S):  Justice by Amber Tamblyn
A love letter to our supreme court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Dear Ruth, you ruthless
justess of justice,
with your hair bun tighter
than a T on the chest of a wrestler,
and your face giving negative triple F’s
about wrinkles,
and your record
on women’s rights
on fleek,
and your record
on men who want to be on record
on women’s rights
but have no right
also on fleek,
and that one time, back in ’00,
when you ruled Boy Scouts should allow gay Scoutmasters,
and back in ‘03,
when you ruled that the LGBTQ community
should be a constitutionally protected class,
and that in ’00,
when you wouldn’t allow prison sentences to lengthen retroactively,
And then in ’07, when you said states could regulate
polluters and greenhouse gas omissions,
and that other time,
when you said tax payers shouldn’t have to pay for church materials in school
not because you didn’t believe in The Divine,
but because you didn’t believe in forcing The Divine
on anyone,
especially children,
and even that one time, in ’11,
when I didn’t like your stance
on church rights to picket gay funerals,
I still loved you,
because the 1st amendment
is your 1st priority,
and that is so HOT to me,
and those many times
you gave Scalia the hand
and Roberts the finger
and that one time,
when you voted to let rape victims
sue their attackers as a gender-bias crime,

and when you were all,
“Women will only have true equality
when men share with them
the responsibility
of bringing up the next generation.”
And when you were like,
“That’s the dissenter’s hope.
That you are writing (law) not for today
but for tomorrow.”
And then, when you just went,
“The state controlling a woman
would mean denying autonomy
and full equality,”
then dropped the mic,
and walked off stage,
your black gown flowing
to the sounds of applause
for generations to come.

Dear Ruth, you ruthless
Justess of justice,
you gavel witch,
you lovely heart
you protector extraordinaire,
you golden icon of grace,
I have just one question,

Will you marry me?

In case you haven’t heard,
it’s legal now.

In the Steps of RBG by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as quoted in Notorious RBG

So let me take one step right now,

one step toward respect.

And give me strength to take another

toward clarity. And though

my feet might feel like stones, let

me take another step toward justice.

And another toward equity. And another

toward truth. And though my legs

may feel leaden and slow, though someone

else may step on my toes, may I inch

toward forgiveness. May every step

be toward a bridge. Enough divisiveness.

And as I go, may I find joy in the stepping,

grace in the edging toward great change.

But if there’s little joy, let me step anyway.

Then take another step. And another. And another.

QUOTE:  "Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you." ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I Have Just Said (Sara Bareilles and The Milk Carton Kids)

My friend RobbyG told me that her firefighter son-in-law and his co-workers do this nightly at their fire station, here in South Florida, and I was delighted to read the following article in yesterday's New York Times to find it was nationwide... actually, worldwide...  :-)  I cry every time I think about it and, starting this evening, I am going to incorporate the expression of gratitude into my nightly ritual.  To quote Mary Oliver:  “Thank you, thank you.”

In Praise of Quarantine Clapping
By Amanda Hess
April 9, 2020

Every night at 7, my Brooklyn neighborhood comes to life with the calculated whimsy of a cuckoo clock. It starts with a single neighbor clapping. Soon dozens more join in, throwing open their front doors or hanging from their windows to put their hands together and say “wooooo.” Perhaps 20 seconds into the proceedings, a man emerges from the garden apartment across from me, banging a pot with a spoon, and a woman appears on the stoop of the house next door, her spaniel barking helpfully at her side. Often there is a special guest: On a recent evening, a guy motored by on a delivery bike, a whistle blaring from between his lips. It’s all over within five minutes.

The Clapping first spread through New York City on a Friday night in late March. Following similar gestures in Italy, India and Spain, the New York iteration was seeded by a strategic marketing firm and circulated over social media to thank workers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak. It was originally presented as a one-off event, and after that, residents were asked to repeat it once a week. But now we do it every single night.

The Clapping has surely been heard by doctors and nurses and E.M.T.s, by UPS workers and Instacart delivery people and the many other New Yorkers who are putting themselves at risk to protect their city. I live just a couple of blocks from the choked I.C.U. of the Brooklyn Hospital Center, and on Tuesday, firefighters lined up right outside the center to cheer the staff on.

But the more the ritual is repeated, the more it feels as if it’s for the rest of us, too. We used to go out to concerts or movies or plays and clap for the performances. Now the clapping is the performance. It is our regularly scheduled programming, live and in person when basically nothing else is.

Thanking health care workers may be the point of this act, but its delights lie beside the point. The Clapping is a communal outburst. It is a reminder that though we are isolated, we are not alone. It is made up of a hundred little improvisations that nevertheless add up to a comfortingly predictable cacophony, tailored to the street where you live.

In some neighborhoods, the Clapping manifests as a sparse pattering, and in others it echoes between high-rise apartment complexes, producing walls of sound. On a recent night in Stuyvesant Town, the Clapping was punctuated by clanging bells and hoots from horn instruments; on the Lower East Side, somebody blasted out Sinatra singing “New York, New York.” I’m told that some blocks do not clap at all.

It’s a cliché to describe a performance as “life-affirming,” but here the description feels true. I like it for smaller reasons, though. Like many New Yorkers, I don’t know most of my neighbors, and I’ve found myself using these few minutes every night to gather clues to their domestic lives. I notice who emerges from sprawling multistory brownstones and who from apartment buildings. One night the man with the pot was joined by a companion banging her own kitchenware. Another time, the spaniel failed to appear, and I reveled in my exaggerated disappointment. Did the dog have a previous engagement?

There are those who choose to abstain from the Clapping, and those who actively campaign against it. The British right-wing commentator Katie Hopkins, who is whiling away her quarantine standing in front of a poster of the American flag and ranting into her webcam, has criticized the applause in England as a foolish hobby. She called it “clapping at the sky,” which is an accidentally lovely way of putting it. Others argue that the Clapping is an empty gesture, accomplishing nothing for the workers who are most at risk. And yet even for the critics the Clapping is a kind of gift; it gives them a performance to pan.

It’s true that on the internet, the ritual can appear flattened into a self-satisfied show. On Twitter, I watched the queasy corporate spectacle of the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco light up with a video of clapping hands. The hashtag #ClapBecauseWeCare distorts the experience to fit the contours of a social media awareness campaign; it oversells the purpose of the event and makes it all feel a little smug. As social distancing has migrated all of our human interactions online, the Clapping has revealed the limits of the medium. Experiences let loose on the internet risk being swiftly mined for their utility to the platform, reduced to mere carriers of information capable of accumulating commentary and debate.

I can understand why people feel compelled to share videos of the Clapping, as it is perhaps the most thrilling non-horrifying event that a quarantined New Yorker can document on any given day. But watching the Clapping in other neighborhoods feels pointlessly remote, like eavesdropping on a conversation in a language you don’t understand. You kind of have to be there — and you only get to be there if you’re already there.

Clappers may have learned of the ritual through a Facebook post or a message chalked on the pavement of a neighborhood park. But it persists because we hear it, and we want to keep hearing it. Some days it is the only thing I hear from outside that is not an ambulance siren.

Every night as the Clapping hour approaches, my body is alert with anxious anticipation. Will we clap again tonight? So far, the answer has been yes. With each day, it feels more likely that we will stop only once the virus does. Until then, I’ve got nowhere else to be.


SONG:  I Have Just Said by Sara Bareilles, unwittingly in collaboration with The Milk Carton Kids, lyrics are a poem by Mary Oliver (thanks to JudiS for the heads-up on this...  :-)

BOOK:   Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott

POEM:  I Have Just Said by Mary Oliver

I have just said
Something
Ridiculous to you
And in response,
Your glorious laughter.

These are the days
The sun
Is swimming back
To the east
And the light on the water
Gleams
As never, it seems, before.

I can’t remember
Every spring,
I can’t remember
Everything-

So many years!
Are the morning kisses
The sweetest
Or the evenings
Or the in-betweens?
All I know
Is that “thank you” should appear
Somewhere.

So, just in case
I can’t find
The perfect place-
“Thank you, thank you.”

QUOTE:  " 'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding." ~ Alice Walker