authored by the best husband ever, Frank Sanders

Our only hope for extricating ourselves from the grotesque, nightmarish situation that mires our society and our world, is for women to find a real voice on this planet.

I love to tell stories (true ones). There’s a story that’s worth telling here, that explicates why high status, a real role with a real voice for women in this world, is ultimately our only hope.

Here’s the story… first I’ll tell it. Then you’ll see why I’m saying what I’m saying.

About 23 years ago, give or take, I sat in on a lecture by Jane Goodall. She talked about her work at the Gombe Reserve over the previous decades.

She presented maps of equatorial Africa. The maps showed where chimps used to live, versus where they were currently living. The map showed their living places being steadily eliminated by human development (meaning destruction) of all the previously wild spaces across central Africa. Where chimps once had free range from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, they were now living in little islands of habitat. These islands, because of their isolation from each other and their shrinking sizes, were (and are) herding chimps into tiny refugia. In those refugia, their populations were too dinky to maintain the genetic critical mass any species needs to survive and reproduce.

In other words, although a head count of the total number of chimps in Africa might look pretty good, their having to live in dispersed little concentration camps that were getting fewer and farther between meant that they were (are) going to die out like individual lights going out on a Christmas tree.

They were (and are), quite simply, going extinct because humans were taking away all of their places to live.

It’s not if, it’s when, unless something changes.

To drive her point graphically, Goodall showed time-lapse pictures of the mountainous terrain on the far side of the lake from Gombe. In the first picture, she showed what it had looked like when she had arrived in the late 1960s. Back then, it had been covered by a lush green rain forest. A Garden of Eden.

Then she showed what it looked like around 1995. It had become a barren, sloped exposure that looked a little better than the Mojave desert, but not by much. It reminded me of what the ground looks like after it’s been whacked by an atomic explosion. All the big stuff either knocked over sideways or just gone, and what’s left, burned off. Any normal person would find it horrifying.

She said, “What has happened here? The people living here need wood for their cooking fires. They cut the forest for that wood. For 100,000 years they only needed as much wood as the forest could re-supply every year. It was sustainable. The people lived and the forest lived.”

“But now they take more than the forest can re-grow. So they have destroyed the forest.”

“Are these people stupid?” she asked aloud. “Do they not know that they are destroying the very forest that they must have in order to themselves survive?”

She paused. And then she answered her own question.

“No, they are not stupid. They are as intelligent as any other people. They know what they are doing. They know they are destroying their own place, the place that they need, in order to live.”

“Then why are they doing this?,” she asked. And then she answered.

“They are doing this because they see no other way, no alternative, no choice. They do this because they have become so numerous. And they have to have wood to cook their food. So today they cut more of the forest, knowing that someday soon they, like the chimps and all of the other forest creatures before them, will have no place left to go.”

Goodall paused. The room was silent. She went on.

“There is only one way forward. It is for women to have high, equitable, meaningful status in their societies. Status in which they have a meaningful say in their own reproduction. Only when women have real education, real opportunities in life, real control over themselves and their destinies, will this situation change.”

Or at least that’s how I remember her words. It was 23 years ago. If I’ve mis-quoted her slightly, I’m at least giving you the gist here.

So I sit here and I think as the first snowfall of the season comes down outside.

Goodall was talking specifically about women in central Africa. But I think her words are exactly true for all of the women in America and on all of our planet.

For you see, we are all living around Gombe now, everywhere on Earth.

We are seriously in major trouble. I am terror-stricken for what our future may hold. The only healthy part of our society here in America is our war-making machinery. That alone should be a dire warning for us all, about where we are heading.

My own demographic, a minority of middle aged running to elderly, rich white men, is running an entire industrial society virtually unopposed. It hasn’t been alone, but it has done way more than its share to get us to this pathetic point.

We still have some shreds of democracy left, that haven’t been bought and paid for. Most people can still vote, even though the old, rich white men are straining mightily to keep the poor and the brown from voting, to the extent that they can.

But those creepy old guys have two powerful allies. Those allies are keeping them on top. Those allies are keeping the old men in the places of power from which they are in turn doing everything they can to enrich themselves and their immediate descendants, even if in doing so they are trashing our democracy at home and our planet in general.

Those allies, those Horsemen of Disaster are (1) apathy (and its sidekick, hopelessness) and (2) women who support their nonsense by actually voting for them.

I find both to be inexplicable. Why so many Americans won’t vote is beyond me. Most people in this country know they’re getting screwed. And a lot of them know it’s those old guys who are doing the screwing. (The old rich guys, for their part, are trying to scapegoat the blame onto women and brown people. Those who lack power are always the easy go-tos.) Others still don’t get it, at least not yet. But if more people in general would vote, things would in general get better. (Let’s just say, it’d be hard for them to get worse.)

If not voting is inexplicable to me, then the women who actually do vote for this ongoing garbage-hurling trebuchet assault on them is even more inexplicable to me. (Find some fun YouTube video, you’ll see it’s an apt analogy.)

Women are more than half of our population. A lot of them totally get what’s going on, of course. And they’re doing everything they can to make things better. To which I say Thank You So Much, Elizabeth Warrren, et al.

But the tipping point can come, the tipping will ONLY come, when the bulk, the majority of women, stop turning a blind eye to the awful things that Creepy Old Jerks are doing, including to them and their children and grandchildren, and start voting consistently to right these wrongs that we see being constantly committed against them, against our society, and against our planet.

Like Goodall said, without the status and the voice that women need and deserve, we’re all going to be goners, in more ways than one.

Transformation and change are one of the most terrifying experiences a human being can pass through. I know this all too well, having walked through four long years of it not so very long ago. It was just after I dived off the cliff of a secure, long-term marriage into an abyss of uncertainty and all things unknown. I ached to reclaim the self I felt I’d lost in union with another, at all costs. The price, as it turned out, was exceedingly high and well beyond what I felt I could afford on any given day. But I’d made the purchase and had to pay the price. There was no reverse.

The progression of unfolding events in our country feels similar. We’ve jumped off the secure cliff of democracy to test its strength, dismantling and disintegrating all we once knew and loved. None of us knows quite what to make of the daily deluge, or what democracy will look like in the end. Ugly displays of confusion, fear, and anger are acted out daily for the world to see. Greed and ignorance are reigning supreme, shouting loudly that this is their country now, and they’re here to stay.

Was it letting the votes go by, that we all got here? What it Russian interference? Whatever the explanation, we’re in it for real. No reverse.

Fear can be all consuming, never-ending and persistent. As I walked the trails in my mountain valley years ago in the company of my sole Longhorn Heifer, the last one standing in what was once an abundant herd of joyful horses, goats and cows, I worried for my future. How would I take care of myself, buy hay that winter? Could I run out of money before I found a job, in an economy of recession, because my unplanned and impulsive decision thought it’d be a fabulous idea to divorce a millionaire just then? Did I throw away the last good man on earth, forever relegating myself to work by day and cuddle with dogs by night? Would this pain, longing, confusion and relentless suffering ever end?

As I wondered for my future then, I see us all wondering now: How are we going to care for ourselves, when they rip away our health care or change the makeup of the nation’s highest court? What’s going to happen to all those people in the detention centers down south, the families ripped apart? How many more national monuments are going to be stolen for the benefit of privileged oil and gas men? Are they really going to trophy hunt twenty-three Grizzly Bears in Wyoming this autumn? Will Captain Cuckoobananas and his Republican Goon Squad continue to destroy our democracy, or will enough people vote in November to save us all? Will the drama and outrage, pain and anger, the moronic, 3 a.m. delusional tweets from the now-desecrated White House, ever end? Will we ever friend our Trump-voting cousins again, after November’s over?

For four years (the term of any one-term president) that I lived outside my own comfort zone. The stress, confusion and daily feeling that I was waking to find myself in a literal nightmare feels eerily similar to how I now feel when a New York Times notification pops up in my iPad.

My life back then was filled with a sense of unshakeable internal terror. Will this next budding romance rolling into my now-single existence undo me forever, catapulting me off the cliff of psychological or emotional sanity to a point of no return if it ends in another breakup? Will one more loss turn me into Michael the Bench Guy, the homeless man in our community, who broke after losing his wife and best friend, and spends his remaining days whittling sticks in a cabin in the woods, walking down the dusty road with his middle finger erected high in the air for us all to see? Will this new — job interview, Meet-up group, friendship, volunteer opportunity – shatter my sense of self-confidence and trust, like a windshield in a car crash, for being a good judge of character? When will I wake up and feel normal again, whatever I once thusly defined? Each step forward into my new life brought rising waves of fear until they rose into full-on panic attacks. I was sure I was a relationship away from becoming a blithering, homeless bag lady, rescue mutts in tow.

I thought that time would never end.

But eventually, by grace of the Universe or fulfillment of the karmic lessons I clearly had coming to me, they did. And I learned. To slow. Everything. Down. I learned to view my life (invoking Dr. Jung here) as a house to be occupied, with the basement of my naked, vulnerable subconscious most exposed. Humility replaced aggressive arrogance. I had no choice but to face every possible aspect of myself I’d tried a lifetime to ignore. Each emotion became a room I visited: Insecurity, the Master Bedroom; Fear, the Living Room; Self-Abandonment, the Kitchen; Hopelessness, well, that’s the entire House!

After I accepted my new situation as an opportunity for growth instead of dread, I could feel a shift. I turned back towards myself, and realized I’d been given an opportunity for growth, to become more of myself. It didn’t happen on a particularly bright sunshiny day or high on any mountaintop with fairies dancing overhead or under the hooves of that Longhorn Heifer standing looking over me, it was gradual – but progressive.

I understood I was being given the chance to learn self-love and self-acceptance, much the same way we’re learning just how much we love democracy and value it as the system of fairness and equality for all individuals, not just the monied or the privileged few. I matured to become a better version of myself, much the same way I believe we will emerge with a stronger democracy for having tested it out with the challenges we are facing. Some (present company excluded here) may not have taken advantage of the opportunity to vote for the bother they believed it was, but won’t be making that mistake again this November. And we’re all getting to see the shadow side of humanity in much the same way I got the opportunity to see my own shadow side or exposed weaknesses – so I could learn and heal them – as we all can now, too.

The process of transformation is just that – a process. I took the time to grieve all I was losing or had lost, often under the harsh needles of the Ponderosa Pines on the mountaintops, in the company of my similarly rejected Shepherd mutt, until I cried myself out. I cultivated resilience when I strapped on my skis, trekked up through the snowy forests at the base of the Continental Divide with my similarly resilient Shepherd mutt by my side. When I was feeling really overwhelmed and ungrounded I climbed on my motorcycle for the Zen meditation of rolling along river-lined canyon roads until I felt grounded, centered and clear. I wrote daily, to let the heartache out and the wisdom in. Each day I wasn’t certain if I would ever feel okay enough with myself to feel life was worth living ever again. But I got through it because each day was all I learned to look at. In all those meaningful, dark and transformational days, I rebuilt my life with a foundation of one, from the ground floor of my burgeoning soul.

We’ll get through this together, she and I said to each other…

Through all the transformation America is undergoing, I believe we will emerge with a better understanding of not only our personal selves, but the moral character and integrity of our country, not to mention strength of our democracy. I believe our democracy will be stronger for our having tested it out and having gone through it. Transformation and facing our fears, traveling through pain, is not something we human beings readily embrace. But here it all is. And for now at least we’re all in this, for better or worse, together…