are you there, dog? It's me, kerensa

On December 1, 1955, a young woman in Montgomery, Alabama sat down. And like the flap of a butterfly's wings, the ripples began and have continued throughout the decades. She has been revered for her protest, silent as it was. Along with Dr. King, Malcolm X, WEB DuBois, Nelson Mandela and scores of other African Americans, she paved a road often riddled with potholes, toward civil rights. But let's go back in time before Rosa Parks sat. Let us go back to 1501, when Africans began to be enslaved. Today, we would call this human trafficking, and if we found even one of our friends guilty of being involved, would disentangle ourselves from them faster than one could say Knockoff Purses. (But that is a story for another time).           We know from our history books the abuse dealt to the slaves- the beatings, the rapes, the death by illness and neglect, the starvation. We know that they often had no one to cling to but the families they made in the fields and in the kitchens- a

I am really tired of seeing the blogs written by complacent women in their suburban homes, self-righteously shitting on the women who took to the streets for the march on Washington last week. We can pussyfoot around the subject and take care with our words, because as women, we have been taught to be non-confrontational, to be demure. But I am taking back those silly notions and raising a big fat middle finger to the people who deride others for defending the very rights that have brought them to their complacency in their suburban homes. If you chose not to march, that is absolutely your decision, and I will not criticize you for it, for we each have to be comfortable in the ways we raise our voices. But if you are a female who has ever voted, who has ever held a job in the workforce, who has ever used birth control, had an abortion, been assaulted, been harassed, bought a home, owned a credit card, or given birth, then for you to tell the women and men who marched on our behalf th