Rebecca Solnit :: We Are What Will Happen

We Are What Will Happen
(short talk for an anti-Kavanaugh rally in San Francisco)

This conflict began as a question about the fitness of one man to sit on the Supreme Court. But now it’s about much more. It’s about who this country is for and who matters, who decides, who can be heard, who will be believed and respected. And with that it joins the battles we’ve called Black Lives Matter and #metoo and Dreamers and voting rights that are part of a long, long project of making this a country for everyone, a country that lives up to its old unfulfilled promises of equality.

This conflict is about that old white male elite versus the voices of women, of immigrants, of people who aren’t rich or straight or white or male or cis-gender. It’s about the refugee children they put in concentration camps. It’s about the Muslim ban. It’s about Standing Rock and indigenous rights. It’s about an old war to keep women silent and out of public life so that men could perpetrate violent crimes against us in private with an impunity some are still shocked to be losing.

It’s about white patriarchy’s assumption that it controls the truth and the facts and the story. They assume their authority is so great that their assertions will override witnesses, evidence, the written record, that theirs are the only voices that matter. That they can have whatever facts they like and make other facts go away.

We are facts who will not go away.

Sexual assault means being stripped of the right to say no, of the right to self-determination and safety and dignity, of the voice that is inseparable from who each of us is. And when sexual assault is denied, trivialized, mocked, or celebrated, when victims are treated as less credible and made less audible than the people who attacked them, that’s exactly the same kind of silencing and dehumanization and devaluation, done by the judicial system or the university or in this case the Trump Administration and half the US Senate.

Survivors, I hear you, I know your value is beyond measure, I send you our love and our pledge that we will change this world for you and with you. We are changing it. We will not stop. We are claiming our voices. With them we will tell our stories and your stories, we will mourn and we will celebrate and we will open all the doors they nailed shut. We will sing until our voices shatter their windows. We will set free the truths they imprisoned.

The conflict about the direction of the country is out in the open. We may not win this round. But we are winning the war, which is why they are so angry and so frightened. It is they who are the backlash. Will we go forward to a country that lives up to those dreams and promises of equality and inclusion? Or will we go back to their frat-house nightmare of white men who can rape and lynch and destroy with impunity and keep us silent? I believe that we will win.

We are the great majority. Our love for each other, for the right of everyone to have a voice and to live in dignity, is stronger than their hate.

Do not ask what will happen. We are what will happen.

I believe that we will win.



"Good Government", On Governance, #fucktrump, #MeToo, #Resist, #BLM, #Dreamers, #Equality, #VotingRights, #FuckKavanaugh, #OldWhiteMaleElite, #FuckTheGOP, #RapeCulture, Rape Culture, We are here to kill rape culture