Speaking Up, Speaking Out
6 minute read
I am in physical therapy. I have been coming here for six months now, but today I have a different therapist - a woman, younger than me. She’s wearing a mask - as we all are - and when she asks how my knee is, I tell her it’s feeling sore, swollen, that I overdid it at the weekend. She asks me what I was doing - it’s a normal question and she asks in a nice way, but all the same I feel myself hesitate; making the decision whether or not I want to be honest. I swallow.
“It was Gay Pride yesterday,” I hear myself say. “I was on a float, in the parade. I was dancing a lot.”
I can tell behind her mask that she is smiling - her eyes are smiling. As she starts to work on my knee she asks me about the route of the parade, how many people came out. I am only half present as I answer her, still caught in the moment before, when, for the first time in years, I had to push through my fear to own who I was in case the person I was talking to wouldn’t accept me.
This is how it starts.
As I write this, it’s four days later, a week since the fall of Roe V Wade and seven states have banned abortion already, with many more restricted or pending. For six weeks this had been signalled - a less well-kept secret than the NPHET recommendations back when a virus seemed like the scariest thing on the horizon - and yet it happened anyway. For the record, I’m not saying that Covid wasn’t scary - that for some it still isn’t scary - but with Covid, at least I had a choice about how to protect myself. I could wash my hands, my groceries if I chose - remember that? - I could wear a mask, get vaccinated. I don’t know how I can protect myself - my family - against the turn this country is taking, the country where I live, the country that as a child I always looked to as a beacon of light on the other side of the Atlantic, a place where people were accepted, where women had rights we didn’t have in Ireland, a place where I could be myself.
Last Friday night, the anger started to break through the numbness that I had been feeling all day, but the rage really took hold the next day as the reality sank in, a rage that made me want to move my body physically, to kick something, punch something. As I read Clarence Thomas’s remarks about the case and the potential to apply the same legal logic to legislation around same-sex marriage, contraception - even same-sex sex! - I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. The only thing I knew about Thomas before last weekend was that he had been accused of sexual harassment by a former subordinate of his, Anita Hill, a case I’d heard about because Hill wrote the introduction to an anthology of essays on sexual violence that I contributed to in 2020. Walking to the subway last Saturday, listening to an outraged voicemail from a friend, I decided to find out who had appointed this man who seemed to suddenly have some kind of control over my life to the Supreme Court in the first place. I got as far as typing Who app... when Google filled in the rest of the question for me: Who appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court? Clearly, I was not the only person who wanted to know.
That feeling - that anger - has not dissipated, it is not transient. It was there on Sunday, beneath the joy as I danced on the Irish Consulate float in the Gay Pride parade that pushed its way through teeming crowds on Fifth Avenue. Even among the jubilance of the young faces covered in rainbow face paint and glitter - many of the older ones too - there was something else at play, a defiance, an anger, a ripple of fear. We live in New York, we are safe, we are accepted - but are we really, deep down, by everyone? And what about our brothers and sisters in those other states, the red ones, the ones bolting up doors to abortion clinics, where young women are already feeling their choices - their value - ebb away?
There’s a lot written in the media - on both sides of the Atlantic - about how fractured American society is, how America is a “divided country.” This is true, of course, but I think what is less well understood by those living beyond the U.S. borders is what this division looks like, and how it manifests in real life, every day. A divided country doesn’t mean having different opinions on the same truth, it means not being able to agree on what the truth actually is in the first place.
A divided country means that as everything gets more politicised, the list of topics to avoid over the Thanksgiving dinner table or the fourth of July barbecue gets longer and longer until, eventually, the only thing left is discussions about what to watch on Netflix or Hulu - and even that can have its pitfalls.
A divided country means that while some are outraged but yet not surprised as the role Donald Trump played in the storming of the Capitol is revealed, others counter this by comparing the prices of petrol at the pump in January 2021 with prices today. A divided country means I am scanning my physical therapist’s face trying to decipher which side she is on before I tell her how I spent my weekend.
One thing I’ve noticed this past week - a positive thing - is a solidarity that is emerging, solidarity that spans generations, a sense of both carrying on the fight and passing on the baton. A friend in her 70s told me how she took her daughter - now in her early 40s - to marches for abortion rights back in the 1970s and now they are going again together, shoulder to shoulder this time. A young woman in her 20s at the place where I get my eyebrows done opened up beyond our usual chit-chat to share how scared she is, how angry she feels, how helpless. Above her mask, I could see tears in her eyes.
“What can we do?” she asked me. “Is there anything we can do?”
Sitting on the high stool I was conscious of my age, that being older than her I should have an answer, something wise to say that would help her feel empowered. I asked her if she votes and when she said yes, we talked about the importance of engaging in the political process, of having your voice heard. But even as we're agreeing on that - right as I was saying it - I was thinking about how Clarence Thomas, the justice who wants to take my rights away, was appointed by a president who was elected when I was only 14, well before this young woman was even born. The reality is that in a country where there are no term limits on these justices who hold the power to redraw and redefine America to mirror their views, where a right that women have held for half a century can fall when the democrats have the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate, where the electoral college system doesn’t give equal say to every voice, every vote, it’s easy to think that even voting isn’t enough.
These past few days, there have been other Supreme Court decisions that are less headline-grabbing, but devastating in their consequences all the same. Their decisions have made it easier for New York City residents to get their hands on guns and to conceal these weapons, while making it harder for the Environmental Protection Agency to limit pollution from power plants. For the first time since I moved here a decade ago, I’ve found myself wondering if this is the country where I want to live - something that up until this moment I’ve been afraid to admit, even to myself.
But even as I have that thought, I am thinking back to the young woman doing my eyebrows who thanked me for becoming a citizen, so I could vote, about how she was meeting friends to join a march after her shift. I’m thinking of my thirteen-year-old self watching America on television and longing for the day when I could go there - be there - as I had a growing awareness that it was a place where I could be who I really was meant to be. And I’m thinking of all the emails I’ve been receiving this week, listing the things we can do, the actions we can take - the most important of which is not to be silent. And I know that this is what I’m going to do - to stay, to use my voice - not just here, on this page but in my life, in those moments like the one in my physical therapy studio. When I meet someone new - someone working in a bank, or a volunteer at my job, or a new student I am teaching, in those day-to-day moments, I am going to speak up, I am going to be myself, I am not going to be silent, even if I am afraid.
Especially then.
Yvonne Cassidy, June 2022
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