Time to Turn Up the Rage

“It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”

“Guerrilla Radio” Rage Against the Machine

White women, nice women, suburban moms and Insta-ready wives, college girls and grandmothers – you have been conditioned your whole lives to be quiet and pleasing and polite. All the while, every day, people are stripped of their dignity and humanity because of it, because of you, because of me. People in this country are quite literally dying because of our conditioning, our gentle nature. There is nothing gentle or polite about indifference to suffering. You rest in your assumption that because the people in the crosshairs don’t look like you, you are safe. Understand that now no one is safe.

I know you are tired or tuned out, empty or frightened. I know how it feels to hold everyone together while the ground cracks beneath your feet. Give yourself a minute or a day or the week to steady yourself atop that shaking ground. Then, sit and listen. Listen to your own breath pace with the ticking of time. It will not wait any longer for you. It has called and called, but you have not answered for fear of making a sound. It is time to shake off the burden of politeness and get loud.

Really.
Fucking.
Loud.

It is time to make people uncomfortable, even if that person is you. Trust me. That discomfort quickly becomes freedom, and you will like it. You will know it was always yours to hold.

You will realize that this new you is not new at all. She has always been there, tucked neatly underneath the piles and piles of lies they’ve sewn up inside of you, inside your very skin. They have stitched these lies to you so delicately that it is hard to find where they end and you begin. They have stitched their lies inside your mind, along your tongue, between your legs. What is them and what is you? So carefully have they crafted you into what they hoped you would become—a smiling, silent doll to be taken down and played with for a while, then stuck back on a shelf when she becomes aged and worn. It is time to start ripping out those stitches. It is time to let the rage that lives buried inside breathe and burn. Let it engulf you as the layers they’ve caked upon us turn to ash.

It is time to start reclaiming who we were before the world sunk its teeth deep into our flesh. It is time to remember what we have always known – that we are all the same. We are bone and skin held together with the magic of our Godly purpose, and no one gets to claim our purpose for themselves. No one gets to rewrite who you know yourself to be.

It is time to have those hard conversations and draw the line in the sand. Whatever those conversations cost you, it is far less than what they have been costing everyone else while you stay silent. We cannot ask Black and Brown women to carry us on their backs any further than they already have. 92% of these women voted for hope and change and decency. 92% of them voted for themselves and, yes, even for you, while 53% of you stood for hours to assert your own voice against your own voice.

If you do not see yourself as equal to the man in front of or behind you, rest assured that your magic is just as pure and powerful as his. I know this is true, but the man you voted for does not. You have missed the sharpness of his words when he told you that you did not matter. You tipped your head back, laughing, but his policies will cement themselves right across your smiling mouth.

The laws his puppet masters enact will set us back to a time you never knew, a time you fantasize about because they skipped that history lesson after you begged them to from your plastic chair in the school board meeting. These laws are from a time when women stayed hidden inside tiny box houses, doped up on meds to help them say “thank you” for the crumbs their husbands shook out onto the floor after a long day at the office. These laws locked women up in institutions when their thoughts and feelings got a little too loud, their displeasure quickly turning to hysteria.

Not only have you signed yourself up for the time machine, your negligence took the rest of us with you. There is blood on your hands, the blood of all those baby girls you swore you voted for. Those baby girls were better off left to live in our dreams than be birthed into this crumbling world you have ushered in for them.

For the rest of us, the ones who went boldly or stealthily into those booths to fill in squares with ink as dark as the future they wish upon us, my message to you is simple. It is time to get loud. It is time to let them know we have had enough, and no, we are not going back. Not now. Not ever. It is time to turn up the rage.

Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage