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raspberryjones · 4 years

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Legacies 1: RBG & #GrowingUpOrlov

Hours before news of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s passing had come in, #GrowingUpOrlov was in her room playing and listening to her favorite podcast at the moment. Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls is made up of 20-minute biographies of “extraordinary women who inspire us.” It’s based on a series of books which presaged the podcast, and which #GrowingUpOrlov’s also been reading, so occasionally at dinnertime, Mrs. Jones and I are on the receiving end of a lecture about heroic figures like Olympic gold-medal winner Wilma Rudolph, or Boudica, the Roman-era Celtic Queen. Hearing this little person we’ve nurtured from a pea, recite a story she’s just learned, one that’s important to her and informed by her maturing worldview, is truly one of the few unreserved pleasures in my life right now. By sheer coincidence, the episode that she was listening to on Friday afternoon was about an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, a figurine of whom stands atop her bookshelf. I went in to check on her around 3p. “Dad, do you know that Ruth Bader Ginsberg is Jewish and from Brooklyn?” she asked. When at the end of dinner I glanced at my phone and, heartbroken, shared the news that was lighting up my feed, #GrowingUpOrlov burst into uncontrollable tears, and ran back into her room.

I can’t say if it’s a good thing that a nine year-old crying at the death of a highly politicized public figure — or attending enough street demonstrations to correctly finish the chant “No Justice, No Peace...” — should become normal. That “become” of course indicates ours as a position of social and emotional privilege. For many, this kind of care and engagement is a “continued” normal, one often coupled with just-as-normal persecution, either direct, violent and crisp, or constitutional, like a slow gas-leak that pollutes the air and becomes a permanent part of the atmosphere. I’m an immigrant, a political refugee with clear, first-hand memories of living in a literal (not existential) fear. #GrowingUpOrlov’s upbringing has been far more manicured, which makes her sympathies and reactions developed choices. Yes, her civic sensitivity was born in the Fall of 2016. Before she would learn about the White House’s current occupant, she heard that a woman had never been president and felt that it was only fair (probably the most indispensable word in her civic vocabulary) that we get one then. When this did not occur of course, there was an advancing recognition: of an increased agitation at surrounding social circumstances, of heated conversations, and of changes in relationships (including the discarding of family members - for which I take full responsibility). There was also disbelief at what new presidential leadership looked and sounded like. Her questions and opinions followed somewhat naturally, and a kind of feminist perspective took root.

“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity,” wrote Frantz Fanon in 1961, and in many ways, those words remain correct. For members of #GrowingUpOrlov’s generation though, the discovery appears to have arrived early, an outline of its mission — the social justice, environmental crisis and economic inequality concerns anyway — clearly sketeched, and the line of demarcation between those on their side and those in opposition increasingly apparent. Excuses of accidental ignorance have been revealed as blind entitlement, and the desire to prolong the innocence of childhood that helicopter parents from MAGA country to liberal ivory towers preach, exposed as systemic complicity. Watching a nine year-old at once engage such ideas, and struggle to comprehend the world she was born into, has been sobering. One can listen to parents of young daughters who’ve come of age during the last four years proclaim the future is female and has many capable hands to guide it (a notion I generally subscribe to), yet still regard it an indictment of myself and my generation. Explicable though they may be, the burning piles of our alibis and blind-spots are global toxins, unrecyclable and unimportant, not unlike many of the products we’ve spent our own lives creating, hoarding and marketing to one another.

Maybe this premature mission creep is a blessing for #GrowingUpOrlov and her friends. After Friday’s tears dried up a little, with Mrs. Jones and I trying to keep our collective freak-out at bay, we decided that the best way to honor RBG’s memory that night was to sit down and watch Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s 2018 documentary on her life for the first time. One thing that stood out in the film is that Ruth too had an early understanding she was being called into action with a long-game ahead of her — her mother prepared her for it, and America’s patriarchy essentially rubbed her face in it. That recognition seems to be a shared characteristic of numerous actual 20th century American heroes, be it Ginsberg or John Lewis or the Rev. Joseph Lowery. Each acknowledged life’s inequities at a young age, and not only fostered the desire for change but was instilled with a belief that change was possible, and then spent their youth formulating the strategies to make it happen.

The other thing I found funny/sad while watching RBG, is the names we give to all these role models: rebels, dissenters, makers of “good trouble.” The contrary aspects of their legacies is why we celebrate them and praise the battles they fought agains the society they were born into. What that says about the world we keep populating and the things we teach our children about the nature of humanity speaks volumes.

#ruth bader ginsburg #rip #legacy #essay #GrowingUpOrlov

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