I am on a date with an Australian man, who has read all of my blog posts prior to meeting me; and he abruptly asks, “Why did you just stop?” First of all, there aren’t many posts here, and they’re short, but it’s true. I stopped publicly writing about my life March 1, 2015, about 9 years ago.
I don’t answer, but instead stare at the murky walls of the speakeasy in downtown San Jose, mentally surveying my life.
In the beginning, I was all hope and no experience. I had clarity and vision, but I faced a long gut-wrenching battle to create the Range of Light National Monument. And I was naive. I even believed the Forest Service could reform itself (read that last post). My goal was (and is) to protect 1.4 million acres of federal land between the parks, an area twice as big as Yosemite; something like that hasn’t happened in the Sierra Nevada in a century, not since John Muir, and to be successful, the U.S. President must sign a proclamation, declaring the land protected. Forever.
What happened in that nine years? Why the silence for nearly a decade? I let the question hang in the air. Glasses clink.
Here’s what I don’t say… Because I experienced one trauma after another, one brutal political lesson after another, one personal loss after another, and I was too busy hemorrhaging and trying to control the bleeding to speak about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. Period.
At one point, I forgot how to breathe.
Two days before I gave a speech at the Democratic Delegation Luncheon in Washington DC, an ER doctor told me, I was alternating between hyperventilating and holding my breath, so my lips, fingers, and feet were going numb from lack of oxygen. It was one of my first speeches ever, and it was a rare invitation. Congressional representatives meet to share lunch together at the Capitol and invited guests (that was me) get 5 minutes to convince them to do something while they dine and stare at their phones (like the rest of us).
At that point, I was nearly out of money, my husband had recently sent me an Excel spreadsheet with our expenses itemized including the weekly date dinner (so I would know exactly how much I must pay monthly to continue the campaign and contribute to the household costs).
I had two months of savings left.
Also, about that time, I discovered that my nagging back pain wasn’t because I was sitting too much (driving to the mountains and working tech jobs) – it was because my lower vertebrae are massively deformed; the MRI showed that they’re smashed together, and they squeeze my spinal cord and bend it the wrong way, affecting my ability to move and sit still. The doctor said, “I’ve seen one worse; at least you can still walk.” Then he said, “Don’t drive and don’t sit.” Really? These activities are fundamental to both earning income and getting to the mountains.
In a nutshell, I didn’t have money, I didn’t have an emotional or financial support system, and I didn’t have my health. I had no structural integrity in my body or outside in the world. So, as I built a massive grassroots campaign, sprawling over the mountains, I had to rebuild myself and my entire life from the spine outward.
The caterpillar in its cocoon phase is entirely vulnerable; it is a mushy mass of liquid with imaginal cells that shape its future as a butterfly. If you cut into it then, it will ooze out and its life will end. When metaphorizing, it burrows inward, dissolves into a liquid, and reshapes itself, until it’s fully formed and ready to fly. The butterfly does this in two weeks though, not nine years.
What was I actually doing during that time? I sip my Manhattan and ponder; my drinks have gotten progressively stronger through those years, too, numbing.
I was quietly reshaping everything in my life in an ongoing unprotected state. So, yes, silence. Politically and personally, exposing your weaknesses doesn’t help you in this realm; you just make yourself an easy target for people on “your side” and “the other side.” In the political realm, people will poke the life out of you, without a second thought.
James Carville, the political strategist who ran Bill Clinton’s campaign, recently said, “The DNC, the state party chairs, the labor people, the progressive advocacy groups, they all want a seat at the table. You can have a seat as long as you keep your mouth shut. I’m old and I can say it because I’ve been around, but that’s the truth.”
Yes. It’s the truth at certain moments in certain places, particularly Washington DC.
That’s how I got the Range of Light bill introduced by Congress, working behind the scenes for years, with focus and a few friends across the spectrum. I didn’t say anything about that bill while working on it, until it became public in the final hours of the 2022 congressional session. It was introduced nearly exactly as I had written it, and that is a seat at the table.
But the value of silence is a half-truth, which works in distinct moments and places. For our country, this is not that moment.
The people, who Carville says should remain silent while Biden’s DC team figures out what to say and do, are exactly the ones who should start talking, and the DC policy wonks and think-tank strategists should actually listen to them (and not via a political survey or phone call or text message, but by going out into the field and talking to people, face to face). The President and his team must understand what people need and articulate a future for them, with power, passion, and clarity.
Only that will prevent the end of our democracy and the beginning of American despotism. Make no mistake, this is exactly where we are. Right on the edge. Dramatic, I know.
Anyway.
That unanswered question still hangs in the air, politely asked by a curious man who I’ll never see again. All I say is, “There was too much happening at the same time, for all nine years, actually 10, and I was not prepared to share the experience publicly.”
Now, however, I am.
Minerva's Moxie 