As an addition to my own response to Lisa Falkenberg’s column about the one-year anniversary of Sen. Wendy Davis’s historic filibuster and the popular uprising around it, I want to call your attention to Andrea Grime’ piece in RHRealityCheck. It’s not a response to Falkenberg or anyone in particular, it’s her recollection of the events of last year as she lived them, and what has happened with her and others that were involved since then. I include it here because it’s a compelling read and it does address some of the things Falkenberg wrote about.
I woke up on the morning of July 13—a Saturday—feeling broken, enraged, helpless. Even after a few hours’ sleep, I was more exhausted than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Days before, I’d made the mistake of telling my husband I’d have brunch with his father-in-law and some of his work colleagues. When it came time to get out of bed, I didn’t even bother. I don’t know what I told my husband to tell the guys. I didn’t really give a fuck. I wanted to sleep, I wanted to cry, I wanted to fall through the mattress, through the floor, through the crawlspace, through the dirt, down deep into the Texas soil beneath our house and nest there, hide where no one could tell me it was time to go to another meeting, time to file another story, time to gather up my shit and move to another hearing room, time to plead with lawmakers who couldn’t even be bothered to pretend to half-listen to reason, lawmakers who played on their phones and passed notes while my fellow Texans broke their hearts open between pink limestone walls, telling stories they’d never even whispered aloud before that summer.
So I slept, and then I ate some Lipton instant rice with about half a tub of sour cream on top. That’s what I eat when I’m sad. Lipton instant Spanish rice. Daisy Light sour cream. I think I Instagrammed it before I went back to sleep, grudgingly setting my alarm for 4 p.m. Because I had another thing to do: drink beer. And I dreaded it.
Which is, uh, unusual for me. Let’s say that. Unusual. “Dread” and “drink beer” are about as far apart as two things can get on my emotional spectrum. But the Saturday after HB 2 finally passed was the same Saturday I’d scheduled our usual Austin feminist meet-up—really, more of a “drink up” group that’d been meeting monthly since November 2011. We called it #ATXFem, most of us knew each other from Twitter, and it had come to be sort of a thing. We’d wear name tags, drink beers, do feminist coloring projects, talk shit, organize. And for the first time in more than 18 months, I didn’t want to go hang out and get drunk with a bunch of feminists.
But #ATXFem is sort of my baby. So I dragged my ass out of bed, threw on my “Wendy F’N Davis” tank top, and arrived late to my own Internet nerd party.
When I walked into the bar, all I could see was orange. The Dog & Duck, a malty-smelling pub just a few blocks from the state capitol building, was packed from, well, dog to duck with people wearing orange t-shirts. I didn’t make it to the beer line for ten minutes—there were too many hugs, too many tears. That Saturday was our biggest #ATXFem meeting yet, and we closed down the bar making plans for what to do next: where to donate, who to call, who to write.
Since that day, I have seen nothing that looks like a loss of passion or a surrender to the inevitable, though GOP pundits and mainstream Texas newspapers seem to love the narrative that progressive, liberal and moderate Texans forgot everything they learned last summer as soon as they were home safe, tucked in their beds.
What I have seen is an incredible outpouring of time, of money, of soul. Because the knowledge that Texans gained last summer—how to testify in front of a committee hearing, how to contact their legislators, hell, how to just know the names of their representatives—can’t be taken away from them. They now see how the system works, and how the system has been manipulated by right-wing lawmakers who have grown lazy and self-satisfied, comfortable with their bully pulpit.
There’s a lot more, including stuff about Battleground Texas, but I want to encourage you to click over and read the whole thing. The point again is that rallies and public events like the anniversary commemoration very much have their place, but if they’re not being backed up by the hard and unglamorous work of organizing, they’re more for show than anything else. And if you find yourself complaining about feeling uninspired after the public events have faded away, maybe you need to check out some of those unsexy but deeply vital organizing events. I guarantee, there’s plenty of inspiration to be found at those.