Читать книгу We: A Manifesto for Women Everywhere - Gillian Anderson, Gillian Anderson - Страница 9
Оглавление‘Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.’
NAOMI KLEIN
Our current way of doing things – the ‘me culture’ – isn’t working.
The world we all share is more divided and unequal than ever.
Rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm among women are rocketing. And the hard-fought-for rights that we, as women, thought we’d finally won are once again under renewed attack.
Nearly 800 million people live in hunger and yet those with plenty battle with obesity and depression.
Every minute one woman dies needlessly in childbirth, while elsewhere in the world another woman spends thousands on cosmetic surgery because she isn’t able to feel comfortable with how she’s ageing.
Violence against women is rising, yet at the same time refuge services – especially for black and minority ethnic women – are being cut.1
The gap between rich and poor is widening, causing social division and ill health,2 but instead of investment and redistribution we have cuts and austerity.
Large swathes of humanity are threatened by climate change, yet our governments fear tackling it lest they offend big business and consumers.
The list goes on and on, and every one of us knows that it’s crazy and it’s wrong.
Yet instead of joining together, we often find ourselves isolated and in competition. Trying to put a positive gloss on our lives to disguise the huge gap between how things look externally and how they feel inside. Not able to lift our eyes to the horizon and deal with the bigger issues because we each already have so much on our plate.
There is a different way of doing things. One that combines our own emotional and spiritual healing with active engagement with the world around us.
Our current political systems have failed us, but it’s not possible to heal the divisions in our world without also healing the wounds which drive them. We can’t heal our broken system by sitting in judgement. Within each of us lie the seeds of intolerance and hate. If we simply declare others wrong and ourselves right we deepen the divide. But, to remain silent is also not an option – it leaves us complicit.
This path – of necessity – involves a lot of internal work but it is work that will ultimately bring us together.
WE is a movement for change, a manifesto for a female-led revolution: a quiet, peaceful about-face that doesn’t require the consent of those in power. It just asks each of us, one woman at a time, to be the change and take the journey from me to WE.
