An open letter to Hillary.

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Dear Hillary,

I read the news today, oh boy.

I read the news of your latest defeats and your latest victories, and I read the rest of the stories, and when it came time to vote, I hovered over the line of circles matched up to names, and, slowly, consciously, I lowered the ink dauber onto the little circle next to a man's name. A whole ghostly congregation of women, back past the second wave and the suffragettes to the abolitionists and the temperance movement and earlier, stood over my shoulder and watched. Some of them applauded, others wiped away a single tear rolling down her cheek.

It was the news stories, Hillary, not the news about you, but the other stories, the stories you weren't in. The stories you too rarely speak of, the stories that should have been the heart of your campaign, but aren't. I didn't vote for you because you said so little about the stories, the lives behind the news.

A young man dressed in black shot up a university classroom, killed five people, injured dozens of others, shot himself. It's this millennium's version of "going postal." We've heard the story so often that we skip over denial, anger, and bargaining, and go straight for depression. My local liberal talk show host calls on the federal government to order everyone with a psychotropic prescription to pee in a cup biweekly, so we're sure the "crazy people" are on their meds.

You, meanwhile, couldn't make it back to the Senate floor to see that the telephone companies land in court for handing my telephone records over to Big Brother.

An Illinois cop is convicted of murdering a fetus and, as an afterthought, the woman who was carrying his child-to-be. For the fetus, aggravated murder; for killing the mother of his 2-year-old son, simple murder. A jury of twelve reputedly reasonable people decided that the cop planned to terminate the fetus and for that he should face the death penalty; killing the woman was happenstance, a means to an end. As the cop told the story, the woman lurched into the cop's upraised elbow, ramming it into her throat. He didn't plan on killing her, just aborting the fetus to get out of child support. The jury agreed: she was merely an impediment, an obstacle to his real objective, to the more serious crime.

But you didn't say a word about the Vitter amendment, the one that keeps abortion out of reach of Native American women.

A junior high schooler gunned down another boy. The dead boy had taken to coming to school bravely adorned in jewelry, makeup, heeled boots. The 14-year-old killer will be tried as an adult, no doubt, but what in our homophobic society taught him that it was wrong to kill the "fag"? How many times was the child-killer himself punched in the gut by bullies, smacked by his father, for being a "sissy," a sister, a girl? How many ways was he taught that acting "feminine" is reprehensible, that women are meant to be belittled, that men who wear the trappings of a woman are an abomination? The child-killer knew the rule: don't ask, don't tell, don't discuss it.

What is this story to you, Hillary? Do these children, the child-killer and the child killed, fit into your scholarly articles on children and the law? When you stand next to Madeleine Albright, who spoke of dead children as collateral damage, do you remember the story of the murdering and murdered children from this small farm community?

Staring at my ink dauber and that line of little circles in the booklet, I stamped my mark on a man's name. I didn't hear you talk about any of the day's stories. All I saw, Hillary, were your corporate suits.

I don't think you're cold, sweetie. Just the opposite: you've been hurt too often. The Stoic cast of the jaw, the jewel neckline, crisp military-esque jackets, they're all part of the the armor. We can all read it. No surprise that you chose your wedding dress for the magazine layout touting your most embarrassing wardrobe moments. Once upon a time, you followed your heart instead of your head, but you weren't Guinevere and he wasn't Arthur and there was no Camelot. Too many of us know that story, and you could have embraced us with yours. We should have been your base and your bedrock, but you left your story--our story--untold, so I voted for a man.

The stories are in you. A few have squeezed themselves into a debate or a speech, but then you twist them into points for your political scorecard, and the people get squeezed out. You know what I'm telling you. You told a story once, just the story and what it meant to you, and, up until the very last phrase, you forgot about winning and losing. For that moment, I thought maybe I'd voted wrong.

"And I remember sitting up there and watching them come in. Those who could walk were walking. Those who had lost limbs were trying with great courage to get themselves in without the help of others. Some were in wheelchairs and some were on gurneys. And the speaker representing these wounded warriors had had most of his face disfigured by the results of fire from a roadside bomb.

"You know, the hits I've taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country. And I resolved at a very young age that I'd been blessed and that I was called by my faith and by my upbringing to do what I could to give others the same opportunities and blessings that I took for granted. That's what gets me up in the morning. That's what motivates me in this campaign.

"And, you know, no matter what happens in this contest -- and I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored.

"Whatever happens, we're going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we'll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that's what this election should be about."

Hillary, honey, back in the day feminists faced a fork in the road of their story. Our stories made the news then, every day. You were there, you made your choice. We could have celebrated womanness, explored what it meant to be female, torn down patriarchy and the whole system of undeserved advantage and power. I rose out of my eighth-grade chair and, at the stroke of 10:00 a.m., marched out of my classroom for the right to wear pants to school. Then, you, Gloria, and so many others took the path from International Women's Year to the Year of the Woman just a decade and a half later, to flaunt five women who made it into the Senate and mainstream politicking. Back in 1977, Betty commanded us, "This year is not the time to cheer the visible few, but to work for the invisible many, whose lives are still restricted by custom and code." Do you remember? Little has changed, Hillary, except that Betty's words weren't part of your platform. Between then and now, you and the rest of my middle-class elder sisters dropped the ball on the ERA but rushed to shatter corporate glass ceilings. Those on the bottom rungs felt the rain of shards as a handful of you scrambled into the board rooms, but little else changed. We all got jobs. A single-income household became a luxury of the elite and a prison for poor single mothers, and we have nothing to show for our labor except less time with our children, less time for ourselves. I didn't walk out of school to wear pants or to dress for success--I didn't want anyone to tell me I had to wear skirts. My body, my self, remember?

That 13-year-old looked up to her 21-year-old big sister. She couldn't guess that someday her big sister would be flaunting designer slacks, corporate slacks, hundreds of dollars for a suit with a jewel neckline where the tie ought to go. The 13-year-old in me screamed, "That's not what I meant!" And I voted for a man.

So it's no wonder, I suppose, that your campaign headquarters sometimes wafts the putrid odor of the century of tension between white women and African-Americans. It's the noxious scent of the seething rivalry for the largesse of affirmative action. It's the stench of those white women who, a hundred years ago, called out rape and pointed out Black men for lynching. It's the battle for power at any cost, undeserved, unearned, the clear, crystalline jangling rain of shattering glass that pierces us all.

You could have had my vote, but you bet on the system. And the system said that being the first female President means that you're measured against some man, and you're never going to be quite as good, except maybe if that man is a Black man. You didn't have to join them, sweetie. Really, you didn't.

When your campaign's second-greatest asset, your husband, started stumping for you, you pulled him back at the first whispers that you were merely riding his coattails. You could have moved him to your side, and dared anyone to say to your face that you're the lesser person. But instead, he retreated into the backrooms.

They told you that eight years as First Lady doesn't count as experience. Of course it does, but you won't claim it. You met world leaders, you kept mortal enemies chatting over dinner, you answered constituents, and you heard and saw the responsibility, the loneliness, the burden of being President as only a spouse can. When you don't claim it as your experience, then you deny that same experience to every wife who's played the hostess for her corporate-aspiring husband, to every secretary who will never get an interview for her boss's job, to every nurse with twenty years in who's told by someone half her age that offering a diagnosis is not her job. No words, no claim to the painfully earned knowledge and authority of the mother and wife.

You lost something along the way, didn't you? You calculate when those tears very nearly bubble over, and you win another state. Some guy on TV suggests you're a pimp and your daughter's your whore, so you refuse to debate on his network, but you refuse, too, the obvious discussion about johns and your husband and how the objectification of sex has stained so many women's lives, surely including yours and maybe Chelsea's. You bit your tongue, held back the anger, just like we always have.

You could have claimed our issues and set the agenda. You didn't fail at health care: you put it on the table. You could have said that a system that routinely locks up young Black men leaves young Black women and their children to fail. You could have told us that a deportation policy that rips mothers away from their children on their walk to school is inhuman, beneath us, that we can and must do better than that, not just with a "path to legalization" but with common human decency. You could have told us that privacy is a woman's issue, that we know that privacy is part of being human, the privacy to control my body and the privacy of my phone calls. You could have told us that all the killing in Iraq must stop, reminded us that rockets and planes and mushroom clouds are monstrous phallic perversions, not a "last resort" but no resort at all. You could have told us that we must care for the earth as we would care for our mother, with love and tenderness and all the healing we can give her. You could have told your stories, our stories, the stories in the news, and you would have told us all of this.

Instead, here you are, ramming at the last of the glass ceilings, and I'm waiting for cuts and scars and bright red blood from the broken glass. Like so many others, I waited a lifetime for a woman President, but my ink dauber fell on a man's name. I wanted a woman who would dare me to put away violence, who would tear down false hierarchies, who would help me build a village. In your finest moment, Hillary, you promised me a village to raise children in, but not in this campaign, no assurances, no stories, of a village for the children.

I wish you had taken the other path. I will vote for the woman who has. I will vote for the woman who tells me that I don't have to live in a world that creates the dual insanities of a mass murderer and some liberal jackass who calls on the government to monitor urine. I want a world where aborting a fetus is not a greater crime than killing the mother. I want a President who will so move the world that boys can wear makeup without fearing for their lives. I want a woman who will speak of the news and the stories behind them, and change the world.

The cover of one of the grocery store rags is saying that if you don't win, you'll divorce Bill. Do it, either way, Hillary. You owe it to yourself. And I, for one, will applaud you.

But I voted for a man, and I'll go on scouring the news for a story about an authentic movement for women and the woman who can lead it.

Authors Bio:
Los Angeles.

It conjures up an asphalt web of insulated individuals occasionally Crashing into each other. It is that, it's designed to be that, but in the spaces between the asphalt and concrete, and sometimes on those hard spaces that shut out the earth, glimmering in the Quartz, there is life, community, and rebellion. What I write is part of that story.

Me? I'm a middle-aged, middle-class, white woman, residing in Los Angeles. Sometimes I hang out with people who are living and changing life in L.A.