What We Need To Do

I spent some time in San Diego this weekend at the California NOW conference. It was a whirlwind trip for me, filled with lots of emotional ups and downs. The experience is worthy of a longer, detailed post, but I am buried in homework and reading assignments, so here are the highlights:

The theme of this year's conference was Crossing Borders: Examining the Walls We Build Around Ourselves.

I attended four workshops - The Commonality of Oppression, Immigration is a Feminist Issue, Marriage Equality and current LGBT Legislation, and Feminists Who Changed California.

I had the opportunity to speak briefly with Dolores Huerta, and shared a great lunch with Bluegrrrl. This was a special treat for me, as she is the first of my blogging community that I have met in "real life!" Getting to know more about her makes me love and admire her even more!

Here we are with Dolores. This picture is particularly meaningful to me as today is the anniversary of Cesar Chavez's death. It saddens me that I did not develop a political consciousness in time to have marched with him in the struggle to bring social and economic justice to our farm workers, and I consider it an honor to have had the privilege to know Dolores.



The elections for our executive leadership resulted in an historic victory for grassroots leadership of our state NOW organization. I was proud to support the young slate and I am excited by the promise of possibility for feminist activism in California.

You can read about our newly elected officers, who will officially begin work for the organization in May, by going here. And please visit this website, run by our new Vice President of Membership!

And then, please read this post. Robin Tyler, founder of The Equality Campaign, made some very good points at this weekend's workshop on marriage equality. She said, "There is no such thing as just kidding. Humor is the razor sharp edge of the truth... You have to believe it in order to make it funny." McCain's "joke" should cost him his party's nomination and scare the rest of us peace-lovers into action to do more to stop this madness.