WHEN IT ALL SEEMS SO USELESS, ONE DAMN WAR AFTER ANOTHER, TRY ANCESTOR WORSHIP

“…calling, signing, marching, posting, talking, listening all seem to be useless. Suggestions?”
-- from Diane a Facebook friend

Diane, we’re in the same boat.

Morale – keeping good heart and not letting yourself down for too long - and icy-clear thinking in the midst of an avalanche – take precedence. Easy to say, hard to do.

Morale is easier since there are time-proven ways of fending off, or distracting oneself from, let’s call it a “social depression”. Pills, the gym, booze, TV or unplug it at the wall, friendships, sex.

Here’s what I do. May not work for anyone but me.

Once a week I re-read the Russian-American reporter Masha Gessen’s ‘Rules for Survival’ in an Autocracy. (Look it up or find it on my web site clancysigal.com.) Putin honored Gessen with a personal face to face threat. The real ‘Russian connection’ is finding
people like ourselves, or who we would like to be like, over there.

For joy I watch Pussy Riot on Youtube. On my web site you can find them dancing at the Sochi Olympics and getting Cossack-whipped for it. They couldn’t care less about “reaching out” to Soviet rednecks. See them rocking at Moscow’s Church the Savior Cathedral...for which they got jailed.

I also do ancestor worship.

This is a very big deal for Vietnamese who erect an altar to the beloved dead in a special place in the house to express gratitude and to educate a younger generation in who they are and where they come from.

I think about one or more of them when I’m in a tight spot.

My own ‘ancestors’ are a strange lot of not always pleasant mavericks who have the grit to step out of line and take the flak.

They include PHOEBE PEARL, a Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, who risked her job by refusing to dance at Trump’s inauguration. And Mormon mother JAN CHAMBERLAI, of the Tabernacle Choir, who resigned saying “I could never throw roses to Hitler”
and got jumped on by angry traditional Mormons.

The EDELWEISS PIRATES, “riff raff” rough teenage working class gangs that were Hitler’s most effective resistance. Even the Gestapo was afraid of this despised German subculture some of whom were hanged for beating up Nazis.

ANDRE VAN DER MERWE, a white South African urologist known as “Dr Dick” ,who free of charge performs penis reattachments for poor black, and often suicidal, Xhosa Bantu boys mutilated in coming-of-age ceremonies. He’s not popular with his surgical colleagues.

REP. JEANETTE RANKIN, the Montana “ranch girl”, who voted in Congress against both WW1 and (the only one) WW2 after Pearl Harbor. Chased by a patriotic lynch mob she hid in a phone booth.

WARRANT OFFICE HUGH THOMPSON, the helicopter pilot who stopped more of the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese peasants by landing his ship and threatening to shoot murder-crazed GIs. For which he was nearly courtmartialled and got hate mail from his Georgia neighbors.

VICTORIA WOODHULL, scandal-plagued, free loving free living first women candidate for president in 1870, also the first women stockbroker and first female publisher of a national newspaper. She and her sexy sister Tennessee were a sensation on popular spiritualist cicles “magnetizing” the all too numerous Civil War widows. America wasn’t ready yet for a Victorian financier with hippy morals.

And countless WHISTLEBLOWERS – scientists, accountants, soldiers many of whom lost their jobs and careers for trying to save our lives. Names on request.

They stick their necks out and pay the price.