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January 16 - January 18, 2023
Their mission is to guide young women to live in the service of others, not because charity provides a passport to heaven or because punishment awaits otherwise. Their ethos is to treat others with charity, strength, and mercy, because—at the risk of oversimplification—it’s the right thing to do.
The above and below passages were in regards to the nuns of Mercy High School, which Jackie attended in the mid-1960s.
The Sisters insisted that empathy was a critical step toward creating lasting change, but—more urgently—they advocated for their students to be actively engaged in the effort to balance the scales of justice. Their approach, which has been reinforced by all the other major influences in my life, was that we cannot rely on others to take action. Thoughts and prayers are not enough;
and neither passive witnesses nor sideline critics are the creators of real change.
But what I learned in the days after the results had been announced—and then time and again in my career—was that the sting of failure never lasts all that long. There’s a quote that I’ve carried with me for decades that has been attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to John Wooden: “Success is never final, and failure never fatal.”
Upon losing an early campaign bid.
After race riots roiled through much of the largely African American neighborhood of Watts, Los Angeles, Ryan briefly took a job as a substitute teacher in one of the poorest schools in the community. He wanted to have real conversations with the students, parents, and educators. What he learned from that experience found its way into legislation the following session. Then in 1970, as chairman of a committee overseeing prison reform, he had listened to inmates talk about the subhuman conditions in California prisons. So, under a pseudonym, he had himself booked, strip-searched, and
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Jackie (above) is referring to Representative Leo Ryan (CA).
very often, women are just as inclined as many men are to propagate political misogyny.
“No, Assemblyman,” I responded. “But let me ask you a question: Have you ever been shot at point-blank range by an assault weapon?”
The above was Jackie's response to an unnamed Republican Congressman who attacked her stance on assault rifles by asking her if she'd ever actually shot one, as if that had any bearing on the merits of the issue at hand. Little did he realize that she had nearly lost her life to one at Jonestown.
In 1996, I talked about my medically necessary abortion on the floor, and a Republican colleague responded in a closed-door caucus afterward by commenting that “Jim Jones didn’t finish the job.” That was a particularly extreme, offensive case, but that kind of vitriol followed me. I’m not immune to the initial sting or shock of such comments, but having faced true disaster has made it easier to rebound from those petty comments and place naysayers and bullies in perspective.
Jackie was forced to have a D and C when it was determined that her baby had slipped from within the uterus prematurely and could not survive, despite intervention to save the pregnancy. The loss devastated her.
Ever since the San Bernardino attack’s moment of silence, I’ve walked off the floor or not been present. Hollow statements always set off my outrage meter. I’m not going to stand up for one more of these moments, knowing that nothing of substance will follow, so I’ve continued to boycott the chamber, or walk out when these posturing pauses occur. They’re an intolerable show of hypocrisy, and speak to our impotence that we think that it’s good enough to take out a minute to pray, then get back to our business. The families of murdered loved ones deserve more than an acknowledgment—they deserve
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I have two bullets inside of my body; I am in a powerful position where I could do something about the type of violence and weapons that put them there, and yet nothing has changed. I’m ashamed of that. It’s horrifying how often our great flag flies at half mast. It infuriates me that the NRA has infiltrated our government to such an extent that a sane conversation can’t be had about this crisis.
Expecting the unexpected got catapulted to a whole new level in January 2017, when Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States. The morning after the inauguration, I hosted a breakfast reception at the Capitol, mobilizing hundreds of women—many of whom were from my congressional district—in the fight to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and to make women’s rights a priority in the 115th Congress. That proposed amendment, twenty-four simple words that would make it illegal to discriminate against citizens based on sex, has been proposed in Congress without adoption since
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Unfortunately, Washington’s system has—for years—done a gross disservice to victims. If a victim has wanted to file a complaint, they’ve had to go to our Office of Congressional Compliance, which Washington created in 1995 to protect itself from being exposed, and it has been remarkably, shamefully successful. Twenty years later, two hundred sixty settlements and more than $15 million have permanently silenced victims of all types of workplace discrimination. In the Office of Compliance, victims are told that they have to spend a month in legal counseling. Then they have to sign a
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three months of that humiliation can they either settle the case or file an action
