My Life on the Road: Parts III–IV

In what writer Pete Hamill calls a “common strategy against loneliness, a fleeting intimacy with their passengers,” drivers tell you stories and are happy to listen to yours.

Nonetheless, my taxi pundit, as blond and blue-eyed as the children in Village of the Damned, said, “If I’m voting for her, and my family is voting for her, and my passengers are voting for her, then she’s going to win.”

Local banks were afraid to foreclose on their farms, and police hesitated to help repossess farmhouses and barns when they knew their occupants to be well armed.

Only later did the media begin to take extremist groups seriously. By then they had committed racist murders in several cities—starting with the liberal Jewish talk show host Alan Berg, who was shot down in his driveway by a white nationalist group—then also bombing a government building in Oklahoma City, shooting Jewish children in a child care center in Los Angeles, and attempting to bomb a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane.

Since drivers have time and a captive audience, they can also be vectors of modern myths.

As one said, “I never thought I would see a second wave of colonialism, but there is one and it’s Chinese. Our countries are becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of China.”

I’m expecting a string of expletives, but instead, he just calls out to her, “Be careful, sweetheart!”

He brakes and careens his way through midtown traffic, muttering in Russian over the sound of Howard Stern’s talk show on the car radio.

This only causes him to add “black” to his epithets, and make it even more clear why he is yelling.

The drama of my exit is marred when he starts yelling for a cop to arrest me. I realize I haven’t paid my fare. I’m reduced to the ignominy of throwing money in his window and standing there while he counts every bill and coin.

I offer just three words—I’m a writer—hoping brevity won’t invite conversation.

Some pilots resented this female invasion of their macho air space so much that they quit.

Stewardesses could be “written up” for any infraction of the rules, including talking back to an obnoxious drunk passenger or refusing to sell more drinks to an already inebriated one.

In 1986, flight attendant Vicki Frankovich led a strike of unprecedented length and unity—and campaigned for a public boycott of TWA because of its discrimination.

I love the buildings with no addresses that only the initiated can find, and the idiosyncratic clothes that would never make it in the outside world.

Indeed, the common purpose in all these disparate and contradictory descriptions is to slow and stop a challenge to the current hierarchy.

Without campuses in the Bible Belt, I wouldn’t know that the belief that women’s subordinate role is ordained by God is still with us, or that it can take courage for a student from a strict Christian family—or a Jewish or Muslim equivalent—to go to any college that doesn’t teach the New Testament, the Old Testament, or the Koran as the literal truth.

Without campuses in the Bible Belt, I wouldn’t know that the belief that women’s subordinate role is ordained by God is still with us, or that it can take courage for a student from a strict Christian family—or a Jewish or Muslim equivalent—to go to any college that doesn’t teach the New Testament, the Old Testament, or the Koran as the literal truth.

An eminent professor of administrative law said as late as last night that he didn’t know what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was.

A portly man in a tuxedo rises from his table, his face flushed with anger, and protests not the content of what I have said but the very idea that I dare to judge Harvard Law School at all.

His remarks seemed designed to put Steinem in her place as a young woman untutored in the facts and values of the Harvard Law School, rather than to rebut her comments in any rigorous way.

His belated essay explains that his then wife, Jana Sax, had felt “profound alienation from the principles and methods reflected in her spouse’s legal education.”

Students take us around the campus of low buildings, plus one tower that is topped by the president’s office—like a warden’s aerie overlooking a prison, as the students point out.

Already, La Raza has confounded expectations by becoming the first national political party to support reproductive freedom, including abortion.

The TWU human rights movement forced the administration to deal with student grievances, took on sexism and racism together, and is now working with undocumented immigrants in North Texas.

Yet both the men and women are so fast, subtle, and nuanced in talking to me and to each other that I feel as if my audible words are like bricks, and their visual ones are sea shells and feathers.

I’m having coffee in the lobby of one in the Midwest when a tall, rangy, fair-haired young man in cowboy boots asks if he can sit down.

As we talk about his hopes of starting a country inn, I have the odd and overwhelming feeling that I’m talking to another woman. He is a cowboy, very taciturn and masculine, yet I can’t shake the feeling.

With an eye on the T-shirt group, I explain that reproductive freedom means what it says and also protects the right to have a child. A woman can’t be forced into an abortion, just as she can’t be forced out of childbirth by sterilization or anything else: the women’s movement is as devoted to the latter as the former—including the economic ability to support a child.

He just sold the patent and received an unexpected amount of money. He would like to donate $90,000, about half of his windfall, to the cause of reproductive freedom as a basic human right—like freedom of speech.

If people pledge money, it’s usually after an appeal and in requested sums.

I also read aloud from notes handed to me by the audience—about, say, cuts of hard-won new courses that aren’t yet in the core curriculum, but plenty of money allocated for a new football stadium—because I can do this without punishment.

Often a kind of alchemy takes place. When someone on one side of the hall asks a question, and someone on the other side answers it, I know this magic has happened. The group has acquired a life of its own.

There are rock-bottom subjects for men as well as women. If there is one that men want to talk about most, it’s how much they missed having nurturing fathers, or any man in their lives who cared. Once they delve into that, the question is how to become that father or man themselves.

I wish I could bring you a thousand YouTube videos of people standing up and asking what they need to know, or sharing what they’ve learned, or telling their stories, or asking for help, or saving me from some impasse I can’t solve.

The mostly male law students are arguing that any exception is dangerous and creates a “slippery slope.” Make one exception, and the number will grow until the law will be overturned de facto.

As in the abolitionist and suffragist era, when there were only six hundred or so colleges with a hundred students each—and itinerant organizers like the Grimké sisters, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth traveled to speak in town halls, granges, churches, and campgrounds—nothing can replace being in the same space.

Now that there are at least four thousand campuses with more than fifteen million students—not yet diverse enough, but more diverse than ever before—they are the mainstay for wandering organizers like me.

I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world.

You’ll learn that, say, students and staff and faculty created child care that changed who could go to a college; or that the best-qualified candidate got elected instead of the best-financed one; or that high school students here worked summers to pay the school fees of their counterparts in Africa; or that a governor learned about wrongful convictions, including of women who killed their batterers in self-defense, and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row...