Comments on: Dickens Suddenly Relevant Again http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/2009/08/09/dickens-suddenly-relevant-again/ helen boyd's journal of gender & trans issues Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:17:33 -0500 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 By: Kath http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/2009/08/09/dickens-suddenly-relevant-again/comment-page-1/#comment-62705 Kath Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:14:32 +0000 http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/?p=8809#comment-62705 Thank you for taking up the issues in Ehrenreich’s piece. When I read it, my mind immediately raced to the transgender people I have known who have encountered homelessness. We have a perverse need in this culture to punish those who don’t measure up. Forget handout and hand-up, it seems all we can do in this country to avoid the open hand slapping of the faces of those who dare to fail, those whose “Americafail/genderfail” confront the illusion of prosperity we have stitched into what it means to be an American. “I have a dream. I have a dream...” The best of us once intoned. In the aftermath of that expressed hope lies a lifetime of doing. Barbara Ehrenreich’s editorial reminds us how far we have to go. From Little Dorrit: “From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.” But it will not go this way. We are here. We are queer. We are suffering. But we will speak truth-to-power. In the eddy of this realization are tears and a reminder we must be fierce: Fierce for our own, fierce for the disenfranchised. As always, thank you Helen. ________ Katherine Thank you for taking up the issues in Ehrenreich’s piece. When I read it, my mind immediately raced to the transgender people I have known who have encountered homelessness. We have a perverse need in this culture to punish those who don’t measure up. Forget handout and hand-up, it seems all we can do in this country to avoid the open hand slapping of the faces of those who dare to fail, those whose “Americafail/genderfail” confront the illusion of prosperity we have stitched into what it means to be an American. “I have a dream. I have a dream…” The best of us once intoned.

In the aftermath of that expressed hope lies a lifetime of doing. Barbara Ehrenreich’s editorial reminds us how far we have to go. From Little Dorrit: “From these cities they would go on again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing to hope, nothing to do but die.”
But it will not go this way. We are here. We are queer. We are suffering. But we will speak truth-to-power. In the eddy of this realization are tears and a reminder we must be fierce: Fierce for our own, fierce for the disenfranchised. As always, thank you Helen.
________
Katherine

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