Eve Ensler on Sarah Palin

Being a woman from Alaska has not only been a fact about my life, but a defining characteristic of my personality. I take pride in where I come from, and often day dream of what Alaska means to me. It’s a land full of people with a deep love for the wilderness, and for each other - creating a radical connection that binds Alaskans together into a rich community.

Recently, I’ve become aware of an intense frustration with the change in the way I am perceived as an Alaskan woman. Sarah Palin seems to have done a marvelous job giving this perception a republican, idiotic, and uninformed face lift, and I’m not ok with that. The Alaskan women I know are intelligent, sophisticated, worldly (beyond Canada and Russia!), strong, and capable women that can hold their own against the harsh Alaskan environment where they live.

We are not all like Mrs. Palin, and we don’t all agree with her politics, her family values, or the way she perceives Alaska. For me, this land is home, and I refuse to associate home with the psychotic values that Sarah Palin holds as her compass towards the white house. I can honestly say that it hurts when I hear her say the word, “Alaska” because I know that deep down she and I don’t share the same passion for protecting this wild, natural, and sacred land. The word Alaska represents commodity for Sarah. For her, it embodies a multitude of natural resources which are to be exploited by any means possible for capitol gains, and political triumph. This makes me sad, but the pain that haunts me at night is her blatant disregard for feminism.

This is complex and problematic to discuss, but before I offer the view of one of my favorite feminist authors, I will offer my view of feminism as an Alaskan. There are a lot of things that Alaskan women are not capable of, but our willingness to fight is fierce and should never be taken for granted. In a very frightening way, Sarah Palin absolutely possesses this quality. It is important as Alaskan women to press pause and truly contemplate the way that Palin is representing us to the world.

The following is an article written by one of my most idolized feminists, Eve Ensler.

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Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a
member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned
and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a
particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it’s their snowy whiteness or their
bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen
one in person or touched one.
Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice.
Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don’t like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life
trying to build community, help empower women and stop
violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why
the Sarah Palin choice was all
the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this
choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is
antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story — connected to
saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls
options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and
war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous
choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those
candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many
areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the
impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is
not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre
be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I t ake this as
a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes
or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The
melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the
pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God’s plan. ?She is fighting
to take the polar bears off the endangered species list.
The earth, in Palin’s view, is here to be taken and
plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot
and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be
taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, ‘It was a task
from God.’

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not
believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will
should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist’s baby or
not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth
control. I im agine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know
how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From
what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency
to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an
environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and
might very well be the next president of the United States. She would
govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian
hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot
hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her
private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector,
when war is declared in God’s name, when the rights of women are denied in
his name, that is the end of separation of church a nd state and the
undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.?

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold
this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the
future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether
we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for
humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in
the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and
attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning
or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and
destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and
healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will
determine whether America is a free open
tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism
and aggression. If the Polar Bears don ‘t move you to go and do
everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that
filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, ‘Drill Drill Drill.’ I think
of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I
think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless
repetition, emptying the brain of
analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone,
in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between
nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we
call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008