I have started and stopped this post more than a dozen times. Here’s the conversation I hear as I type, delete, type, hit save draft…

Head: “It’s time to write a blog post.”

Heart: “Yeah, probably, but I don’t wanna.”

Head: “You have stuff to say, publications to plug, yadda yadda.”

Heart: “Ugh, I would rather sit under a blanket and watch Scandal, the best show on television.”

Head: “You streamed every episode available.  There won’t be a new one until March 21. WRITE THAT POST.”

Heart: “Dammit.”

In last month’s issue of the Minnesota Women’s Press, themed “Matters of the Heart,”  I wrote a fan letter to feminist men.  It was pretty good, I think–at least good enough to warrant many hetero women to inquire where I found my awesome feminist husband (behind the counter at Cheapo, of course).  But I didn’t do the usual thing and hawk it here, for an uncomfortable reason.

My big fat feminist heart is in pieces.

On January 30, my friend Pam Taylor passed away from brain cancer.  She died with her family at her side, at home, in typically stubborn fashion–her doctors gave her just weeks to live, but she pushed that out to fourteen months.  If you knew Pam, you knew she was not about to leave her two daughters THAT quickly.  No way.

Usually, I respond to upheaval by writing.  I wrote volumes when my dear friend Liz passed away in 2007, also of cancer, also at home, also leaving behind two young daughters.  At the time I kept my blog on MySpace, a charmingly mindless place to vent about the ugliness and unfairness of life.  As a plus, you could add the music you were listening to at the time, which in 2007 was always Paul Westerberg’s “Let the Bad Times Roll“:

The good times hide/and so do I/out of my control/I dig a hole/I’m gonna let the bad times roll

It should be noted that this song was released in 2002, a decade before Scandal was available to cheer ol’ Paul up.

In the years (yes, years) that I’ve been working on The Radical Housewife, the book, I’ve utilized the services of a number of industry professionals who advised me that my blog should be a place where I “build my platform,” such as it is.  I must be vigorous about promoting myself and my work at the Women’s Press, at MPR, at the Minnesota NOW Times, at any analog and/or digital publication that would have me–nevermind that this is contrary to every introverted cell in my body.  I find that this push towards “branding” has strangled my natural impulse to write directly from my heart, whether it’s broken or whole.

And more and more often I see bloggers are clashing with each other (and with their readers, sometimes) over anything and everything.  Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg seem to have reinvigorated the Mommy Wars for 2013, and every feminist writer I know has taken a side.  Page views and well-placed editorials are the reward for the winner, dontcha know!  The Feminist Breeder was so fed up she put up a paywall on her site.  Kinda makes you wish we were all gluing up zines at Kinko’s doesn’t it?

Goddammit, whatever happened to GIRL POWER?!  Forgive us, Bratmobile and Sporty Spice!  We need you!

Ultimately, waxing nostalgic for long-lost “good old days” is as unhelpful as wishing very very VERY hard that people wouldn’t die.  You can give it a go, just don’t expect results.

The heart is a fragile thing.

Whatever your feelings about the obnoxious commercialization of Valentine’s Day, put them aside and consider the goals of today’s OTHER big campaign, One Billion Rising.

…and whatever your feelings about the largely symbolic nature of the One Billion Rising movement (and I share them, believe me), consider that Katie Couric, hardly a radfem, just Tweeted: “1in3 women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her life.”  Anything that gets that TRUTH spoken more often in public is, to my mind, a step in the right direction.

Do you remember the first time you heard that statistic?  I do.  I couldn’t believe it–and really didn’t believe it until a friend told me what happened to her.  Then another friend told me her story.  Then another and another and another.  As a member of the randomly lucky two out of three, I was changed forever.

I am changed every time I hear the truth.  Are you?

I hope to attend tonight’s Minneapolis event, a rally, meal, and dance dedicated to the memory of Jyoti Singh Pandey, but it’s possible that I’ll be worn out after  my usual Thursday duties: volunteering for a local organization that provides services to women and children experiencing domestic violence.

As a dedicated binary rejector, I tell you this not to imply that one (direct service) is better than another (dancing at Powderhorn Park).  Each complements the other.  In fact, survivors of violence and those who work in the field are the ones who need to dance most of all!

My hope is that those who come to dance  are equally moved to put their hearts, hands and wallets to work towards domestic violence education and prevention, as well as ensuring that resources are readily available to survivors who need them.  Many of today’s dancers know where to buy a Wonder Woman outfit but remain unaware of their power to be advocates for REAL wonder women in their own neighborhoods.

To DANCE in your community: http://www.onebillionrising.org/page/event/search_simple

To SERVE in your community: http://www.ncadv.org/

To LOBBY for reuathorization of the Violence Against Women Act: http://4vawa.org/

The National Women’s History Museum posted this 1916 pamphlet on their Facebook page yesterday:

HA HA HA!

“Women are not suffering from any injustice which giving them the ballot would rectify.”

HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Isn’t it hilarious what those poor misguided idiots thought about women’s suffrage a hundred years ago?  One has to wonder what feminists of the 22nd century will think of debates happening today. What do you think my great-grandchildren will think of these words, written in 2013:

“We’ve got equal pay, and female CEO’s just as greedy and criminal as the males. So what do we need the ERA for?”

HA HA HA HA HA …ha ha….sniff sniff…..*sob*…gawd have mercy….

Yes, folks, I wrote an essay for Minnesota Public Radio News calling for action on the long-delayed Equal Rights Amendment and got myself soundly mansplained in the comments.  And if you think that’s enough to make a white woman (earning 77 cents for every white man’s dollar) bawl her eyes out, consider that the wage gap is FAR worse for women of color: like 62 cents (African-American women) and 54 cents (Hispanic women) worse.

An Equal Rights Amendment would sure help.

The same gentleman also insisted that “we’ve got equal sports,” which I found kinda funny in the week leading up to the Super Bowl.  I don’t remember weeks of hype leading up to the WNBA Finals last fall–and I was paying attention, because 2012 was the year my daughter and I became hardcore Minnesota Lynx fans. Maya Moore, the Lynx forward whom my daughter wants to be when she grows up, earns $45,000 a year.  Moore was the WNBA’s number one draft pick in 2011.  The NBA’s top pick that year, Kyrie Irving, was signed by the Cleveland Cavaliers in a two-year deal worth nearly $23 MILLION DOLLARS. Wow! Is that “equal sports”?

Would an Equal Rights Amendment bring these wildly disparate pro basketball salaries into alignment?   Free market mansplainers will squawk “hell no!” but I say we give it a try!

I could write a (long-threatened!) women’s studies dissertation disproving these gentleman’s claims, but I have two children, a marriage, and fresh grief that runs deeper than the sorrows of First World Woman.  I urge YOU, however, to keep talking about the real need for the ERA to your friends, colleagues, unfortunately unavoidable mansplainers, and most importantly, your elected representatives.  Your signature on this White House petition would be nice, too.

Last week, a reader named “Elizabeth” posted this comment on my Roe-anniversary-themed blog Answering the abortion rights question: 

Hello! Just found your blog. I am curious how you would explain to your son an abortion performed on an embryo or fetus that is not a two-cell or four week old zygote, but perhaps a 20 week or 28 week old who is certainly a baby by that point who can experience pain, and could potentially survive outside the womb. Who’s body is it at that point? What would be a good explanation? Thanks 

In my experience, the only folks who ask questions like this are anti-choicers trying to bait Roe fans into admitting that on occasion, reproductive rights activists sneak into nurseries to D & C babies in their cribs.

Yikes!

Elizabeth, I could try to explain an abortion performed on, in your words,  ”a 20 week or 28 week old who is certainly a baby by that point,” but I think I’ll let Tiffany Campbell do it instead:

Stories like these are why there remains a need for abortion access later in pregnancy.  It’s simply a myth that there are 28-weeks-along pregnant ladies who wake up one morning, wish they had their figures back, and drive to Planned Parenthood to get rid of that pesky thing that’s making life so darned difficult.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 88% of abortions occur in the first trimester; additionally, “fifty-eight percent of abortion patients say they would have liked to have had their abortion earlier. Nearly 60% of women who experienced a delay in obtaining an abortion cite the time it took to make arrangements and raise money.”  Women who want to terminate their pregnancies do so as swiftly as possible.  Ironically, the obstacles anti-choicers have put in place probably increase the likelihood that a later-term abortion will occur.  As I noted in another old post, a 2008 Guttmacher study concluded that 87 percent of counties in the United States do not, DO NOT, have an abortion provider.  Five years later, that percentage is probably higher.

So whose body is it?  I feel it’s still the woman’s.  I believe in women–in their common sense, in their intelligence, in their ability to weigh many sides of a very difficult decision.

Tiffany Campbell had no choice when it came to her sons’ devastating medical condition.  She could, however, choose what steps to take next, to decide what would be best for her and for the rest of her family.  Who are we to tell her otherwise?

While we’re reminiscing today, the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, let’s take a moment to remember what I looked like on Good Friday, 2005, just one of the many days I have honored my commitment to speak out for reproductive rights:

Back then, my son was a five-year-old preschooler, obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and the Hardy Boys.  Today my son is almost thirteen, a fan of Katniss Everdeen and dubstep music that makes my head hurt.  He has always been a very curious kid, and now that he is older he is very interested in what I call The Big Questions: life, death, and the tools we use to make sense of what lies in between.

Not long ago he asked me how I felt about abortion. “I think whether or not to have an abortion is a woman’s business and no one else’s,” I replied.

“But don’t you think it’s killing a baby?”

Bam! THE REALLY BIG QUESTION!

Of course this discussion had to happen in the car, so I wasn’t able to whip out the smartphone to add visuals to our conversation.  It took much longer while driving to explain that THIS:

…or even THIS:

…is not the same thing as THIS:

…which is what his sister looked like six months OUTSIDE of my body.

“Some people think that a two-celled zygote is a human life,” I told Elliott.  “Some people think that a four-week zygote is, too.  I saw you on a sonogram only nine weeks after conception, and I saw your little heart fluttering.”

“You did?”  He was impressed.  I was too, back in the summer of 1999, and I wrote about the experience in my book The Radical Housewife.  I shared the excerpt here on Blog For Choice Day 2011:

Lacking the framework of faith, I seek not perfection, but balance. When I looked my blob, I understood him as the culmination of countless events and choices, the sum total of my years on the earth. My years, and no one else’s. I also saw a creature that drew sustenance from me and me alone. He lived on my blood, my nutrients, my oxygen, my energy: all of it mine. If I died, so did he. His tail could not wiggle outside the safety of my womb.

I gave him life. I also gave him meaning.

When does life begin? I suspect it is a process requiring a complex engagement between both the being and its world, much like a story requires a reader. Otherwise, the words remain only a series of unintelligible scratches on a page. If we accept that a story has different meaning for a different reader, we may understand that no person will approach either their soul, or a zygote’s, identically.

The above language is a little fancy for the average 13-year-old, even one as brilliant and handsome as my son, so I tried to craft my feelings about abortion, and life, so that he could understand.

“A woman must have the right to decide what happens to her body.  How I feel about pregnancy, or how you feel, or how the lady next door feels, or the President feels or the Pope feels, can never be more important than the feelings of the woman going through it.  No one can decide but her.”

The backseat was quiet for a moment–a rare thing.  Then he said:

“I get it.”

1. Sandy Hook “Truthers” (also known as Newtown “Truthers” and/or batshit paranoiacs who of course ALL HAVE GUNS!)

2. The CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who thinks that Obamacare is not socialist (Sweden) but fascist (Nazi Germany).  As I commented on HuffPo, I’m glad I know where NOT to buy my bulk quinoa and Rice Dream from now on.

3. Suzanne Moore, Julie Burchill, and any other vagina-born person who considers intersectionality a bad thing.  Allow me to introduce them to my new favorite meme, the RadFem Scorpion:

4. The godawful people who run the NRA.

5. Lance Armstrong apologists.  And Lance Armstrong.  Gawd, I can’t stand that guy.

6. That dude who thinks that an effective way to shut down the work of a feminist writer is to call her “ugly.” Instead of feeling badly for Jen McCreight, Jessica Valenti, and Sandra Fluke, I have to ask this Mr. Roosh fella: WHY AM I NOT ON THIS LIST?!  I’m a feminist and an atheist, dammit!  Why aren’t you giving me the same blog traffic as Amanda Marcotte?  Do you not love me?  I am a lady, so of course I need your approval.  What can I do to win it?  Are there not enough unflattering pictures of me in the internets?  Here’s one you can use, taken just after I returned from a vacation to Cancun:

Add your own reasons for staying locked inside your house in the comments section.

To honor the long-awaited decision of Planned Parenthood to drop the word “pro-choice” in favor of more, er, neutral language (I don’t hear them tooting the “reproductive justice” horn, unfortch), I am sharing these thoughts on the subject, excerpted from my book The Radical Housewife and first posted on this blog in 2011.   Choose to enjoy it!

The late, great Shirley Chisholm wrote the following in her autobiography Unbought & Unbossed, addressing men on her staff who tried to convince her to avoid speaking out in support of abortion rights:

“Women are dying every day, did you know that? They’re being butchered and maimed. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich, while poor women have to go to quacks? Why don’t we talk about real problems instead of phony ones?”*

Rep. Chisholm wrote these words in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, when dying from a botched abortion was a very real threat to women across the country, particularly poor women of color. Two generations later, not a lot has changed. Accessing an abortion is easy for well-heeled urban women, the vast majority of whom (as it was in 1970) are white.

In Shirley Chisholm’s day, the term “pro-choice” was used to remind people of the personal matter of the procedure. The “choice” to have the abortion should be the woman’s, centering the debate on the right to individual autonomy, a concept that Republicans claim to embrace. Senator John Kerry declared in a 2004 Presidential debate that having an abortion “is a woman’s choice. It’s between a woman, God, and her doctor.”

Oh, if it were only that easy, John! God and doctors are often in very short supply when they are needed the most. If you get accidentally knocked up in Wyoming or Mississippi, you better pray as hard as you can, because your states have no provider at all.

In fact, a 2008 report funded by the Guttmacher Institute announced that 87 percent of counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider.That’s a big enough number to put in all caps: EIGHTY-SEVEN PERCENT! That makes getting an abortion seem less like a “choice” and more like a forced road trip.

Or a financial ordeal. The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1977 and reauthorized every year since, bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. Rep. Chisholm worried that poor women would have to go to quacks; she didn’t realize that when they won the right to access abortions from a trained doctor, they’d have to surrender their rent checks. The Hyde Amendment, predictably, reinforces the idea that wealthy women have the “choice,” but poor women don’t. And lest we forget, the poorest women are the ones who lack access to contraceptive information and services anyway, dammit!

When I demonstrated with over one million other people on the U.S. Capitol Mall in 2004, I wrote the word “choice” on my sign, but the event was officially called the March for Women’s Lives.**

The name, though, made some mainstream feminists cranky. Shouldn’t it be called the March for Choice? Not so fast, declared a coalition of poverty activists and health care groups for women of color. The word “choice” obscures the “real problems” that Rep. Chisholm talked about: racism, poverty, and other forms of pervasive inequality.

I no longer identify as pro-choice. How can I, when Sarah Palin congratulates herself for the “choice” to carry her Down’s Syndrome child to term? Bringing a special needs baby into a tightly-knit, financially stable family that has access to health care and other forms of support is no big whoop, except for the baby in question—Trig Palin is one hell of a lucky kid. So is Tripp Johnston, the child carried to term by Trig’s seventeen-year-old sister. All four of them appeared on a celebrity tabloid in the early days of 2010, declaring “we’re glad we chose life!”

That’s that sneaky, slippery power of language again! Can you imagine a headline that read “we’re so glad we didn’t have abortions!” I can’t either.

Remember chapter one?*** I don’t deserve a medal for surviving life with the colicky, special needs baby I had in the year 2000. Accidents of fortune gave me everything I needed, and my child reaped the benefits.

I don’t care if Sarah and Bristol Palin keep on breeding–that’s their beeswax, not mine. But under Gov. Palin’s leadership, Alaska’s rates of domestic violence and sexual assault were twice the national average.**** When Palin ran for office in 2006, she announced (in so many words) that if her then 14-year-old daughter were raped, she wouldn’t allow the girl to have an abortion—a very likely scenario, considering Palin’s vocal support for parental notification laws. In yet another nimble linguistic twist, Palin averred that the issue was one of “parents’ rights.” Welcome to Palinverse, where a pre-born fetus had greater bodily autonomy than a post-born teen.

Feminists of any/every Wave, listen up: “choice” is over. It’s done. NO MORE.

*Oh my gaaaawd, I love Shirley Chisholm so much!!!!!!

**It was awesome.  I can’t wait until Erin Matson’s Feminist Jetpack Factory™ organizes another one. 

***You WILL remember it when you buy your copy from Medusa’s Muse Press this fall!  Woot!

It’s no secret that reproductive rights activists and the anti-choice crowd read each others’ websites and Twitter feeds.  And by read, I mean parse in ever more minute detail.   Aside from providing insight into the other side’s strategies and tactics, it’s fun!  The circle-jerk that gets going after a blog post responds to a Twitter war kicked off by a online news report is a great way to waste a quiet afternoon.

I’m not going to link you to the site that inspired this post, because I think you should have your own moment of bliss when you are forced to Google “Gloria Steinem abort Erin Matson.”

You all know Erin, right? The former Action Vice President for NOW who spoke to Time magazine for their January 14, 2013 cover story on the reproductive justice movement 40 years after Roe v. Wade?  The woman in the article with the staple in her face?

Photo credit: my crummy Samsung Galaxy

Erin should also be familiar to my regular readers as a longtime friend, one so dear that I would trek from Cub Foods to Walgreens to Rainbow to find a damned copy of the very prominent national magazine with her picture in it AND be pissed to find that there’s a fucking STAPLE in the photo I was going to hang up by my desk!  I didn’t pay five bucks to have a clear picture of Nancy Keenan, I’ll tell you that!

Ooooh, did you catch that thinly veiled jab at the soon-to-be-former president of NARAL?  Look for it to be headline news in the blogosphere tomorrow.

If you performed the aforementioned Google as directed, you went to a site that had a rather snide take on the concerns of Erin, Steph Herold, and other young women in the reproductive rights movement.  If you read closely (as I do whenever I see a piece with Erin’s picture attached), you noticed that the post’s author believes that intergenerational tension is due in no small part to our elders’ subconscious desire to have aborted us.

(Well, not ME.  I was born in 1971, and everyone knows that no abortions occurred before January 22, 1973.)

Yes, folks, it’s true: Gloria Steinem wants to abort Erin.  When Erin told me the story of why she felt she had to leave her job at National NOW, she failed to add that Terry O’Neill, a 60-year-old Second Waver, kept chasing her around the office with a coat hanger.

I realize, of course, that writing a blog post about a blog post about a magazine article (and a blog post) is contributing yet another jerk to this particular circle, but I can’t help myself.  It’s too, too funny!

If I don’t see a response to this post from Lila Rose or the New Wave “Feminists” that in turn inspires a snarky rebuttal from Amanda Marcotte, I will be very disappointed.

During January in Minnesota, no one feels big.  The excitement and energy of the holiday season has worn off and we’ve awakened to darkness, cold, and existential despair, which has a way of making you feel very small indeed.

My street looks just like this every January 1st, darn it!

So it is with some shyness and anxiety that I accepted a challenge from my friend Sonya Huber to participate in a little blog-go-round called Next Big Things.  Sonya, herself the author of two great creative nonfiction books (Opa Nobody and Cover Me), completed these questions at the behest of another author, then she tagged me to do the same.  I, in turn, have to tag some up-and-comers who will complete the circle of Next Big Thinginess.  Look for their names at the end of the post.

What is the title of your book?

The Radical Housewife: Redefining Family Values for the 21st Century, but you knew that. I’ve officially resolved to have the editing done and the book in your hot little hands by the end of this year, even if it means I have to step over dead bodies in the snow in my haste to deliver edits to my publisher.  Marge would understand.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

One day my husband said, “Why are you driving yourself nuts writing novels when you are already writing really interesting stuff about your life as the anti-Schlafly?  Why not publish all of that?”  I mulled this over and realized that writing fictionalized versions of my life was quite a lot of work–all those pseudonyms to remember, the hair and eye colors to change!  The essays I was writing for the Minnesota Women’s Press and for my old MySpace blog would be my jumping-off point for a full-length book about the adventures of this feminist activist parent.

In hindsight, I probably should have stuck to just changing all my novel’s characters to vampires and been done with it.

What genre does your book fall under?

One that I invented: Political Momoir.  I thought this was very clever, but industry professionals did not.  How well I remember the exasperation of the editors and agents! “Sometimes it reads like a memoir, sometimes like a polemic,” they’d say.  ”BUT I’M A FEMINIST WHO REJECTS THE RIGIDITY OF BINARIES!” I’d splutter in my politely middle-aged Minnesotan way.

In hindsight, I should have already become famous before I attempted to do anything interesting.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Janeane Garafalo, patron saint of bespectacled white nerd girls everywhere, as The Radical Housewife!

Jemaine Clement as the handsome and heavily-Kiwi-accented Radical Hubby!

Bart & Lisa Simpson as the children!

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

The Radical Housewife documents ten years in the life of a feminist stay-at-home-mom determined to upend the myth of American “family values” one dirty diaper, clinic picket, and PTA meeting at a time.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Working off a framework provided my blog posts & MWP essays, only about six months for the first bloated draft.  I offered a few chapters up to my friends, who made valuable suggestions, one of which was “you probably shouldn’t curse so much.”  Duly fucking noted.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Remember Matt’s naïve suggestion that I write about my own life for public consumption?  IT’S ALL HIS FAULT.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Ah, the dreaded request for “comp titles.”  From my exhaustive proposal, I came up with PAGES and PAGES of books by  Third Wave feminists, mommybloggers, women’s studies academicians, even jokey lefty books by Al Franken, but no single genre fit me. I saw this as proof beyond a doubt that I am the specialest snowflake in the world and ought to get a contract with a hefty up-front advance.  Didn’t happen.

I think the closest comp titles out there are probably Ariel Gore’s HipMama books: personal, confessional, funny, frustrated, and always aware of how our individual stories and larger political movements are interconnected.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I love the word “pique.” It isn’t used enough.  Neither is “kerfuffle.”

I do think that I present a pretty compelling argument for feminists being more actively concerned with the needs of American families and children than the conservatives who claim to have a monopoly on the subject.  I also have some pretty interesting run-ins with psycho anti-choicers who try to shove fetus photos at my kids, parents at my kids’ school who troll me online because of my political views, and Michele Bachmann BEFORE she became MICHELE BACHMANN!

Who will represent your book?

A wild warrior woman in California with a big heart, a sweet tooth, and snakes where her hair should be: Medusa’s Muse.

In hindsight, signing with her was a great thing to do.  No regrets whatsoever.

Who are your Next Big Things? 

Zoe Ann Nicholson, “The Engaged Heart: An Activist’s Life”

Avital Norman Nathman, “Deconstructing the Myth of the Good Mother”

Robin Marty & Jessica Mason Pieklo, “Crow After Roe”

Erin Matson, who will deny that she is writing a book BUT I KNOW BETTER

Onward to a Big 2013!

Once upon a time, I thought that the opposite of love was hate.  Now that I’ve grown (much) older, I believe that the opposite of love is fear.

Fear prevents us from asking for help when we need it, sometimes desperately.  Fear prevents us from offering help to others when we know, from the gut, that it is desperately needed.

Fear stops us from accessing our own humanity.

Fear sells weapons.

Fear enforces stereotypes.

Fear tightens, restricts, confines.  Fear obscures our interconnectedness.

Fear hurts.

Fear feeds on fear.  Fear snowballs, compounds, multiplies.  Fear makes you type dumb things on Facebook that you would never say to a person’s face, things like “unfriend me now if you don’t do this or that.”

Fear creates an insatiable need to create and assign labels, from “outcast” to “weirdo” to “Trench Coat Mafia” to “mentally ill” to “autistic” to “threat to society” to “gun-worshipping NRA lunatic.”

Fear stigmatizes.  Fear isolates.

Fear kills.

Knowing that, what can we do?  Here’s a thought from Pema Chödrön, who has made the study of fear her life’s work:

“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.”  

I’m starting to do things differently already–but it’s not easy, and I am afraid.  Are you?