Susan B [Who?]

Today Mom and I went to the Contemporary Jewish Museum here in San Francisco to see the exhibit on Gertrude Stein, moments following a phone call from the Obama campaign that really offended her. It's kind of galling to think he'd be soliciting money right after the brutal debt deal he's putting America through, especially since Democrats here in Berkeley are probably the most alienated of his liberal base right now. You all probably know that I'm still a supporter and I've always thought people unfairly labeled him farther left than he really is, but after this debt deal that seemed to make no one happy would make him want to hold off asking for donations for a time. It's just not smart.

So we went to the museum and had a really wonderful time. The exhibit was well designed and pleasurably interactive, a couple of iPads scattered around the rooms with sound catalogs of audio recordings, cartoons, newspaper clippings, quotes, and so on to browse. It was easy to take at whatever pace felt most comfortable for me, even with my mother going at a different pace.

But I was most moved by the original posters for Stein's second opera, "Mother Of Us All," about Susan B Anthony and celebrating her accomplishments. For some reason I was particularly touched by that, as if women had only gained the right to vote last week and I was living in monumental history, finally having achieved something embarrassingly basic but fought so long and hard for. The right to vote, something so small that too many of us throw away with negligence or disdain, felt worth struggling and protesting for even now that we take it for granted. Such an inalienable right has rarely felt so present for me - I'm not a woman so I've never been confronted with equal protection discrepancies; I could have gotten married to a stranger in Nevada when I was 16, and because I'm not gay I don't know how it feels to be barred from marriage in most of the United States, disgustingly including California; I have white skin so I've never felt the butt of racial slurs, segregation, or cultural alienation. And yet I walk through each day without even paying any attention to my great fortune, nor to the many who aren't as fortunate. And in comes Susan B Anthony to uncompromisingly remind us and to win those forgettable but essential rights for those without.

Who is our Susan B Anthony of today? Who's out there fighting for what's undeniably right and deserved for the unfairly persecuted and the unrecognized minorities in the world? Looking at the posters for "Mother Of Us All" I thought about Mom's anger at the Obama caller earlier in the day and the deep frustration inside her, feeling that the man she voted for won't fight for her rights or well-being. I voted for Obama because I thought he would be willing to compromise, and I turned out to be too right. Mostly it's great to compromise, but there are some rights (equal marriage, for example) that can't be won through compromise. The most-remembered leaders throughout history aren't remembered for how they sacrificed their convictions to the pressures around them. No one would know the name Susan B Anthony today if she'd struck a bargain at the polling office, and women would've had to wait for even more painstaking years for the rights they're due.