The big award lists have come out naming 2010 Women of the Year. Some surprises head the list: Lady Gaga, Sarah Palin (sigh), and Fergie. Fergie, for heaven’s sake?
On a more serious side, look up Female Heads of State: Women of the Year issued by Glamour Magazine. Feet to the fire: how many of them could you name? Be honest.
I’m working up a list for Frazier Mountain Communities Women of the Year that I just know makes you breathless with anticipation. I’m taking nominations, by the way.
Heading it would be Linda Mackay of the Tri-County Watchdogs, followed closely by Patric Hedlund, editor of the Mountain Enterprise. Love it or hate it, what the editor of the local paper has to say matters.
I also want to include the women who will never win that award. They’re the women who sit in the back rows at meetings and don’t talk to anybody. They get to the occasional meeting, sign a petition, do a few phone calls, make promises that are sometimes impossible to keep.
If they could do more they would.
They feel the same passion about school, church stuff, environmental, animal rescue, or local government issues that the rest of us do.
But…they’re women with young kids whose budgets don’t stretch to a babysitter for a Wednesday night meeting. They’re women commuting to Bakersfield or LA every day. They’re women who struggle with chronic pain and disability, with mental health problems, exhausted by fights with insurance companies. They’re women caring for a relative or a friend.
They’re women whose husbands or boyfriends don’t like them sticking their neck out in public and getting involved.
They say, “The car broke down again. There’s no money for gas. The babysitter cancelled at the last minute. I’m too depressed to go out. Nothing to wear. I’m too shy to go someplace where I don’t know everybody.”
They think they have nothing to offer. They don’t know enough about an issue to have anything worthwhile to say.
That’s not so: I can tell you that any volunteer organization values whatever you can do. Whatever your issue is, church, school, roads, the Condor, the skate park–there is a welcome for you.
If this isn’t the phase of life where you can offer your time, things may change this year, maybe next year.
All we’re guaranteed in life is change. And we can’t sit around and wait for government to do everything for us. It won’t happen.