RWA Scuttlebutt

Jenny Crusie of course says it best, so by all means go read her, but here's my take on the whole RWA debacle.

I confess I sort of spaced the graphics standards thing, I really didn't get who Charis was until she was long gone so I didn't get that outrage like I should have, and I confess that even this year I did not get to the AGM because I was too busy trying to figure out a bill for a really great party the night before.  But the survey got my attention, I think the new RWR is about as graphically palatable as a communion wafer, and I really needed more alcohol for that awards ceremony.  Now I'm all fired up to do something and really trying to figure out what.

People keep talking about the Republican leanings of the ceremony, and that has bled onto the rest of the issues above - you can really get a good conspiracy theory going here if you want to, and as most of us are storytellers, I bet someone has written Karl Rove into the wings of that theater in Reno.  And there's a sort of them/us comfort in that, saying, "SHE did this!" or "THEY made this happen!"  We can say the board is full of evil right wingers, or say the TTQ is an evil right winger -- you can go on all day, really, and I suppose if you dig you can find a few confirmaitons or contradictions.

But really, what happened with all this is that everyone trusted the system, thought things were fine, and a lot of us kept swimming even though there were a lot of warning signs for one hell of a waterfall.  It's just so easy to say it won't be that big of a deal, that there's no reason to get upset, to say, "Really, what can I do?"  I was too busy to go to the AGM.  Really, what would I do?  Except that argument's going really flat now, because all signs point to one or two people with a pretty pointed agenda and great skill at convincing themselves they act for the "greater good" and that "everyone agrees with me," and that one person or small group of people really got a lot of damage done in a short amount of time. 

I think the hard part is that sometimes all we can do is write letters, be PITAs and join committees, then watch as the shit happens anyway.  Since the political analogy has already been made, it reminds me a lot of first diving headfirst into the Dean campaign and killing myself for him only to have him scream himself out of the race in Des Moines, to swallow my objections of Kerry and kill myself all over again knocking on doors and making phone calls and writing letters, only to have him fall short, too.  It was really tempting to resent the effort, to say, caustically, that it didn't matter, that I should have just had a beer and watched the train wreck.  And sometimes I sort of wish I'd knocked on a few less doors and done just that. 

But now I'm watching the RWA fallout, reading SmartBitches and hearing all the arguments, following Cory's blog and watching Jonquil get her rage on, collecting truly frustrated emails from board members after I wrote them, and I'm thinking that it'd have been nice to have been fighting this whole time so I could not feel like I was desperately trying to catch up and figure out WTF but could instead be feeling finally vindicated, that at LAST someone was realizing that the damn waterfall is going to kill us if we don't portage soon.

The thing is, RWA is full of smart women.  I guess sometimes that makes us inefficient and I bet it's a bitch of a thing to be on a committee let alone on the board -- but really, this is what happens if we make it easy.  If it were easy, men would do this.  Okay, that's not entirely fair.  But really, that's the beauty of an organization full of women.  We're going to be messy, and it's going to take ten months just to agree what to order for lunch, but the alternative is playing nice and risk getting that awards ceremony. 

So everybody go join stuff, get invovled.  If nothing else write your rep occasionally and ask politely what's going on.  Probably you should write your member of Congress while you're at it, too.