Sarah Palin is ordinary.
Yes. Ordinary.
Our country, and the world, is populated by millions of women just like her… worker ants, carrying astonishing loads many times their body weight, building, building, nourishing, nourishing, organizing, organizing.
The worker-ant is a pattern of Nature. An ordinary one. A usual one. Not an odd, strange, once in a lifetime one.
Come with me to the South and I will show you the most beautiful and semi-treacherous “steel magnolias” who follow the worker-ant pattern precisely. The entire culture would collapse without those radiant, wily-coyote women; they are often found in legislatures, homes and businesses, propping up all kinds of matters behind the scenes and being wickedly funny topside.
Come with me to the farmlands and small towns of the Midwest and I will show you the most gorgeous corn-fed women who are pretty and pony-tailed and run grim in the blood to get done all that must be done, by their lights. Backbone is how they call it there. They can gentle the horses, rev up the tractor, negotiate with the bank officers, run the corporation, marshal the family.
Come with me to the gaming tables of the Southwest, and I will show you women dealers who have many children, a husband or not, and they may also be building a manse out in the desert while taking care of their elderly folks… and without a complaint, and just a lot of ‘family management style’ in those manicured hands. ‘Never is heard a discouraging word,’ is not just a song. Funny, in MSM, we often hear of those who tangle in the traces, but little about those who remain in harness, pulling hard and strong for life.
Come with me to the East and to the self-built Courts of the Monied and to the huge hives of the Publishing Empires along the coast… and I will show you worker-ant patterns in women taken to such extremes that the women will use their beds as desks to dictate to the family and their corporate sister and brother-ants, even though the woman herself just came from chemotherapy two hours ago.
Anywhere we might go together, you and I, we can easily, with just one or two questions, scout-out myriad women who ‘do it all,’ and continue to ‘do it all,’ until they die.
Some can shoot a gun, others aim ace-accurately and shoot from the hip. Some can skin a coon, others can skin a dollar ’til the eagle screams. Some can dress-out a moose, others can ad-dress injustice and turn it to the good. Some can raise ten kids, others can raise hell and make useful and long-overdue things happen, at last. All this is Ordinary.
Their secret? Often, it is Love with a capital L.
We know that what we are attached to in heart and spirit is also what creates what we might also call – and not with disrespect but just with a reality take – demented loyalty.
Like the most dogged of the worker-ants, to mix a metaphor, we trudge onward, sometimes leaping, sometimes dragging our rear-ends in fatigue. But, we go on. Ask any matriarch of any family. Ask any worker-ant, male or female.
For many women of the world believe they hold the only light that is not inextinguishable by bad turns of fate, by running off-track, by getting to the place where the road runs out and you have to go it alone on foot. They believe they are outrunning the devil they know. Somehow, someway. They believe they are following the God of their bones. Worker ant style.
Thus, Sarah Palin is ordinary. Just like countless other women. Ordinary. Loyal worker-ant. To each her own devils; to each her own vision of Creator.
Setting aside all the projections about Governor Palin’s ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ in family and work life…. let us see then, as she gives her speech today, what actually does set her apart from this ordinariness that most women carry without hype.
Let us watch and see.