A great voice has gone silent. Ann Richards was an inspiration as well as a comic genius, and I will miss her wisdom, energy, and unflappable common sense.
From Salon:
10 reasons we already miss Ann Richards
Ann Richards, the famously silver-tongued and silver-haired former governor of Texas, died Wednesday from complications of esophageal cancer. She was 73. Here’s just some of what we’ll remember and miss about her:
1. Richards used her wit not only disarm her political opponents, but to encourage other women to get into politics: “Let me tell you, sisters, seeing dried egg on a plate in the morning is a lot dirtier than anything I’ve had to deal with in politics,” she said.
2. As a homemaker raising four kids, Richards became politically involved by volunteering on campaigns, including helping elect Sarah Weddington, the 25-year-old lawyer who had successfully argued “Roe v. Wade” before the Supreme Court, to the Texas House. Richards called Weddington the first “out-and-out feminist activist” she’d ever met, according to the Washington Post.
3. Two years after undergoing rehab for alcoholism in 1982, Richards was elected state treasurer, making her the first woman elected to a statewide post in Texas in 50 years. Of her return from addiction, she said: “I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.”
4. When Richards gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 1988 — where she zinged the elder George Bush — “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth” — she also reminded the audience that she was only the second woman to give the keynote address at the convention in 160 years. The first was Barbara Jordan.
5. Richards may have lost her re-election bid to George W. Bush in 1994, but she beat another rich Texas oilman in her first governor’s race: Clayton “Claytie” Williams, who during the campaign compared rape to the weather: “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.” That race was dubbed a match between “Claytie and the Lady,” in which “the Lady” prevailed by a narrow margin. 61 percent of women voters supported her, and she became the second woman ever to be governor of Texas.
6. As a feminist, Richards championed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in Texas. She led workshops for women campaign managers and political candidates, before being elected to office herself. When she became the first woman in half a century to serve as governor, she celebrated by holding up a T-shirt that showed the state Capitol and read: “A woman’s place is in the dome.”
7. As governor, Richards made it a priority to appoint more women, African-Americans and Hispanics to state boards than any previous Texas governor. Before she left office in 1995, she said: “I did not want my tombstone to read, ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me by saying, ‘She opened government to everyone.’” According to KWTX TV she appointed “the first black University of Texas regent; the first crime victim to join the state Criminal Justice Board; the first disabled person to serve on the human services board; and the first teacher to lead the State Board of Education.”
8. For her 60th birthday, Richards got a license to ride a motorcycle.
9. Late in life, Richards continued her advocacy for reproductive freedom. Appearing at a pro-choice rally in Austin in 2003, she denounced the influence of “a small group of religious right-wingers” on the Bush administration’s policies, and Texas’ abstinence-only sex education programs. One of her daughters, Cecile Richards, is now president of Planned Parenthood.
10. In her later years, Richards established the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, which will open in 2007. Her family requests that memorial gifts be made to the school, through the Austin Community Foundation.
There’ll never be another Ann Richards, but here’s hoping her school graduates generations of her successors.
– Katharine Mieszkowski
(Er, not that I’m calling anyone who’s reading this stupid, you understand.)
Paul Krugman, writing in today’s New York Times:
“More broadly, right-wing commentators would like you to believe that the economyâ??s winners are a large group, like college graduates or people with agreeable personalities. But the winnersâ?? circle is actually very small. Even households at the 95th percentile—that is, households richer than 19 out of 20 Americans—have seen their real income rise less than 1 percent a year since the late 1970â??s. But the income of the richest 1 percent has roughly doubled, and the income of the top 0.01 percent—people with incomes of more than $5 million in 2004 â?? has risen by a factor of 5.”
And again, I am forced to wonder why Americans aren’t rioting in the streets every single day.
(Actually, it’s Wednesday. But I am in love with Fridays. To wit:)
One of the things I love about the company I work for is that from Memorial Day through Labor Day, we get Friday afternoons off. Now, I’ve worked at other places where we had “summer hours”; they’re the norm in the publishing world, and even my last job, at the happy factory, offered some version of them. They always involved a tradeoff, though—we had to work extra hours the rest of the week to earn those four free hours on Friday. At my publishing job in Mpls., we weren’t supposed to shorten our lunch hours as a way of extending our Monday-Thursday workday, so I’d drag myself in at some ungodly hour like 7 a.m. and then stumble home exhausted on Friday afternoons, unable to do anything with those free hours except nap. Eventually I decided I preferred working normal hours during the rest of the week, and I gave up on summer hours (and then I got promoted to editorial director, and was way too busy to take whole afternoons off anyway…but I digress).
Here, though, there are no strings attached; we simply get Friday afternoons off in the summer. Of course, if you’re wrapped up in some big project or your client calls a meeting on Friday afternoon, you stay and work, but the message from The Powers That Be is clear: if you can, go home at lunchtime on Friday. They lock the doors and switch the phones over to voicemail, and the office is officially closed. Last summer, I was only able to take every third Friday or so, which was okay; I appreciated the ones I could take. This year, though, I’ve been in between projects and picking up little fillers for most of the summer, so I was able to go home early nearly every Friday that I was in town.
So the news we got yesterday was fairly fabulous: TPTB have decided to extend summer Fridays through the end of the year (or rather, through Christmas, since we close between Christmas and New Year’s, which is also fabulous). In addition to being delighted by this news, I’m feeling a little bit chastened as a result of it, like I’m obligated to Do Something with my Fridays instead of just wasting them the way I usually do. I confess that—probably due to its having been a pretty blah summer—I have once again spent most of my summer Friday afternoons napping.
(I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about my fondness for being asleep and what it means, and it’s been bothering me for the first time ever. Usually, I treat naps as a necessary part of dealing with day-to-day life as a depressive: existence is tiring stuff for me, and so I’ve tended to let myself off the hook for taking frequent breaks from it. But I don’t know, I’ve started to think that I shouldn’t coddle myself so much. It can’t be a good thing that unconsciousness is my preferred state so much of the time. And on a practical level, my frequent inability/unwillingness to do much of anything except sleeping all day on Saturday has gotten to be sort of a pain, because it means that I have to cram a weekend’s worth of chores and errands into Sunday, which generally means that most of them don’t get done at all. But just thinking about all of this makes me tired.)
So I’m entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, I should plan some sort of structured activity for my fall Fridays. I’m considering using that time to actually read all the information architecture books that I bought when I was preparing for a career switch; I’ve read the polar bear book and JJG’s book cover to cover, but the rest of them I’ve either skimmed or, in one or two cases, just barely glanced at, almost as though merely owning them was enough to improve my qualifications as an IA. I can never find time or atmosphere or, really, justification for reading them at work, so going through them on Friday afternoons might be a good solution. On the other hand, reading can be done in bed, and that usually leads to naps, so maybe I need to find an activity that’s a little less passive. I could set the time aside for going to the gym at a nice uncrowded time of day, and it would be great if I could be sure that I would actually go, but that’s far from a safe bet. Or maybe I should use the time to knit, which is a) realistic and b) sufficiently relaxing and c) might mean that I’d actually finish a project sometime soon.
But maybe there’s some perfect Friday afternoon activity that I’m just not thinking of. Anyone got any ideas for me?