Orcasional Musings | International women’s day? Black history month? What about all that?

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Mothers’ Day, a pseudo-holiday invented by commercial interests attempting to sell us gifts appropriate for giving to our mothers, occurs on the second Sunday of May every year. If you rigidly observe Mothers’ Day, and always give mom a gift and the usual sappy card, does that absolve you from paying close and loving attention to her during the remainder of the year? Maybe not, if you like your liver-and-onions in some condition other than burned to a crisp.

We recently passed through International Women’s Day. Was that it? One day a year? There doesn’t seem to be even a Women’s History Month! What about Madame Curie? Rosa Parks? Katherine Johnson? Elizabeth Cady Stanton? And what about the thousands of “Rosie”s, whose riveting helped us win World War Two, and who definitively and irreversibly enrolled women into the American workforce? Is one day a year enough time to honor all of them?

We do have a Black History Month: February. But Black History has to share February with, among other things, Lincoln’s Birthday, Washington’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, Purim, and the totally irrelevant foolishness of Groundhog Day. Does that leave enough room to recognize and remember Nat Turner, Malcom X, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart, George Washington Carver, and W.E.B. Du Bois?

But there’s an even greater problem than mere time and calendar space. It’s hidden, but it’s large and it’s deep, and it’s something that we never seem to want to notice or discuss. It has to do with exclusionism. For instance, does the existence of International Women’s Day mean that the other 364 days of the year are not about women? Are all of those other 364 days about men, instead? And what about Black History Month? Presumably, that permits us to focus the remaining 11 months of the year on White people. So where do the Black people disappear to?

But that’s only one part of it. There remains the question of who instituted these memorials, and who put them on our calendar? Who decreed International Women’s Day and Black History Month? The saddening answer is that it was our federal legislature, a class made up, to the vast majority, of self-important White men. That is, a conclave of pompous White guys deigned to look down from on high, to give permission to women and to people of color to have a couple of short periods of calendar time during which to celebrate the accomplishments of their peers and colleagues.

Somehow, that seems to smack of both belittlement and bigotry: Relegate ’em to a corner of the year, and forget ’em for the rest of it. Well, we shouldn’t fall for it. The truth is, every day of the year is Women’s Day, Black History Day, Hispanic-American Cross-Cultural Day, Chinese Traditions Day, Jewish Religious-Discussions Day, Zen Day, Understanding Islam Day…well, you get the idea. Don’t let those self-important and pompous federal legislators tell us what to think about and when to think it, or what to do when!

And, while we’re at it, let’s do something about Daylight Savings Time, too!