In sort of a nonchalant yawner – at least for me – September 25th, National Daughter’s Day came and went with nary a thought; understandable I guess if one isn’t blessed with having a daughter.
But suddenly, like swift kick in the groin, this coming November 5th, Election Day, a relevant September 25th piece by John Pavlovitz, and a piece I wrote a dozen years ago led to a dot-connecting, “oh wow,” pause by me.
You see, as a person who is hopelessly addicted to Pulitzer Prize winning writers, I employ the committee approach for ideas on issues I choose to tackle. Case in point is when Leonard Pitts, Jr., hard-hitting author of, “Racism in America, Cultural Codes and Color Lines in the 21st Century,” retired as a columnist, my “committee” was loaded with a portfolio of talent that I – like a kid in a candy store – could select from, among them the Washington Post’s unflappable Eugene Robinson, the New York Times’ “vocabulary builder” Maureen Dowd, or Mississippi’s pipe smoking, suspenders wearing author William Faulkner, Pulitzer Prize winners them all.
Now the latest addition to my collection of writers is the aforementioned John Pavlovitz, former youth pastor known for his gut-punching political writings from a liberal Christian perspective. We draw on him further down.
But first to the column I wrote a dozen years ago.
A few days after I’d published that column, “Fellas, would you really want your daughter to work here?” I got a call from “Collette,” one of a few women who worked as factory managers at the company we both worked for. It seemed that that column, one that included a picture of my then two-year-old granddaughter, dominated water cooler conversations and was the first item on the agenda in a meeting with 20+ manufacturing managers, “Collette” the only woman among them.
“Terry, although I’d read it before the meeting, I was caught off guard when our boss “Rex” passed out copies of your column and instructed us to take a few minutes to read and react to it. The funny thing is that suddenly what was usually a group of talkative men, often with raw language, was reduced to silence. I was hard pressed to hold back my laughter.” She mentioned that a normally verbose “Mark” eventually broke the silence:
“Yeah, I read this yesterday and feel that it insinuates that our organization discriminates against women and that’s nonsense,” he said while looking at me, the only woman in the room, for validation. Enjoying the moment, I remained silent.
Afterwards, “Juan chimed in. “I don’t know why we’re wasting time talking about this.”
“Wait, because she’s a woman, it’s only fair that we have “Collette” comment on this,” said “Pete.” But before I could respond, “Rex” stepped in and presented a slide showing the gender mix in the organization and sobering attrition statistics.
“Look guys, I know “Collete” well enough to know that she has an opinion on this but let’s not make her our token “go to” person on women’s issues just because she is a woman. Rather, let’s look at our organization as a reality check. As the data shows, women are not well represented here and although we have hired qualified women, we lose them at much higher rates than we lose men. Clearly, the picture is not a pretty one. So back to Howard’s column, the question before us remains, would you want your daughter to work here?”
Silence!
Now afterwards the organization initiated a climate assessment to uncover and remove hidden barriers to the recruitment, inclusion and retention of women. That was 12 years ago.
Now this takes us to, “Guys, the Election is a Test of Our Goodness – and we can’t fail it,” by John Pavlovitz, a message to men. Here are excerpts from the piece.
“Men of America, we need to have some real talk about something. America is approaching one of the most important and consequential days in our history—and we are in danger of (expletive) it up.”
“I’m writing this on National Daughters Day and according to many polls, nearly 60% of us are still planning on voting for Donald Trump in the upcoming election. If these estimates hold and we become the single greatest reason he ascends to power again, it will be a collective failure of us as fathers, as husbands, as partners, as sons and brothers and friends and neighbors and coworkers. And so, this is a gut check for all of us, guys.”
“I hope you’ll take your daughters, wives, mothers, sisters and friends into the voting booth with you and that you will vote to protect them, to honor them, to love them, to respect them enough not to subject them to someone with contempt for them.”
“I’d tell you not to be a real man, but instead I’ll ask you to be a good man, and it won’t require you to lose anything. It won’t require you to be soft or to be weak. It will just require you to vote for a woman.”
Now to wrap all this up as succinctly as possible, on November 5th we’ll have a choice to cast our vote for what many will agree will be the most consequential election ever; a choice between a highly qualified woman and a former president with, to put it as mildly as possible, a “checkered” past in his treatment of women….women, by the way, who are someone’s daughters, mothers and sisters! ….and granddaughters like mine! © Terry Howard is an award-winning writer. He is a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.