THE ONLY LABEL WE WILL ANSWER TO IS SACRED
  
  A MESSAGE TO THE GRASS YOUTH
 
  (Our youth who are being cut down like grass.)
  
  Notes for a speech
    by
    Alice Walker
 
 
  A friend who has been a midwife for two decades talks about the
 incredible decline in the mothering instinct she has witnessed in the
 past several years.  She tells of one woman who had a baby only because
 she was told giving birth would relieve her uterus of the tendency to
 sprout fibroid tumors.  After the birth of the child, she showed no
 interest in it, but was instead relieved that she could now play golf,
 her new passion, without debilitating cramps.  Another woman, formerly
 addicted to crack, could not relate to her baby at all after its birth;
 when it cried - from hunger or wetness or cold or simply the need to be
 held - this woman left the room.
  
  Women are turning into
 something else, something strange, she said. Adding that in our time,
 back in the day, as one says these days, such behavior as exhibited by
 these women would have been unthinkable. I agreed. Certainly, thinking
 back to my own small rural community and its women burdened with more
 children than any human being on earth should be required to try to
 feed, no one would have been able to understand these women.
  
  It is the drugs, said one woman, listening to our talk.  Prozac and cocaine.
  
  It is the hopelessness. Said another.
  
  It is that women are becoming what they call themselves, I say. They are becoming guys.
  
    
   Until I Was Nearly Fifty (The name of the poem that goes here. )
 
 It can be found in Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthling Poems.)
 
  from someone from “back in the day”
  to those arriving, newly, in the dark
  
  If the youth of the world are to have a chance, the elder citizens of
 the planet must form a parallel world government. Parallel, that is, to
 the world government formed by politicians and corporations.  It might
 be called The Government of Lived Experience. For a long time I could
 not see how this would be possible, given the stranglehold on the mind
 of the world that Western dominance, male dominance and class dominance
 has become. But now, having learned only a rudimentary amount about the
 Internet I see such a government can have its home in cyberspace.  This
 would be a government whose primary purpose would be to act as ally to
 the young.  To be present, in one place, easily accessible, with the
 most direct information about Life that elders have experienced.  I am
 convinced that there is enough wisdom in the world, and enough heart,
 to provide our children and grandchildren with proper encouragement and
 direction.  But they must know it is waiting somewhere for them; that
 it is not self-serving; that it is impeccably dedicated to their
 future; that nobody would dream of evading a question or lying to them.
  In short, this government in cyberspace would feel as much as possible
 like going to visit one’s grandmother.  However these would be
 grandmothers with a difference: along with unconditional love would
 come unconditional honesty. We might not be able to save our
 descendents from much, but we can certainly save them from ignorance.
 With knowledge, which is different from information, they have a chance
 at least to have a deeper appreciation of their life, and their right
 to have a life; they will also have the constant awareness that they
 have allies who see the world always in its relation to their healthful
 growth.
  
  Who would form this government?  People who have
 lived broadly and deeply.  People who have felt life with their hearts
 and souls, not just their fingertips, their brains and their genitals.
  People who have a record of caring and sharing. People from every
 community, proposed for the job by their communities, specifically by
 the women and children. And by the elders.
  
  Who will
 organize this government?  I do not know.  Probably all of us together,
 if it is an idea whose time has come.  Some of us know how to use the
 Internet; some of us know how to strategize; some of us know how to
 gather the people; some of us simply have dreams and visions.
  Everything we need, including the courage and the love, we have.  That I know.
  
 
  The poem that I read (which I can’t include here because of the above
 mentioned copyright law) speaks to my wonder that when I reached fifty
 I felt I was just beginning to hit my stride.  All around me women were
 moaning and groaning about how rotten being fifty was.  I on the other
 hand have found my fifties an ideal time to fall passionately in love,
 more than once, to write books that startled even me; to travel to
 ancient cultures and even more ancient jungles, and to deepen my
 understanding of who I really am.  It is painful to realize we humans
 in the West have a hatred of aging that means we sometimes refuse to
 grow up;  by not growing up we of course miss out on ever being adults.
  Many people will never allow themselves to become elders and will
 attempt to live their younger selves over and over again.  What does it
 mean to spirit and psyche, not to mention body, to try to stay in a
 place that doesn’t exist anymore?
  
  And yet, of course I
 understand this.  It is precisely this ignorance that we are ideally
 suited to prevent in coming generations.
  
  When I was a child
 I learned nothing, was taught nothing, about menstruation. Nothing.
  When I had my first cycle, the blood was referred to as “a red bird.”
  The attention I received was not from my mother, who never said a word
 to me about what was happening, but by my sister-in-law, who
 magnanimously gave me, as menstrual pad, one of her white socks.  The
 cramping that accompanied the bleeding was neither acknowledged nor
 explained.  Everything I learned about menstruation I subsequently read
 on a Kotex box. That I was now a woman was mentioned by someone, but
 that I could now become pregnant was not.
  
  In fact, only
 after the birth of my own child, ten years later, did my mother feel
 free to discuss sex with me. (My heart breaks for her that her natural
 instinct for teaching the young had been crushed by patriarchal rules
 that, in her youth, completely dominated female life.) By then I felt
 I’d been shoved into a boat on a fast running river filled with rapids
 and that only by chance had I not been dashed to bits on the rocks.
  
  Why didn’t you tell me?
 is the cry of millions of our sisters and brothers and children and
 grandchildren as they whirl down the rapids of the river of life and
 their small craft is cracked and starts to sink.
  
  Elders are
 a government soon to be in exile, where the ancestors already are, with
 nothing to lose but reputations, maybe, for being something or someone
 they’re probably not.
 
  Why didn’t you tell me?  I for one do not want to trail the misery of this cry into the afterlife.
  
  Love is not concerned (The name of the poem that goes with this section. Also found in Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Earthling Poems).
 
 
  In my forties, I fell in love with a woman for the first time.  I had
 heard so many stories about how bad this was.  And yet, I knew I was
 okay.  That most of the women I knew were okay. More than okay, to tell
 the truth, but I will attempt to be modest.  Nobody had minded when I
 fell in love with men, though almost everyone and every song described
 them as unsafe.  Women old enough to be grandmothers are being told by
 youngsters in the Corporate/Political government that they can’t sleep
 together.  They can’t get married.  In reality, such insolence should
 be punished by spanking. However, in deference to the non- violence
 that is our only planetary hope, The Government of Elders or The
 Government of Experience would offer a plain and conscious response to
 youth who might be perplexed.  In spite of everything one might hear,
 an elder might say, the primary motivation for being intimate with
 someone of whatever sex, race or gender, should be love.  Sometimes, it
 is true, it isn’t love, because we’re talking real life and not ideals;
 sometimes it is curiosity, sometimes it is lust, sometimes it is
 experimentation. Sometimes it is simply the need to own this miracle
 for one’s self, to taste and see, to grow. All of this is fine.  And if
 someone is smart enough to choose their own car, they might be smart
 enough to choose a marriage partner.  The idea that “civilization” as
 we know it will fall because women marry each other and men marry each
 other is perhaps a thought we might more closely consider.  Something
 very different is needed to change our disastrous course;  if same sex marriage will  help us, we should offer it a place of honor.
  
    
  At First, It is True, I thought There Were Only Peaches and Wild Grapes

(The name of the poem that goes with this section. Again from Her Blue Body Everything We Know, Earthling Poems).