The Fearless Fund is a venture capital seed fund that targets – in a good way – one of the least invested in groups in America: black women. Women of color have a harder time getting funding for business, start-ups, concepts, ideas – you name it, they’re receiving less than 1% of V.C. out there, overall. No seed money equals less opportunity. From the FF website: “We know that companies with a female founder perform better by 63% than all-male founding teams. Despite a greater potential to produce higher returns, women are historically underfunded, particularly women of color. In 2018 U.S. companies raised a total of 130B in V.C. funding, yet only 2% went toward female-founded companies, and less than 1% of total funding was allocated toward businesses founded by women of color. Fearless Fund was established to address the gap that exists in venture capital funding for WOC-led businesses and to finally push the needle on the abysmal current statistics on the current narrative for WOC-led businesses today.”
Why am I speaking to what the Fearless Fund is? Well, bless my stars and garters, I’m a goddamned social justice warrior, brother fuckers, that’s why! Yes, but, and, however – I bring this vital, necessary (sad but true), important fund to your attention because this past June the regressives once again proved why we can’t have nice things – and it’s because these racists assholes keep us from so doing. JHFC, these pieces of shit. And the people with money behind them, who use their big bucks – often inherited – to delay or derail progress. Deep breaths.
In June, a month when so many terrible, mean, shitty and truly bad decisions are being handed down by so many Federalist Society led and constituted courts, the 11th circuit ruled that the Fearless Fund could not run a grant program aimed at black women, to uplift black women in business. But why? Because the court, in a two-to-one decision, found it contrary to an 1860s reconstruction law meant to protect black people post-Civil War. That’s right, a law to help prevent black people being excluded because of race is now racist because a tiny bit of seed capital from a NOT-FOR-PROFIT meant to uplift black women excludes white people and men from a single grant process awarding 20K in venture capital. That sound you hear is my head banging against my dining room table. If black women were getting 95% of all V.C. out there, or even 75%, maybe I would agree with the good justices* in this matter, but they’re very clearly not. (*sarcasm)
Once again, a law designed to lift POC is being used against them, a law that literallyreads ‘all persons shall have the same rights as “white citizens” to make and enforce contracts’ is, by way of convoluted, labyrinthine thinking, being used to harm a program meant to lift up black women on the grounds of racial discrimination. You have got to be kidding me, right? I wish.
The group bringing the lawsuit, The American Alliance for Equal Rights (a misnomer if I ever saw one) is, says their website, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to challenging distinctions and preferences made on the basis of race and ethnicity. The main mover and shaker here is conservative activist Edward Blum, who was also behind the case ending affirmative action in college admissions because, again, it is racist, it discriminates against white people, who are so put upon I can’t believe it. And I can’t believe it because it’s not fucking true. Want to end discrimination in college admissions? End fucking legacy admissions, FFS. Legacy applicants are something like 40% more likely to get into top tier universities and colleges, but given they’re overwhelmingly white, let’s not go there, shall we? Or, end athletic scholarships, especially in an era when the NCAA is giving college athletes the right to enter into major sponsorship deals – ca-ching! – while getting an education other students, non-athletes, aren’t eligible for because ‘sports’.
If you want to do good, donate to the Fearless Fund (the link is below), and pray some of these judges and conservative activists choke on their well done burgers, please.
*Ursula Le Guin, from the Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. I have to admit, I’m a little embarrassed by the the fact that I haven’t read any of Le Guin’s books, because I don’t generally love sci-fi (too much outer space and robot nonsense TV as a kid, maybe?) altho I have read The Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, which I only did because a man I was involved with thought it was the best thing ever; the series was good, not great, certainly not the best thing ever written, far from it. But, okay, sure, fun, inventive, creative, interesting. I have always thought that men’s fascination with other worlds (that creep Musk, for instance, obsessing over living on Mars LOL – please, go to Mars, and soon!!) mirrors a specific male inability to love and treasure the actual planet – our Mother Earth – that we have. Their need to conquer ‘new worlds’, their endless fantasizing in books, TV, film about what’s out there when we have so much work to do here, to heal our planet and human and all other life on Earth. Grow up, guys. Is space travel stupid? No. Not at all. NASA is one of our leading environmental reporters, because their tech is able to see the glaciers shrink from space, wildfires too. But – resources and research dollars being limited, where should we be putting the majority of our collective attention? Here, or there? I vote here. Sigh.
“Change is freedom, change is life.
It’s always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don’t make changes, don’t risk disapproval, don’t upset your syndics. It’s always easiest to let yourself be governed.
There’s a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.
Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”
*Monday, July 22, 2024 was the hottest day ever recorded world-wide – until Tuesday, July 23, that is.
*I wrote this last month, in June, at the height of peony season, and in the burning heat of hurt and anger. And, I stand by it. So sue me.
Who doesn’t love peonies? I am sure there is someone out there who doesn’t, a joyless sort who thinks they’re ant magnets (kinda true), or another peony Grinch who thinks they’re overblown, floppy, and full of themselves – but I love them. I have a dear friend who also loves them, and when I bought my first ever actual home with an actual yard after many years of apartment dwelling, she sent me four white peony plants, the ones with just a hint of blood red in their centers. Love. When I moved into my present home fifteen years after that, she sent me more, texting me to be on the look-out for the arrival of ‘some peonies’.
As it happened, I had already transplanted four peony bushes from my previous house, two she’d given me, and another two that were original to that house but were in a bad spot, struggling to bloom and prosper due to too much shade. But sure! Bring ‘em on. I love ‘em! The more the merrier!
Reader, she sent me eleven peony plants, in October, and omg, planting bushes in the Catskills is no small feat; our soil is famously rocky, epitomized by an old-timey descriptive saying, ‘two stones for every dirt’. I can attest that it’s absolutely true; one of my dad’s earliest memories was of picking stones out of the cauliflower field below the house where he was born, as a toddler. And so, eleven peony plants, here we go. Pick-axe, check. Determination, check. Achy-body aids in place, check. Exhaustion, check. As the peonies arrived, in four separate bunches of two-twos, one three and a four, I thought, this has to be it, right, and by the time it actually was it, we were getting very near closing time on safe planting season.
But. I got them all in the ground, the final three in the slope right behind my house, because that was as far as I could drag my tired arse. But I promised myself and the peony gods that it was temporary. Not enough sunshine there, etc. I would transplant them, and did so, last fall after two years; now they and their many brothers and sisters are thriving, including one Diego the wonder dog almost trampled to death in his youthful enthusiasm this spring (they now each have fencing around them).
Another lover of peonies, another dear friend, was the recipient of a few peony plants from me, because why not? Spread the love, and the blooms, oui? Oui. She had room on her property; I’d also been telling her for years there was no way I was visiting her in jail after she’d been nabbed for cutting blooms off various neighbors’ lawns! Plus, it’s simply fun to surprise people with little gifties, especially people you love, gifties that will be a permanent reminder of that original thought, and person, oui? Oui, oui! The blooms during the ensuing years on all sides of the ant-magnet equation were shared via text photos, and all was well in Mudville, right? Sure. Absolutely.
Until this year. This year when I asked for photos, um, uh, well, those plants were transplanted and died. What!? Having transplanted many peonies and other plants, lemme tell ya, killing indoor or outdoor plants takes effort, takes a dollop of deliberate harm, gross neglect, actual malice, and/or a refusal to take basic steps to insure they will do what they and every other sentient creature being including plants wants to do, works to do, strives to do even under challenging circumstance: live. Live.
She implied, she inferred (she was driving, it was a very quick call) that when you live with someone else, meaning her husband, these things happen and you make compromises.
Oooookay. What a punch in the gut, and heart. Um, were the peony bushes in the way of Mr. Big mowing the lawn? Do tell, dear friend! But again, she was driving and I didn’t think to ask before we got off, in large part because I was so stunned by this – story, event, thing.
A little context. This friend and I met freshman year in college at the tender age of 18; by sophomore year were besties, dancing, smoking pot, drinking wine while munching on stoned wheat thins and cheddar cheese, playing backgammon and attending our various classes, all while negotiating the late 70s and our respective families and history – known, unknown, acknowledged and unacknowledged – together. Or, if not together, nearby. During the summer before our junior year, when we would be traveling to London for a semester abroad, we decided (she decided, I followed) to work on Nantucket Island, where she met Mr. Big. The rest, as they say, is history. Literally, His Story, as he soon took ownership of my friend, with her permission, I grant you, at the tender age of twenty to his thirty or thirty-one years of age. They’re soul mates, no question! He looked like Cat Stevens! Hey, it was meant to be, practically pre-ordained, blessed! All these decades later, they have three grown children and 7 grands together, last count. #TeamTrueLove
He was a Vietnam Vet. This biographical factor, this pain, trauma and emotional-psychological struggle, was central to his story, to the aura of adult that hung lightly or heavily, depending on the day, on his manly shoulders. He was just so experienced, so assured, so – short. I remember meeting him for the first time down by the docks, on a beautiful day in late May or early June. Nantucket Island is a place of magic and beauty. This moment in the sunshine, with the sounds and smell of the sea all around us, was probably the friendliest he would be toward me for the next twenty-plus years. Good times.
We love the people we love. Some would assert that we meet certain people and keep them in our lives, whatever the challenges may be, because they provide us with essential lessons, tools, aspirations, hopes, experiences, connection. This is certainly true of my peony stealing, and accessory to peony murder, friend. She is a delight, a source of intellectual and heart inspiration, a funny, brilliant, warm, caring, loveable munchkin with whom I have so many hilarious memories and points of contact I could not even begin to list them, could not live without them, or her, in my life. They are my life, a part of it, as is she. She is a gift, and always has been.
And, the man she lives with is and always has been – in my opinion and personal experience – an asshole, an insecure, petty tyrant, a child, a baby-man who, as it happens, never set foot in Vietnam, or anywhere near it. Was anticipating being drafted, then actually being drafted, living under the threat of being shipped out, and losing friends to that war, deeply traumatic? Yes. Was using it to manipulate a twenty-year old – two of them, in fact – a shitty thing to do, disrespectful to those who did serve, who did cross that ocean, who did die or lose brain cells or body parts to that specific trauma? Y’think?!
For forty-plus years I have been discreet – mostly – about the man she married because he was her choice and you go, girl. I had watched her burn through numerous young men and relationships for several years before they met. She was endlessly restless and seeking, but now it was clear she had found her home. Yay. My job was to be happy for my friend’s happiness, and if Mr. Big was not interested in having me around, wouldn’t sit down to have dinner with me, tried to convince her I was a dyke among other plots twists, insisted on seeing me as a threat – oh well! I’ve had worse. I had my mother. My tolerance for bullshit and shitty, petty, insecure people treating me like crap is sky high. And, she let him kill those peonies. She allowed it. Deep breaths. My heart hurts. I am angry. I am making assumptions. I am human, hear me roar. I am angry with her and, for now, I’m going to stay that way.
He and I used to chat, briefly, before he would pass the landline phone to ‘your friend’. Cell phones quashed that connection. We were friends on Fakebook, until he deleted his page; after a few months he started up again yet never requested my friendship. Fine by me. Thanks, in fact, because we’re not friends. We never were, and that’s okay too, largely because he wouldn’t allow it, and I learned a long time ago that working overtime for someone’s affection (thanks, mom!) was a fool’s game.
My hurt and anger from those first twenty years allows me, finally, in my sixties, to be as angry as I find myself now, and to care deeply about my childhood adjacent self as I never could, once upon a time, because I was young and foolish, childhood adjacent, wanting only to be seen as the human I was, not a threat, but a friend. A friend. A potential friend to you, Mr. Big, and an actual one to your soul mate, dude. Still, I am happy to be disconnected from him on that superficial shit-show of a platform. As in life, so goes – occasionally – the internet.
This all sounds petty and stupid, even as I write it. What’s that saying? Don’t wrestle a pig, as stooping to their level all you get is muddy and the pig enjoys it? Oink. I am human, hear me roar. And I love peonies.
Taking your nonsensical sense of injury out on innocent living things is seriously un-groovy. All assumptions aside, destroying gifties presented with love, killing living things, sucks, whoever is doing it, or why. FEH.
So! Things got a little bit of a shake-up over the past weekend, didn’t they? In fact, the entire last two weeks have been intense and shaky, with the shooting in PA, unsuccessful other than in convincing You-Know-Who’s supporters that he is protected by an angel, a thought so ludicrous – I just can’t. And then the increasing calls for Biden to step down, which I found annoying AF, because he has been one of, if not the most progressive, the most impactful and successful presidents, potentially, in the last fifty years but yes, he’s old, and imperfect (aren’t we all?). And then there was the insanity of the GOP convention, including the elevation of a brand-spanking new Senator J.D. Vance – a conservative, pro-forced birth Catholic pol from Ohio by way of Harvard and the venture capital empire of noted creep Peter Thiel, who is both a conservative backer (in the multiple millions) and gay (mind-boggling, because Project 2025 is homophobic in the extreme), for whom J.D. once worked, and where he made big bucks. Big.
Mass Deportations Now signs on the convention floor in Milwaukee with Vance’s wife being south East Asian and definitely a brown lady made me laugh, sorta? Kinda? Whatever. Mass Deportations Now? The hatred in these people is real. And as for the bandages worn in solidarity with their great leader? Ridiculous, especially when donned by those who felt wearing masks to TRY to control a respiratory virus was equal to tyranny. You cannot make this shit up, people.
And now, Joe Biden is out. I cannot tell a lie, I was angry and scared for a good hour after he announced in no small part because the threat You-Know-Who poses to our democracy and the world is – I believe – so great. And I wept, because the guy is so ancient, has been through so much in his lifetime, and is, I deeply believe, a good egg, a kind person, performing public service and sacrificing in a manner foreign not just to You-Know-Who, but to the rest of the current GOP. And, I am always concerned where the Dem team is with ‘Unity’, because as Will Rogers said so well a century ago, ‘I don’t belong to an organized party. I’m a Democrat!” But. They seem to be doing it, the base is engaged, and fund raising numbers are off the charts. Hallelujah.
And yes, the right-wing echo-sphere is already after VP Harris for supposedly not being a citizen and therefore ineligible (same thing would have to apply to Mrs. Vance, then, you a$$holes) as well as for her ‘annoying’ laugh. Misogyny and racism being what they are, this is going to be a fight, but one I strongly believe we can win. After all, their guy is so fucking old, ya’ll! It’s elder abuse, keeping that confused, doddering, meandering, falling asleep in his own convention elder person in this! #DropOutDon
Or, what is it? Never heard of him. Them? Because Dutch Sheets sounds, and I thought this when I first heard it mentioned in a political podcast, like a brand of linens made in the Netherlands, or maybe it’s a way of putting sheets on a bed that the Dutch had perfected? Nope. Or rather, yes, Dutch Sheets is an actual living person’s name, that living person is a ‘he’, a white male pastor and author of religious garbage, originally from Ohio, now living and preaching and doing his best to be a regressive prick in South Carolina. I have been researching Dutch (his given name is William Dutch Sheets) because he is a right-wing nut trying to take away your – and my – freedoms, in particular our freedom from religion imposed by the state, the state as interpreted and enforced by Dutch and his pals.
Sheets came to my attention along with a flag he, among others, has re-popularized over the last few years, a flag with a green pine tree centered in a field of white over which tree appears the words ‘An Appeal To Heaven’. This flag, which appears outside the current Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s office (gack!), is a symbol originally flown during the American Revolution; it continues to be used by the State of Massachusetts with the ‘appeal’ phrase removed because the good peeps of the Bay State are fond (as am I) of the mighty principle enumerated in the first amendment to the U.S. constitution regarding separation of church and state, and forbidding the establishment of a state religion.
The Pine Tree flag was used on January 6th by numerous treasonous insurrectionists storming the Capitol, and was recently reported as flying outside a beach house in New Jersey owned by the spouse of my least favorite Supreme Court Justice (although it’s a very tight contest, that one), Sam Alito. Sam claims the property is wholly owned by his wife Martha Ann, and that he has no responsibility for whatever freak flags that freak decides to fly. How stupid does this arrogant asshole think we are? Pretty damned stupid. Actually, no. He’s in a life-time appointed position and simply trolling us from his judicial throne on high, as many court watchers and pundits have commented in the last month or so. Gack.
Dutch Sheets is an evangelical pastor who believes that the United States needs to return to its Christian roots, and he, along with others, has latched onto the flag as a symbol of their cause. He’s also a major supporter of number #45, otherwise known as Orange Menace, Orange Mess, or Convicted Felon Trump. I find it fascinating that religious wing-nuts like Sheets believe that people having the right to not practice religion means he is being somehow deprived of his right to practice it. Maybe he’s just resentful people aren’t being forced to join his Christian sect, along with the required tithing to pay his bills?
Sheets is a part of what is called the New Apostolic Reformation, which matters, or should, to all of us because these wing-nuts believe not only that the U.S. should return to its supposedly Christian roots (enlightenment era Christians could not be more different from these creepers), but that warfare is very likely necessary to achieve their aims.
From Wikipedia: “NAR is a theological belief and movement that combines elements of Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, and the Seven Mountain Mandate (*see below) to advocate for spiritual warfare to bring about Christian dominion (control, peeps) over all aspects of society, and end or weaken the separation of church and state. NAR leaders often call themselves apostles and prophets (lemme guess, they’re overwhelmingly male, and white…ding ding ding, got it in one!!!) Long a fringe movement of the American Christian Right, it has been referred to as “one of the most significant and controversial movements in late-twentieth-century evangelicalism.” The NAR’s prominence and power have increased since the 2016 election of YKW as US president. Theology professor André Gagné,author of a 2024 book on the movement, has characterized it as “inherently political” and said it threatens to “subvert democracy.” Many notable American Republican politicians such as Mike Johnson, Doug Mastriano, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren and activists such as Charlie Kirk have aligned with it.”
The thing is, as these conservative wing-nuts attempt, and in several cases (thanks to Justices like Alito) succeed, in pushing their Christian fundamentalist agenda on all Americans, they’re being revealed time and time again to be fundamentally out of step with the overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens. You want to take away contraception, IVF, IUDs next? Huh?!! The even funnier thing is, the flag they carry, whose appeal to heaven phrase is part of a 1690 theory put forward by John Locke, an enlightenment-era philosopher who believed that individual rights (like, say, the right to an abortion, or privacy with regard to medical choices, or to bodily autonomy) are inherently greater than the right of kings, otherwise known as ‘the state’. Locke was also, while deeply religious, committed to the equality of both sexes, which he felt was inherent in the Bible, making him – perhaps – not the ideal preceptor for the modern GOP.
Again, from Wikipedia: “Locke exercised a profound influence on political philosophy, in particular on modern liberalism. Michael Zuckert (never heard of ‘em) has argued that Locke launched liberalism by tempering Hobbesian absolutism and clearly separating the realms of church and state. He had a strong influence on Voltaire, who called him “le sage Locke”. His arguments concerning liberty and the social contract later influenced the written works of Thomas Jefferson. One passage from the Second Treatise is reproduced verbatim in the Declaration of Independence, the reference to a “long train of abuses”.
…Locke derived from the Bible basic human equality (including the equality of the sexes)…To Locke, one of the consequences of the principle of equality was that all humans were created equally free and therefore governments needed the consent of the governed. …Locke’s doctrine that governments need the consent of the governed is also central to the Declaration of Independence.”
It is my view that this fall, women in American will once again save Democracy from Orange Nero, helping to re-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Because we the people – over 50% of Americans are women – do not consent to having our rights taken away, and – as that troll Alito reminded us when he struck down Roe v. Wade – we’re not without power. We vote. well, you got that right, asshole.
*the Seven Mountain Mandate holds that there are seven aspects of society that believers (christian fundy zealots) seek to influence: family, religion, education, media, arts & entertainment, business, and government. And we don’t want that, y’all!! Michael Zuckert is a political philosopher at the University of Notre Dame. 😉
