When I was young and privileged, I had the opportunity to travel to Europe with my friend, Cindy. We travelled by Eurail pass, stayed in youth hostels, and carried our stuff in backpacks. We were gone for almost three months.

While in Greece, we met a woman, Helena, who ran the hotel where we were staying on the island of Ios. She didn’t speak much English, but she was intent on sharing an experience with Cindy and I.

I’ve been thinking of it for close to a year.

“I see boy lying in ditch. I poky him with stick. I say Fuck Off! Fuck Off!”

Cindy and I thought this story was hilarious at the time. We also thought Helena was fairly old. I look at the picture I took of her then and think that she was likely my age now or possibly younger. She may have been going through menopause or maybe she was just fed up with tourists destroying her island. Or both. At that point in time, Ios was known as the party island.

Feminism comes in all forms.

I think now that this was a woman who cared deeply and was trying to share her frustrations with women of a younger generation. Even if she didn’t speak the same language well.

Everyday I wake up frustrated with how things are. I wish there was someone I could poke with a stick and yell at. I wish I could poke a lot of people with sticks. Mostly men.

I am not happy with what has happened to my country. I am deeply saddened by the destruction of my planet. I truly wish the ghosts of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK, and the OG RFK would haunt Trump and the rest of the would be ogliarchs in this country until they died of mortification.

Nothing is going to get better until we address the root causes of human suffering on this planet – patriarchy, racism, and cancerous capitalism.

We know how to care for one another. It’s the people with the most money that prevent us from doing it.

I truly wish that we as a nation (the US) would try to get back to those idealistic roots we maybe once had. Take the money out of politics, level the playing field, and shame those with so much into investing their wealth into something decent – like upgrading any of the numerous antiquated systems that we still insist on using just because it’s easier than addressing the real problems.

Tax that obscene wealth to the point that it’s pointless to try to attain it. Put it into hospitals, roads, school systems, libraries, farms, small businesses. Anywhere but where it’s been going.

Until then, I’ll keep dreaming about poking men with sticks.