Boodaism
I’d love to see a woman elected president.
I don’t think we can really understand the significance of what that would mean for a country that less than 100 years ago didn’t even allow women the right to vote.
It would be a win for women everywhere, and it would set a precedent for the real, world-wide struggle that women go through every day to have the same rights as men. Did you know that Saudi Arabia just allowed women the right to vote 4 months ago? It’s hard to believe.
Another reason I’d love to see a woman president is because we as a culture are badly in need of feminine leadership.
The old model of masculine men as leaders worked for the first and second industrial revolutions, but has lost it’s relevance in a society that now suffers more from lack of compassion than it does from a lack of industrial strength.
We’ve lost a sense of interconnectedness, a relationship with nature and the natural order of things, and we need a leader that will bring it back, but it doesn’t have to be a woman.
I believe “feminine leadership” has nothing to do with having two X chromosomes.
Yes, Hillary is a woman, but does she really have the kind of feminine leadership we need? I don’t know. I certainly haven’t seen it yet.
When I really consider what it means to be a leader who embodies feminine qualities, Bernie Sanders is my girl.
In a not-so-strange way, if our definition of “woman” includes both gender and feminine qualities, Bernie is more of a woman than Hillary.
I don’t mean to discount the reality of what Hillary has gone through as a woman, because one of the things that defines a group is their shared struggles, and in that way Hillary has fought alongside her sisters in a way that would constitute a remarkable paradigm shift if she got elected.
Yet I can’t help but notice that Bernie actually represents more of a departure from the norm.
Twenty years ago who would have thought that a serious woman presidential candidate wouldn’t be as big a departure from the status quo as an old white man with a New York accent?
Maybe it shows us how far we’ve come in the fight for gender equality.
Maybe for the first time we are actually seeing beyond gender to the qualities that make someone a great leader.
Maybe instead of voting for historical significance we’re voting for what the United States needs right now, to fix the problems we’re facing, to have our elected officials do what’s best for everyone.
Maybe the time has come for a woman to be president, but not this year.
This year, I’m not voting for gender.
I’m voting for Bernie.
