I did this for a Facebook challenge from Annabel Ascher:
"Please repost this with your own photo and bio, including your reasons for being anti-fascist. If enough people do it should change the narrative! Let's not let these people paint anti-fascism the way they are!"
Since I am a digital art journaler, I decided to do mine in my own way. Elements are from Little Butterfly Wings, Sahin Designs, Tangie Baxter, and Vicki Robinson. The Statue of Liberty images are from the web.
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Text:
I am Sharon, a 72-year-old white woman with pre-existing conditions. I haven’t had a haircut since January. I write poems, and do digital art journaling and collage. I spend too much time online. Before the pre-existing got me, I was a clinical social worker specializing in domestic violence & sexual assault, and later, worked with the seriously mentally ill.
I have moved often in my life, and have lived in Colorado, Montana, Minnesota, Washington State, and Alaska. I now live (isolate) in Montana with my (new!) husband, two cats, and one tiny Pomeranian. My professional life, and varied living experiences, have taught me to pay attention to both commonalities and differences.
I am Antifa, which means anti-facist. I believe Black Lives Matter. I grew up in a small Montana town, in the care of my grandmother, who took care to teach me that we are all cousins. As a teenager, I lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended a large, wildly diverse high school, which reinforced that lesson. I believe that it matters that Black Lives Matter.
Quite young, I read Anne Frank’s Diary. Later, I learned of my father’s Air Force service, his time in a prisoner-of-war camp, and his determination that Naziism must never recur. In my twenties I discovered feminism and its relevance to my life.
Consciousness-raising was, for me, a broad and powerful experience that encompassed much more than womens’ rights. It insists on consistent attention to systemic biases of all kinds. It forces one to notice what is not present, what is not acknowledged, what is not admitted. It reminds me that the personal is political, and the political is personal.
I have been aware of the hum of white supremacy that underlies our culture for most of my life. It’s always there, just under – and now in the bright light – of our country. Now it threatens to steal from us the ideals we’ve claimed for so long, the “American Dream” of equality, opportunity, and possibility. It threatens people I know and love. It facilitates, even encourages, our worst impulses, our fears and greediness and selfishness.
I fight those impulses in myself.
I want to reclaim our flag. I want it to again represent what we hope to be: Mother of Exiles.
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
~ Emma Lazarus
I am Antifa.
