JANE FONDA

JANE FONDA’S
SPEECH ON ART & ACTIVISM FOR
V-DAY NEW ORLEANS…April 13th, 2008


Oh mercy, oh my—it feels like when the levees broke it blew the lid off the ninth ward and Parrish unleashed these voices, these poems, these words, these doves of peace, these attitudes --power and solidarity. I don’t know think they knew what they were unleashing. And I say “they” because it wasn’t the natural disaster that did it, it was man made—it was negligence and lack of caring. That broke the levees.

I don’t know about you but I’ve been rocked to my core and I’m so grateful to Eve and V-day for creating this chance for all of us to witness the power of the women of New Orleans. Their words, their poems and songs gave voice to all the women from all the corners of the world that have been represented here so beautifully—the Congo, Kenya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Croatia, Serbia, Phillipines and it has enabled us to understand in our bodies, in our cells what sisterhood and solidarity feel like. That’s what art does. No woman no cry. Everything’s gonna be alright.

And the beautiful “vagina-challenged” men on that panel yesterday who helped us see that patriarchy doesn’t just wound women, it wounds men as well. It allows men to engage in violence without knowing it’s wrong. It makes them define their manhood by machismo, it creates a toxic brew called masculinity that is so easily shamed and so ready to turn to violence to cover the shame and win back their dominance. Our brothers yesterday helped us understand that all of us must work to create a masculinity that is less vulnerable to shaming. This means raising our sons and grandsons and nephews to understand their manhood is connected to their hearts, not their fists or their penises. And then we have to be sure we’ve created a safe space for them to be sensitive, loving men.

Patriarchy is the enemy, not men. And the opposite of patriarchy isn’t matriarchy—although that might be nice for awhile—just to right the balance a little. But no, the opposite of patriarchy isn’t matriarchy, it’s democracy. There can be no democracy in the hierarchal paradigm that is patriarchy—somebody’s always gotta be on top and it’s not supposed to be women unless they’re ventriloquists for the patriarchy. Can’t have true democracy that way. We’re the majority, for heaven’s sake!

We are at a crossroad right now in the world—we cannot continue the way it’s been. We’ve seen these last two days where that’s taken us.

As Naomi Klein made real clear this afternoon, all we have to do is look at what the U.S. government has done in Iraq after the invasion--the exact opposite of what needed to be done and, then, here in New Orleans during and after the flood. Same thing. How people’s needs were ignored, how the same private corporations that botched it in Iraq were brought in to do reconstruction here and again botched it through waste and corruption and got incredibly rich, in both places—with our tax money.

We can even see how from the point of view of the old, patriarchal paradigm, that global warming and the natural disasters that result from it are a boon. It means that disaster capitalism doesn’t have to create the chaos and shock like it did in Iraq, Nature will do it for them. New Orleans showed how it can be done.

This is the paradigm that says “Never mind governance. Never mind humanity unless it’s rich, powerful and mostly white. The “others” will be in such a state of shock they’ll be powerless to stop us, their government will be unable to help, and we’ll be safe behind our walls and partitions that separate us from them.”
If we continue on this path we will all perish because the planet will have been destroyed. What do they care? Many of them believe in the Rapture, when everyone like them will rise up to the Kingdom of heaven. Well guess what? The Kingdom of Heaven is right here, right now, all around us and within us. That’s what Jesus taught. And that is what this whole weekend is about—manifesting the Spirit –the new paradigm—right here on earth, through art and activism.

The combination of Art and Activism is the perfect way to celebrate the new paradigm. All the great conduits of perception who represented this paradigm --Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus, Lao Tse, all of them, spoke to us in poetry, parable, metaphor. Why? Because the non-linear, non-cerebral forms that are Art speak on a different frequency above the chaos and dysfunction and awaken us to consciousness, to the Spirit. Never is this more needed than when the world is in transition as it is now. Art reminds us that the world as it is, is not all there is, that there are other possibilities to strive for. Activism helps us turn the possibility that is opened by Art into reality. Art can jolt us open. Activism can step into our openness and offer us the structures and community to turn our awakened selves into action. Art can penetrate our defenses so that we can see and hear what we have been afraid of seeing and hearing. Activism can offer ways to turn us from preoccupation with ourselves into the healing action of service.

I’ve had a lot of experience with what can happen when Art and Activism are joined. I produced a movie, “Nine to Five” that was inspired by activists in the National Association of Women Office Workers. For some, it was a light comedy. For others, especially office workers, it exposed through laughter the very serious problems they were up against and empowered them to organize for change. Out of the movie the organization became a national union within SEIU and Dolly Parton’s song became the movement’s anthem.

“China Syndrome,” another movie I was involved in as a producer, exposed the dangers of nuclear energy—the unforgiving technology-- and helped people understand exactly what had happened at Three Mile Island—which occurred just 2 weeks after the film opened.

“Coming Home,” couched as a love story, helped expose the realities Vietnam veterans were facing when they got back.

All the didactic speeches in the world couldn’t have penetrated people’s consciousness the way those films did. The messages, embedded as they were in the genres of comedy, thriller and love story, could creep up and take people by surprise.

That’s what the Vagina Monologues did to me. I first saw it in New York in 2000. Eve was performing solo. Up until then I had been a feminist in the sense that I supported women, brought gender issues into my movie roles, helped women make their bodies strong, read all the right books--I had it in my head. I thought I had it in my heart--in my body--but I didn’t, not really. I couldn’t. It was too scary, like stepping off a cliff without knowing if there was a trampoline below. It didn’t just mean being with men differently, it meant doing life differently.

I don’t think I’d ever laughed as hard or cried as hard in the theater as I did during Eve’s performance. And something happened to me. I think it must have been during the laughter part because I was off guard, my defenses were down. My theoretical feminism slipped from my head into my body. I became an embodied feminist. I think, without my realizing it, the play allowed me to really own the reality of what has been done to us, because we are women, and at the same time, how beautiful we are and poignant and brave. It’s hard to explain in words. But that’s what Art can do to us.

There has probably been, or will be, at least one moment during this weekend when you feel this happen to you: A shift in consciousness, when the Spirit will move through you and you know you are not alone. You feel love. You feel power. You will cry, because that’s what happens when the soul is broken open. And you know this can never be taken away from you again. It has become who you are.

The fact that you are here shows that you are ready to be vehicles for this Spirit, this consciousness. Each of you is like a ripple of energy and, because consciousness is contagious, your energy will keep circling outward until a tipping point is reached.

This isn’t just new age hogwash. This is how reality works. Think of it this way: in the middle of the ocean, many, many small, almost undetectable currents occasionally come together in just such a way as to suddenly produce a very high wave which appears as if from nowhere.

Physicists believe that the “big bang’ origin of our universe was just such a little ripple out there in what we think of as empty space, little concentrated excitations in the immense ocean of cosmic energy, coming together to create a sudden wave pulse that exploded outward and eventually manifested as what we see out there in the sky at night.

Maybe some of you saw the film, “What the Bleep Do We Know.” There was a scene in which someone told about the experiment that was conducted one hot summer in Washington DC, usually a time of heightened violence and crime. Thousands of people came from around the world to DC to meditate on peace. The Chief of Police ridiculed them, but at the end of a month, violence in the city had dropped an unheard of 25%.

We are simply fields of energy and what we put out can expand and ripple far beyond what we can see and touch to become a critical mass.

Eckart Tolle, in his book, “The New Earth” that is rippling out to millions of people because of Oprah, talks about the next stage in the evolution of consciousness on the planet —the new paradigm. He says, “The closer we get to the end of our present evolutionary stage, the more dysfunctional the ego becomes, in the same way that a caterpillar becomes dysfunctional just before it transforms into a butterfly. But the new consciousness is arising even as the old dissolves.”

Today the “old” can’t get any worst. It’s like a wounded, flailing beast—very dangerous, but dying. We have to take care of ourselves and each other.
And we must, in all humility, understand what our role is as women and men of conscience. We are the way to the future. Eckart Tolle explains it this way: “The suppression of the feminine principle especially over the past two thousand years has enabled the ego to gain absolute supremacy in the collective human psyche.” He says that it is harder for the ego to take root in the female than in the male because women are more in touch with the inner body and the intelligence of the organism where the intuitive faculties originate, have greater openness and sensitivity toward other life-forms, and are more attuned to the natural world.”

So—we’re it. The leaders. The fields of energy. We’d better be brave and have faith. Someone, I don’t remember who, gave me these words: “Hope is the ability to listen to the music of the future. Faith is the ability to dance to that music in the present.” We have to keep the faith and keep dancing to the music of the future. And, like the butterfly, we will rise.