Thank You Miss Molly

Came home this morning to find one of my daughters playing hookey. I’m so proud.
I took the opportunity to read to her from a piece on Texas Women from Molly Ivan’s first book. It was so gratifying to see her eyebrows shoot up upon hearing that married women in Texas did not have full property rights until 1969. That the “unwritten law” was codified in the Texas Penal Code until 1972, but that women didn’t have equal shooting rights. That until 1918, all Texans could vote except “idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane, and women.”

In 1990 she wrote this about the first Gulf War:
“There are two kinds of bottom line in this deal; one is that war costs hell’s own money. Sooner rather than later, it will be much, much cheaper for us to conserve energy than to kill tens of thousands of people.
The second is what we put on the tombstones when they start shipping the bodies home: HE DIED TO KEEP OIL AT $17-A-BARREL? MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR FEUDAL ISLAMIC FIEFDOMS doesn’t have much of a ring to it. Everyone who has ever lost someone he or she loved in a war has an obligation to talk back to these chest-thumping jackasses who are so anxious to get other people’s sons killed.”

Now this from her last column:
“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"