AOC and a voice for those who were dismissed

It’s been more than fifteen years and one minute is still as clear as if it happened a moment ago.

I was attending a public comment session at a European Parliament regarding the war in Iraq, civilian casualties and the US misinformation about weapons of mass destruction. One of my closest friends at the time was an Iraqi refugee and his brother had recently been killed by American troops who mistook him for someone they were looking for. Shoot first and ask questions later… and all that.

High-ranking US military and civilian officials had come to answer questions from the European public and this was supposed to be a rare opportunity for open discussion of the issues with those who actually had the power. I managed to get a seat in the question gallery due to connections within the high-powered charity community. My US passport and press credentials didn’t hurt either.

The session lasted two hours and there was very little critical discussion allowed. Everyone had been pretty thoroughly vetted and most of the questions from the “public” were sycophantic opportunities for officials to regurgitate the Republican party line in Europe. Finally, toward the end of the session, I got one of the coveted comment spaces, and goddess, was I ever ready.

I had a stack of documented cases of avoidable civilian casualties three inches thick in my hands with my friend’s brother on top.

Public domain image

I am not good at public speaking or even speaking in general. My forte is much more the written word. I tend to choke and forget my vocabulary and stumble around without a clear goal even just trying to hold my own in a political discussion among friends. So, I had prepared for this.

I took deep breaths as I was called to stand and then I put it out there. My statement had to be phrased as a question, and it was, but it contained enough data to make clear that platitudes weren’t going to work here. The mediators were so shocked that I actually got to the end of the two sentence question before the shouting started and I was drowned out.

I had done it. The words were on the record and on national TV and I hadn’t choked. My heart was pounding. It was a tiny thing, but at least I had forced the people in power to confront the lie that this was a relatively clean war, where only the guilty suffered and the oppressed people of Iraq were supposed to be grateful for occupation and viciously negligent violence.

The officials had to spend the next ten minutes uncomfortably wriggling out of the issues I had raised. But of course, it was buried in the end. That was just all the power I had at the time.

And that isn’t actually the memory I mentioned in the first line. What stands out most clearly to me isn’t the fact that I managed to put the truth out on national TV and in front of US officials. I was standing out in the entrance hall of the Parliament after the event and I was cornered by a member of Parliament from the far left who had been trying to milk the anti-war movement for media attention without actually helping.

Several members of Parliament from the pro-US, right-wing party walked down the steps from the main hall and passed us. One of them turned around, pushed his face close to mine and sneered in a loud voice that cut through the space, “Disgusting bitch! It speaks our language!”

His cronies chuckled and they left. I stood frozen and speechless.

I had spoken in English during the public session because the guests were US officials and English was allowed. But I had been speaking Czech to the leftist MP. That was what the right-winger had meant. He was surprised that I was bilingual. But he had put it in extremely insulting grammar, calling me “it” and clearly putting me in the place of a sub-human.

His companions had laughed and the leftist MP who had pretended to be sympathetic stepped away. Far from standing up for me, he disappeared.

I was a blind woman who had the international microphone for a fleeting moment and I had been slammed back into my place with public humiliation.

No, I wasn’t surrounded by people mocking me or supporting me. I was suddenly simply dismissed. Everyone’s back seemed to be turned to me in the entrance hall. The journalists who had previously been interested in my documentation were no longer interested. I had been demoted from upstart to irrelevant and then brushed away.

That is the part that makes the memory stick so painfully—the dehumanization followed by very effective dismissal.

When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was demeaned with sexist language on the steps of the US Capitol building last month by Congressman Ted Yoha it was the same kind of moment. It was a man in power slapping down an upstart woman, calling her a “F—ing bitch” and “disgusting.” It was eerily reminiscent of my experience all those years ago.

At first AOC didn’t respond publicly. She probably didn’t want to stoop to his level. And that is understandable. I didn’t respond either. In the moment, I choked as usual, and later when I could have thought through a response, I no longer had a microphone or any platform to speak of.

But I very much appreciate Ocasio-Cortez’s words from the House floor several days later. She laid the issue out in no uncertain terms. Having experienced much the same thing in public and a lot of less-public abuse over forty-four years of being a disabled woman, I know exactly what she meant when she said, “It’s cultural.”

It wasn’t just about me being a woman or disabled, of course. I was a political opponent of that rude MP. But he did not and would not—particularly in the somewhat more staid European context—treat a man like that.

Ocasio-Cortez said, “Men harass women daily and feel they can go unpunished,” I know exactly what she means.

I have often wished I had the platform, the mficrophone and the power to talk back and to verbally tear up sexist, ablest and racist bullies in public. But the truth is I don’t have the seat-of-the-pants eloquence either, not in spoken words at least. Ocasio-Cortez has that and she now has the microphone and the platform too. She uses it well and I’m one more woman cheering her on.

Alexandria Ocaso-Cortez continues to be a voice for those of us who have been dismissed and trampled too many times. And she is one of those who reminds me there is still much worth fighting for.