Twitter Roller Coaster (This Time Re: #SB1, #HB2) – Part 1

July 9, 2013

Twitter convo on HB2For something I love and adore so deeply, twitter sure does cause me a good amount of stress.

I’ve been watching the situation down in Texas – live streams of the State Senate and House. I’ve been reading articles and of course following the situation on twitter.

Today, I saw a tweet of Lizz Winstead’s. (She’s the co-creator of The Daily Show.) Someone had tweeted her saying, “tirelessly fighting to maintain privilege for white women. I’m sure. You must be exhausted.”

Lizz replied with “Yep. That’s me.”

Now, this is where I first replied.

I don’t (or at least I don’t think I)usually go for sarcasm. I think sarcasm can sometimes come across as pretty mean, also sometimes pretty childish. So, I think usually it kind of undermines the point you are trying to make.

However, sometimes sarcasm is sort of the easiest response when you only have 140 characters to try and get your point across.

So, I replied to them and said, “Yes, because the privileged white women with insurance & resources are precisely the ones for whom we’re fighting.”

(If you watched the livestream of the Texas State Senate last night, you would’ve seen so many women who said they were privileged – privileged enough to be able to take time off work and come and fight on behalf of all women.

Some people didn’t have that privilege – and the people who didn’t have the resources to come be part of the fight would quite possibly be the same ones who’d no longer have access to healthcare and services they may need if they became/were pregnant when/if laws changed.)

So, it was pretty clear to me that that was the point. Many of us were sort of owning up to some of the privilege we have. I was talking with a friend about this and the general idea we spoke about was that if people without a voice were too angry to let people with a voice say something, then no one would be speaking at all.

Anyway, I suppose that was a bit of tangent (when is it not on here, right?). So, this woman replied with “Non-which women are disproportionately economically disadvantaged in large part due to White Supremacy, a system.”

I put part of her tweet in quotes then added my own part to the end – “Non-White women = disproportionately economically disadvantaged” – WHY we must fight 4 ALL women 2 have healthcare.

Now, this is where Lizz Winstead got involved (again, I guess).

She replied to me and this other woman. And she said, “Haven’t you heard? I only work for the rights of privileged white women.”

Now, this is kind of where my mentions and things started getting a little busier than usual. And some people started mentioning me in the same breath as the twitter handle of the other woman, talking about poor Lizz Winstead and how she had to have patience with people like us.

But no. Not people like US! I’m on Lizz Winstead’s side. I’m on the side of women. But some people were not reading the thread – or perhaps they were and my sarcasm was getting lost.

I had a moment of terror, and a moment of not the greatest reaction. I tweeted a reply to the person who mentioned Lizz needing to have patience with me and the other woman, saying I was fighting with Lizz not against her.

I tweeted a couple of general tweets to my followers sort of explaining what happened, asking if everything I said was okay or if it was easy to misconstrue.

And I texted a friend of mine with everything that was going on. He very nicely calmed me down and said I was going a wee bit crazy and that if I wanted to be thought of as at least a semi-rational person with the logical, well-thought out view point, I shouldn’t be presenting a crazy and scared timeline when anyone looked at it.

And he was right. So, I deleted the insecure tweets asking if my tweets were okay. They’d only been up for a few minutes. Hopefully no one had seen them. (No one had interacted with them.)

This is where I’ll pick up tomorrow.

(Just so you know, there are no insane turns in the story, so don’t get too excited. But, there will be more.)

I'd love to hear from you! So whaddya say?