We’re in an early stage of civilization, if we survive it. We’re going through a dramatic adolescence, as a species learning how to organize itself. We’re like bees before hives, or ants before hills. We’re hormonal, lust-driven, reckless, grabbing what we want without regard for consequences, taking chances with our lives as though we were immortal, invulnerable. These are our crazy teenage years. Clearly this is no way to run a planet.

Without female nurturing, there’s too much aggression and the fear and hatred it can engender for society to function. We fall apart from our unrestrained aggression. Caring is the side of our humanity that has been suppressed, discouraged, discounted, disrespected. We have mocked loving as weakness. So we become, as a society, sicker, more poisoned by the imbalance in our natures. Women are the cure, or part of the cure, for what ails us – not the gender so much as the repository of ideas and values we store under the rubric “woman.”

So just as the voices of young and old, white and black, all genders, all classes, are required in order for our species to understand our situation, so the presence of women in our politics is a sign of improving health. Balance, which is peace, which is harmony, health, and wellbeing, must be restored, or maybe, as a new era dawns, achieved.

It has always seemed to me that women are going to have to lead the way toward real revolution. Not the violent kind, which is just more of the same damn thing, but true revolution – big change in the right direction.

I don’t think women are naturally better than men. It’s just that for centuries, women have been the custodians of the values our culture now desperately needs. It is mostly women who take care of children, the sick, and the elderly. It is mostly women who teach. It is mostly women who clean up men’s messes. Not being allowed to speak, we have been forced to learn how to listen. Not having access to power, we have learned what it feels like to be powerless. Women have learned to have compassion the hard way.  Now we need to show the world how it’s done.

There’s a flip side to compassion, though. If we really want to alleviate suffering, we have to find ways to stop people from needlessly and cruelly making others suffer. When the struggle is nonviolent, and we’d better hope it is, humor is one of the best weapons we have against the oppressors. Let’s be funny when we can, and make it sting.

The Bible says the last shall be first. That sounds like women to me, especially poor women, and most especially women of color. Just because it’s in the Bible, doesn’t mean it’s not true.