The inspiration came, literally, out of left field, a passing reference in a New Age-y journal to a group which believes that there is a new male religious "savior" currently on the planet who has been influencing the world from behind the scenes since July of 1977, and is soon to go public. Normally, I would have ignored such an outrageous claim and outdated construct, but the specificity of the date intrigued me. It is the month that I headed out into the world after college (university) graduation, the year that many millions of women born in 1955/56 entered the adult realms of work, further education, family, and civic engagement. In America, we were the first generation of women to be told, en masse, that we could be anything we wanted to be, and if the infrastructures were not in place to make that literally come true (and in a sense, still aren't), there is no question but that we have been uniquely influential, whether quietly or openly.
I had this idea. What if over the next year, 60-something women all over the globe were to speak even more courageously and publicly about what kinds of societies, economies, health care systems, religious constructs, and educational institutions they would create from scratch, and the processes they would use? What if 60-something women could speak to their communities about our human relationship to the earth and the heavens without being interrupted, contradicted, fought, or told, "that's not the real world"? What if their audiences truly heard, read, marked, learned and inwardly digested their wisdom, and considered acting accordingly? Not all women would say the same things, but I feel certain that the ideas would be invigorating, exciting and forward-looking. The "Person of the Year" in 2017 might well be the women of the class of '77, and a camera lens wouldn't be big enough to capture all of us.
