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>> Gloria Steinem: Well, actually,
when I got the call from The White House,
I said "are you sure?"
What makes this medal mean so much
is that it's for waging peace you might say.
It is because the division --
the so called gender division, the idea that there's
a subject and an object, masculine, feminine,
dominant, passive,
is the route or the normalize of their violence
that has to do with race and class with ethnicity,
with sexuality that has to do with men's ideas
that they have to defeat each other
in order to be truly masculine,
you know, it is the root of the false idea
that we are ranked as human beings rather than linked.
We are truly linked so I feel blessed and enthusiastic
and lucky to be part of a movement that is fundamental.
Humans are communal animals, we need to have
that kind of shared community which doesn't have to do
with how different we are,
we need to be different, we learn from difference
not from sameness but from shared values.
And I have that, I mean that's what you have in a movement,
it's huge and so it enables you to keep going
and also to be angry when you need to be angry
and to do unacceptable things when you --
because you know that there's somebody over there
who's going to understand why you did it.
We are linked as human beings, not ranked.
That we are also linked to the environment
to try altogether to have a paradigm in life
that's a circle, not a pyramid,
not a hierarchy,
to have companions in that worldview,
and then at the same time, you know,
that we understand that we're shared humanity,
to also understand that we're each unique.
We are each the combination of who knows millennia
of environment and heredity that got convened
in this particular way that exists in each baby.
You know, really there's a person in every baby, right?
So the -- we can tap into that strength if we think,
"Okay, what do I love to do?
What does it -- why do I forget what time it is when I'm doing?
What would I do even if I didn't get paid?
Do I want everybody to get paid?"
and to try to let that guide us.
I think it's a balance between our shared humanity
and our uniqueness.