Progress Report:
“Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses Yearning To Breathe Free…”
Lady Liberty and the 2025 Fourth of July
By Vajra Ma
July 4, 2025, for me was a day of both mourning and celebration. I mourn the accelerating firestorm of Project 2025 (do your research). I celebrate that I spent the day with people who share my view, but also with some who support the acceleration (although I tend to think if they recognized the earmarks of the authoritarian playbook, they wouldn’t). Why do I celebrate that? Because the hope of this nation, indeed the world, is that we came together as human beings across the divide that would conquer us. We shared company, conversation, food, music and laughter across the divide. WE celebrated our common humanity.
But what about the rest of humanity…?
To that end I share this uniting view in “The Women’s Collective”, a pamphlet written in 2017 by my late husband Wolfgang Nebmaier. [excerpt from “The Women’s Collective” by Wolfgang Nebmaier with Vajra Ma, © Shakti Moon Publishing, 2017]
HAND ACROSS THE AISLE: LISTEN FOR WHAT OTHERS CAN HEAR
[excerpt from “The Women’s Collective” by Wolfgang Nebmaier with Vajra Ma, © Shakti Moon Publishing, 2017]
This is how differences are bridged in a collective.
Someone once expressed to me the opinion that “right-to-lifers” could not be part of the women’s community. Nothing could be further from reality. Some time ago, I was chatting with a young looking middle aged woman and she expressed her view that “the family” and “family values” were the foundation of everything that is good. Obviously not a perfect candidate for raising the issue of reproductive rights.
What I did instead was to mention how important it is that her daughters – and granddaughters – learn that they do not need male approval or validation. That got the woman’s nodding attention, reminded her of how much she loves the women in her family, her daughter and granddaughters, and wants them to blossom.
This is actually feminist consciousness, and that’s all we need, awaken feminist consciousness no matter if it is prudent in a specific situation to use the “f word”.
In order to build bridges between people wearing different political or racial or religious or social labels – as among The Women’s Collective – we try to find possible constants and establish them among people of otherwise diverse characteristics.
To establish and maintain a sense in women of being part of a bigger picture requires no liberal or progressive pedigree. In fact, I believe those labels hinder women coming together. And that would be doing patriarchy’s work under the guise of liberalism or progressiveness.
Removing the labels and seeking out the commonalities will result in a bigger picture which implies the following vision:
Women shall never again be separated from each other!
Women shall never again automatically apologize.
Women shall never again be “reasonable” and try not to offend anyone.
Maybe there’s one thing to be learned from the ‘apprentice-
maker’: He got where he is today by NOT apologizing.
LADY LIBERTY – THE AWARENESS OF WOMAN’S INNATE POWER AND AUTHORITY
Finally, there’s a reason why the statue facing Ellis Island does not depict a Sir Liberty or Lord Liberty. It is Lady Liberty because She personifies the aspirations, courage, faith, and confidence also known from all the world’s mother goddesses of power and compassion such as Tara, Isis, Yemaya, Kali-Ma, Guanyin, and for most in the so-called western, Christian dominated world of course, Mother Mary. The mother goddesses are who we turn to when we endeavor to create and preserve a better society for all.
And there’s a reason, the famous poem engraved on Her pedestal reads like this:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, *
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
“The New Colossus” a sonnet by Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) written in 1883 to raise money for the construction of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
What this historical reality signifies is that throughout history the awareness of Woman’s innate power and authority was never lost. Despite thousands of years of separating women from women in men’s domains, despite thousands of years of legislating the stealing and raping and exploiting of women’s lands, their children, and of the women themselves, Woman remains “The Mother of All Living”.
What needs to happen is no party line, no agenda, no organizational hierarchy, but to let the awareness of this world-wide Women’s Collective take hold – in both women and men. And within that collective, we will first breathe out and give space to again realize what not a single person is born without, a knowing of Woman as the natural and spiritual authority of life.
And then, from that global awareness, we will know what to do and we will have the power to do it.
When Women Come Together,
the World Comes Together
When Women Heal, The Earth Heals!
There is No Future Without the Women’s Collective. It’s been tried for six to eight thousand years.
* The “original” Colossus of Rhodes on the Greek island by the same name was a 108 foot tall statue to the Greek god Helios. The statue erected in 280 BCE, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was truly colossal and the approximate height of today’s Statue of Liberty, but it was not earthquake-proof and fell in 226 BCE when a major earthquake hit Rhodes. [END EXCERPT]
Final Note: I titled this Progress Report. The jury is still out. But the deadline is now. The “Mother of Exiles” still stands on our shore. What you and I do NOW with the tired, poor, the huddled masses, homeless and tempest-tossed yearning to breathe free, determines the Report.
