Everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to 
 Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving 
 the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, 
 opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

 I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous
 choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those
 candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in
 so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally
 disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the
 world.  Unfortunately, this is not a joke.  In my lifetime I have
 seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the
 presidency with regularity.

 Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor.
 In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets
 better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The
 melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the
 pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan.  She is
 fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The
 earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves
 and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to
 be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As
 she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

 Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women
 who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should
 have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or
 not.

 She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I
 imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many
 babies that makes.

 Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she
 has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense
 with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an
 environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could
 and might very well be the next president of the United States. She
 would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

 Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting
 rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot
 hundreds of wolves from the air.

 Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private
 right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when
 war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in
 his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the
 undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

 I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this
 election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the
 future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine
 whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever
 uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards
 dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence
 through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether
 we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in
 alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It
 will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or
 whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine
 whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of
 fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

 If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your
 power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the
 hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of
 teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of
 destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises
 that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis,
 doubt, ambiguity or dissent.  I think of pain.

 Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the
 floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between
 nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing
 we call life?


 Eve Ensler
 September 5, 2008