I love the word, "Daughter". I like the sound of it. I like the sound of the phrase, "My daughter". I'm not sentimental about the bizarre english spelling -- it seems ridiculous in contrast with the much more sensible Swedish, "Dotter", but hey. The Swedes don't do the whole "grand" thing either. Your granddaughter via your own daughter is your dotterdotter. Your great-grandmother in straight matrilineal descent is your Mormor's mor. Bork Bork Bork.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 8 is not-particularly-super Tuesday. It is, I am very sad to accept, likely to be a pretty brutal day for the Sanders campaign, and those of us still hoping for some serious change.

It is also International Women's Day. I'm not sure what to make of that -- how to address the reality that on International Women's Day, I dearly hope that the first serious female candidate for President of the United States improbably comes up short in the Michigan Primary.

Meanwhile, as they were three years ago, the Girl Scouts of America find themselves engaged in a PR battle they did not choose and probably do not particularly want, largely due to their insistence that part of their mission is to equip young women with what almost any self-respecting progressive would consider essential information about their own reproductive biology. This aspect of their mission probably wouldn't have attracted anybody's attention, had they not made the obvious choice of relying on the premier not-for-profit source of such information, Planned Parenthood.

Disclaimer: I am sickened by the decision of PP's political arm to endorse HRC. There simply are no words for the level of betrayal I feel. I do not think I will ever be able to send another dime to the political arm -- at whatever unforeseen moment in the future I feel that I have the financial security to be the benefactor of anyone outside of my immediate family. But that is another story, for another time.

Regardless, 3 years ago, an appalling individual had the effrontery -- the absolute lack of normative social restraint -- to approach my daughter as she sold cookies outside of a building on a University campus (during a day of miscellaneous science outreach events), and lecture her on the evils of Planned Parenthood. By the time I intervened, he was describing (complete with illustrative hand motions) the mythical fiendish work of some mythical demented greedy surgeon, mythically slicing up a fetus with a scalpel. Yes. A middle-aged man accosted my 10-year-old daughter and tried to make her feel responsible for some rhetorical evil, torturous "murder" of a "baby", because she was selling cookies to raise money to go horseback riding with her friends.

I regret to admit that my intervention was itself far outside the bounds of normative behavior. I used some very, very ugly words. (Anybody familiar with some of my more exercised postings on dKos can probably imagine what it sounded like. The only phrase I specifically recall was, "Get the fuck away from my daughter".) I used them very, very loudly, right there in front of my tender-eared daughter, and not all that far away from some people who must have been appalled to hear someone talking like that 3 feet away from a girl with a wagon full of Thin Mints. (Who, I also regret to say, will probably be swearing like a sailor by the time she graduates from high school, largely down to my own tendency to verbal excess.)

Whatever.

Tomorrow, we will probably not be doing any cookie selling -- we'll be taking a break until this weekend. She will be busy with extracurriculars, and I will be busy with Boy Scouts. I might not even see her, actually. And if I weren't busy with the Boy Scouts, and so paralytically depressed about the political situation in the United States, I would be actively engaged doing everything I could to try to render International Women's Day a sour irony for all of the women whose hearts are electric with the hope that next January they will celebrate the inauguration of the first female American President. I don't know what to say about that. I honestly wish I could get behind the HRC campaign. I wish I could look forward to feeling the same kind of warm fuzzies that I felt 7 years ago, knowing that so many of my fellow citizens were experiencing a joy that even 12 months earlier had been almost unimaginable. I would love to be able to sit down with my daughter next January and gleefully watch that milestone inauguration. Not that she would care very much -- she hasn't any interest in politics, beyond a generalized loathing for the Scott Walkers of the universe.

Meanwhile, the Girl Scouts of America are raising the flag for girls everywhere, and asking folks to, 'Apply our profile pic frame to your Facebook profile picture, share it on your timeline, and tell everyone "She's Our Future. I Stand with Girls."' I don't even know what that means -- the bit about applying the profile pic, i mean -- but here's the PNG that was in the email they sent me (click on it and you'll go to the GSUSA Facebook page).

They are also, of course, winning the PR battle, because the people attacking them appear, in the minds of 90% of the populace, to have such deeply ugly souls that many Americans feel compelled to respond by buying more cookies than they can possibly eat. And I have to tell you, there's something fundamentally satisfying about seeing my daughter encounter one of those outraged citizens, recognizable by the extra adamance with which they assert their desire to, yes you bet i do, buy some Thin Mints.

So I guess that's me, Standing With Girls. If you want to make a small difference in the lives of girls, as well as the grown-up versions thereof, and if you haven't reduced yourself to penury contributing to Bernie Sanders or other progressive candidates, consider ponying up for the Girl Scouts on Tuesday. You don't have to buy cookies. You can just give them money. Or you can go online and order cookies to be donated to some worthy cause or another (If you know a scout who is selling cookies, and her troop is participating in a "Cookie Share" program, be reassured that only about $1 of the price of the box goes anywhere outside of her regional Girl Scouts program -- about a buck goes to the costs of the sale, a buck to the miscellaneous rewards and whatnot for the seller and her troop, and the rest goes to support programs like the subsidized summer camps.).

If you can't figure out how to donate, well, after 15 years of going door-to-door with my assorted kids to raise money for scouts, I'm absolutely shameless, so I'll welcome you to donate cookies on my daughter's account. We take the donated cookies to a local women's shelter. Drop me a message with your email, and she'll send you an ecard invitation. I'm afraid you'll have to pay by sending me a check, though. You can make it out directly to Girl Scouts, as long as it will get here within 2 weeks. You can also order cookies for yourself (in 6 or 12 box increments), though there are stiff shipping charges. It's a different link, so be sure to let me know which you're interested in. (I'm afraid it's a very impersonal invitation ... they can't add any text to it. I suspect there were problems in the past, when they could.)