Margaret Atwood has been a personal hero of mine for at least 25 years. Her outspoken feminist belief that women should be treated equally and their reproductive rights be respected earned her a permanent place in my heart. Now Atwood has taken up the torch to save libraries in Toronto, thus earning her this week’s HWA.
Much to the disdain of Councillor Doug Ford, (idiot at large) Atwood has waged an on-line campaign to save Toronto’s libraries from budget cuts. Her outreach to her Twitter followers was so successful that the respsonse briefly overloaded web servers. The hypocritical and quite foolish Ford said in response to Atwood’s efforts:
Well, good luck to Margaret Atwood, I don’t even know her. If she could walk by me I wouldn’t even have a clue who she is…But she’s not down here, she’s not dealing with the problems, and if she did, tell her to go run in the next election and get democratically elected and we’d be more than happy to sit down and listen to Margaret Atwood.
Sorry Ford, but you are a raging idiot. You are an elected official. You work for Atwood and the rest of your constituents. Your job is to listen to the people. If I did not know better, I would say he is one of the many misogynistic character’s in an Atwood novel.
Brava, Margaret Atwood. You are a treasure for Canada and much beloved here in the States.