Girlboss, Gatekeep, Gaslight by Olivia Stevermer

Author:Olivia Stevermer [Stevermer, Olivia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637309681
Publisher: New Degree Press
Published: 2021-12-02T20:48:16+00:00

Chapter 9

The Campaign

Eight a.m. is the earliest I’ve woken in months, so Cori really does have a way of defying all odds. Yesterday, I sent her a direct message and she replied with an address, which, according to my navigation software, is a spacious parking lot about fifteen minutes away, so the possibilities of today’s adventure are increasingly endless. She has less than ten thousand followers on Instagram. She isn’t necessarily “famous” by a conventional standard, but I feel more starstruck by her than I would if Taylor Swift data mined the web for my phone number and invited me to her childhood home in Pennsylvania.

Cori will share her story with anyone who asks, but her biography is readily available on her website. Cori Bush grew up about twenty minutes away, right outside Ferguson, Missouri. When unarmed teenager Michael Brown was murdered by police in 2014, Cori arrived at the brutal fight for racial justice to—simply—do her job. As an ordained pastor, mother of two, and a registered nurse, she arrived at the scene to “lend a hand as a nurse,” completely unaware of the path her compassion and charisma would take her.

“I wasn’t trying to become an activist,” she often claims.

The majority of her life spent in one of the most broken parts of an already corrupt system finally became too much when she saw others experiencing the same burdens she had been carrying for the past thirty-eight years. She’s faced evictions, homelessness, racism, sexual assault, physical abuse, and fell severely ill with COVID after serving as a frontline nurse amid the pandemic.

So it’s quite simple: Cori doesn’t want anyone to ever endure the same hardships she did. Her humility and selflessness are unmatched, so I could not care less if her current social clout is relatively unextraordinary because she is so authentic and wonderful, and SHE replied to ME!

I’m omw to 75 North Oaks Plaza. I head past Delmar and into the heart of a once-prosperous area that was drained of all resources and forced to continue living. Past the first set of brown apartment complexes is a small open field that leads to an intersection with a “Cash Gold” store and a “Grand Opening” of a fish mart, both of which look completely dead and locationally incapable of coming to life. The drive continues the pattern of brown apartment complexes followed by small fields of dead grass that lead to run-down businesses.

The actual address is a little office in a strip mall. It’s sandwiched between a Save A Lot and a clothing store and about two hundred feet behind a McDonald’s. The inside is the size of a small pop-up boutique with the thinnest layer of dark gray carpet coating a firm surface. There is a desk to the right with a cool-looking man sitting in front of it. He has voluminous curly black hair with a black-and-white camouflage mask. His water bottle is pink, blue, and yellow, and his baggy oversized tank top with stylistic black jeans must have been carefully selected from a thrift store.

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