If you watched the Golden Globes on Sunday night, and you were in any way paying attention, I imagine there came a point in the evening where you just texted "MERYL!!!!!!" to your best friend in all caps. That was about as coherent as I was able to be in the moment, but there are some who had their faculties a bit more about them. Twitter user Anne T. Donahue's hilarious and insightful tweet about Meryl Streep's speech on Donald Trump could not be more on point.
Just to catch you up, our reigning Queen Of All That Is Acting — also known as "Meryl Streep," to her friends — was honored at the 2017 Golden Globes with the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, as is right and good. During her acceptance speech, she used her time to speak on an important issue facing the American people right now.
That issue is the fact that Donald Trump is about to be our next President, something that has thrown many Americans into varying stages of anger, denial, depression, and outright fear. Streep half-jokingly shared that she had "lost her voice in screaming and lamentation" over the weekend, and "lost her mind sometime earlier this year" — specifically after Trump allegedly mocked disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski. (He has repeatedly denied that he was mocking the journalist.) For him to take the highest office in what we claim is the greatest nation after a stunt like that has left many Americans reeling, and Streep spoke to their pain in her heartbreaking, no-holds-barred speech.
Which is, when you really think about it, not traditionally the way that award recipients need to spend their time — underlining out the troubling, problematic, stomach-churning behavioral issues of our President-Elect and urging the press to stay vigilant in reporting them. And the surprise of the moment is exactly what Anne T. Donahue so brilliantly pointed out in her tweet on the issue.
It's everyone's dream to get mentioned in a Streep acceptance speech, unless it's for her to point out to everyone exactly what a hot pile of garbage bones you are. Donahue's tweet is what we were all thinking, as if she peered into our brains and plucked out the perfect little 140-character soundbite to encapsulate how brutally insane our world has become in 2017.
But 2017 is only just beginning, so we need to take a lesson from people like Meryl Streep and Anne T. Donahue and keep speaking truth to those in power.
Whether you're tugging heart strings with a well-worded speech or causing coffee spit takes from people checking Twitter at their desks the next morning, when you use your voice as a shield to protect your fellow humans in these hateful times, you're seriously out there doing important work.
