Veronica Pooh Nash Poleate: Feminist Icon

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"The problem isn't that Bernie Sanders is a crazy-pants cuckoo bird," said Jon Stewart recently (moment of silence please...) "It's that we've all become so accustomed to stage managed, focus-group driven candidates that his authenticity comes across as lunacy."

Such is the disruptive, intoxicating power of unbridled authenticity, that a school counselor in Hamilton County Tennessee become an overnight internet phenomenon.

I first heard about Veronica Pooh Nash Poleate via her viral video about shark attacks this summer.

When you go into the shark's house, you get ate. When a chicken walks into my house, guess what, they get ate.

For Veronica, this is just an obvious fact. The ocean is the shark's house, she says. Yup. She's got a point there.

A Jewish woman living in Israel, a writer, a storyteller, I have no connection to Veronica's world in Tennessee. But this woman has a hold on me. I want Veronica to be my mother, my friend or my sister. I watch all her videos, I follow her on Facebook.

I'm pretty sure that if Veronica knew me, she'd beat somebody up for me, is the thing. And then make a delicious dinner and make me help and lecture me about my bad behaviour and then hug me. I think she would tell me the truth. I think she is an unapologetic, middle aged, truth telling, fear evoking shark, swimming through an ocean littered with the flotsam and jetsam of generations of racism, body shaming and classism. The ocean is the shark's house indeed.

Veronica owns who she is with a fearlessness and authenticity that is nearly non-existent in our ever so groomed and image conscious world. She is body acceptance, she is proud of her Christian faith, she says the things that we think but do not say:

It's August. In August you have to instill fear, she says, in her video of tips for teachers this fall.

The video includes instructions for "stank eye" and advice to practice "the rat" look in the mirror. Tell the kids, I quit school because of recess, because I do not play, she advises fiercely. She says everything fiercely.

Veronica is a woman speaking truth to power in a way that homegrown and sincere. She simply is who she is, without an agenda. Imagine that. She is proud, she's fat, she's black, she has a strange hair style, she is opinionated, old school and blunt. Veronica is, in other words, a feminist icon.

"I love you, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it," Veronica says vehemently at the end of each video.

I'm not going to argue with that, are you? -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.












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