When I was paying for my groceries in the supermarket today, the cashier inquired if I would like a free pack of Disney Wonder Cards?
“Thanks, but not really,” I said.
“For your grandchildren,” smiled a woman behind me.
“I’m a childless cat lady,” I announced.
Startled by this sudden revelation, she replied: “Well, I’m also childless, but I have a dog.” And there, our brief encounter ended.
In fact my mind was preoccupied with writing about the remark about ‘childless cat ladies’ made by JD Vance, Trump’s sidekick in the US November election.
Alluding to Democrat VP Kamala Harris, who has no children of her own, Vance declared that America is being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable with their lives and want to make everyone else miserable too.
With the right to abortion still raging across the mid-west, the insult set social media on fire with hundreds of feline owners, childless or not, demanding action.
Author and academic Dr Rebecca Hains, professor of media and communication studies at Salem University in Massachusetts, sprang into action creating a Facebook group called Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris on 24 July.
When I saw the site, with followers fewer than a thousand I even received a personal thanks for signing up: today, a mere four weeks later, Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris has become a Facebook phenomenon counting 90,500 members.
Ninety percent are women, mostly from the USA, but also from Australia, Canada, the UK, Norway, Pakistan, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Mexico and with twenty-five moderators required to monitor the different time zones.
META statistics show that since its start, Cat Ladies for Kamala Harris has received 40,257 posts and a staggering 4,754,773 reactions: the mission – vote BLUE and put America’s first woman president in the White House.
While serious, the group is also light-hearted with followers uploading photos of every type of cat on the planet: Bengals, tabbies, Persians, Ragdolls, tuxedos, calicos, hairless and some you’ve never heard of.
Even ‘childless dog men’ have joined with Harris and her selection of popular Minnesota governor Tim Walz as running mate drawing massive crowds.
Notably, since the cat ladies got their claws out, the “Harris Waltz” has risen several ratings above the Republican ticket, so much so that Trump may rue the day he chose JD Vance to help him “Make America Great Again.”
“Should I lose,” he is reported to have told the *NABJ Convention, “I shall go to Venezuela. It’s a safer country than America with all these illegal migrants.”
In Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro has, of course, recently declared himself president again in a widely disputed national election.
One might say birds of a feather flock together – until the cat comes.
Meow.
*National Association of Black Journalists.
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