World: Burning Desperation - nytimes.com/video
When I see things like this I want to scream in desperation and anger and refusal that human beings can create this kind of despair in one another. I want to go to those girls and women and I want to hold them and look and their eyes and say:
“Baby girl, baby girl—you are precious—you are beautiful—you have value.
Why didn’t they tell you that?
Why didn’t they teach you that?
Come with me. Let me take you away.”
How can people preach peace out of one side of their mouths and shame and embarrassment out of the other? How can they say that not bringing a gift to a birthday party is a reason for a degree of shame that requires self-immolation? How can abuse be doled out in such a way as to make a married 13-year-old want to set herself on fire just to put an end to the words?
When I see and think and ponder on these things…these heinous acts….this despair and demoralization and the dehumanization that one individual suffers at the hands of another…I don’t want to talk about Jesus, or God, or Allah or Buddha or any other religious figurehead. I don’t want to say or hear the words “The only way to save them is by bringing them God.” Or “The only way they will be better is if they believe in…” Because it’s not true.
The only thing that will save them is for people to behave humanely towards one another. The only way to stop the burning, the beating, the berating, the stoning, the whipping, the cutting, the sadness, the despair, the humiliation, the domination is to just stop. It is not the hands of a God that brings this pain into the world—it is the hands of men who would exert their will and their desires on another human being that brings this pain into the world.
How can you say you love someone and do these things? How can you say “I loved you, but you have shamed our family by holding hands with that boy who is not our same religion, so now I am going to behead you…or run you down with our family car…or chop your hands off…or smother you…or drown you…or lock you in the basement…or the closet?” In no way is that love, or kindness or caring.
The shame is yours for the thinking and for the doing of these things. YOU are the one that is the shame. YOU are the one that is the criminal. YOU are the one that is practicing unlawful domination of one human being over another. It is YOU. It is not them.
You are the one with all of the power and they are subject to your whimsy and your desires. They have no power. They have no control. You hold it all in your monstrous paw. You pull the strings. You decide fate. You make decisions over things that are not your right or your choice to decide, and yet out of respect and fear these women continue cowed by it all.
A woman is, by nature, a sweeter creature who will generally be interested in caring and creating and loving and serving. There is no dispute here. But so often through the millennia man takes undue advantage of this. He takes what would be sweet and mild and he twists, and he twists and he twists. And even this is not the most wicked thing of all. He teaches, through his own example, that to survive one must emulate his behavior and so he passes on his vampiric legacy of abuse and violence to his wife and to his children, both girl and boy.
How can you hear their near-silent sobs? How can you listen to their quiet weeping when they have hidden themselves away from you? How can you look into their pleading eyes that are begging you for a reprieve from your hate and your vitriol? How can you see their bruises and their scars and not weep? How can you watch their blood run from the wounds that you have caused by putting hands, that should have loved them, on their bodies in hate? How can you live with the pain and the anguish shown on the flesh, through spilled blood and in the hollow eyes of those who would have loved you most and best and forever???
If I could I would take them from you.
If I could I would love them.
If I could I would give you their pain as a direct mainline shot into your very soul.
If I could I would condemn you to the worst of hells that any fiction could come up with.
If I could I would take their pain for my own.
I would do this because I already know of my value and I already know of their value. I would suffer knowing who I am and that there is something more. I would suffer, but in my suffering I would relish in the joyful knowledge that they were now free to be the glorious girls and women that they were always meant to be. I would suffer knowing that they now had a chance to laugh and love and be loved.
I would suffer but I would fight against you in every way, taking every opportunity to create problems for you, I would recoil against you, oppose you, balk against you and take every opportunity to oppose you and to combat against you, to bring you trouble until you killed me with your own hands…which no doubt in your misogynistic mind and your megalomaniacal ways wouldn’t take long for you to deliver to me. But every minute of my life that was entwined with yours would be one that you regretted.
If I could I would set you on fire and kick you to hell.
If I could I would demand that justice be given.
But I cannot. I cannot do any of these things and hell is for the victim not the perpetrator, no matter what anyone says.
And so I see you with my eyes, and I hear you with my ears, and I speak against you with my mouth to any ear that will listen. I tell the stories of dead women who were abused at your hands and by your will so that all women who would hear, and all men who would believe, can stand against you to resist the perpetration of additional crimes against humanity.
~Abigail Adams~
2 comments:
There are no words. You put it perfectly.
That video made me cry
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