we’re doing the best we can
Thoughts have been swirling around in my brain all weekend. We don’t live in the best neighborhood, though it’s ‘up and coming’ and ‘transitional’ and its name has been cobbled together from a classier zip code… with a qualification tacked on at the end. A 33 year old woman was raped not far from here. In broad daylight. While another man held her three year old daughter.
I wish I could help that woman. I wish I could make it all go away, or tell her that everything’s going to be alright. But I can’t. The thing about violent crimes? They divide your life so thoroughly into ‘before’ and ‘after’ that whatever might have happened to you before the incident might as well have happened to another person. The terror sneaks up on you when you least expect it, even decades after the incident, even if you have been proclaimed cured. I wish I could find the bastards who did this to this woman and her tiny daughter and teach them what true terror feels like. I wish they could know what it felt like to never again walk safe on the streets, to know with a stark cold wailing in your soul that you aren’t special, death can come at any time, and there is no magical shroud that makes you one of those folks nothing bad ever happens to… I wish I could take away those men’s charmed lives… force them to take a long, cool look into the gaping maw of true fear and know what it feels like to really, truly lose your freedom.
But I can’t. I can’t reach the people in this world who truly don’t have a conscience. Who really don’t give a ****. I can’t teach them to value another human being’s life, or consider someone else’s needs and happiness before they gratify themselves. What I can do, and what I will always try to do, is protect those who need protecting. and stand up for their needs, their happiness, their rights. Treating women as if they don’t matter, aren’t valuable… belittling, diminishing or outright destroying what makes a person good, and full of light… well, that makes you some kind of monster, doesn’t it, mister?
Tags: abuse, mental-abuse, rape, single-mama, single-mommy, single-mother, violent-crimeRelated Stories
POSTED IN: PSA
2 opinions for we’re doing the best we can
Daisan
Apr 9, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I keep thinking about this post when I’m away from the computer. My heart just goes out to this woman, and her daughter.
I can’t do more than simply shake my head and marvel at the absence of humanity in these men.
Sobering and sadenning.
You carry pepper spray, right?
Christina
Apr 9, 2007 at 4:39 pm
I don’t carry any sort of self-defense paraphernalia. With my child, I run the risk of macing him, and if the wind’s not right, I could simply incapacitate the two of us. I walk smart, I keep my ears wide open and my eyes, too, and I don’t think twice about crossing the street or ducking into a store to let someone who’s giving me the heebie jeebies pass us by.
there are lots of folks we know between our house and his school, so I think we’d have a good place to run, at least one house in every block. the king of everything knows where to go and what to do.
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