Tag: women

Today we live in a world where the overwhelming majority of war casualties are civilian, and the majority of those are women and children. Women are typically the most marginalized people in a war-torn country, and when these countries sanction violence against women, we tend to look away and dismiss it as cultural. We throw our hands in the air because we think there is nothing we can do. We need look no further than to the Taliban.

But women are also the people who hold their families and communities together in times of war. To a large degree, they are the ones who create stability and rebuild — and they are left to care for the survivors.

Empowering the women in war torn countries is powerful way to create stability and peace.  

Imagine a United Nations body responsible for the recall of faulty human systems. Surely they would recall the “male template.” Its 10,000 year warranty has expired. Further extensions or bailouts will only exacerbate a doomed strategy.

Its faulty wiring system has resulted in a deranged habituation to violence and war since the beginnings of “civilization” and history. As to the previous hunter-gatherer period, when women had a voice in decision-making, we are in the dark. I wonder who turned out the lights

First, let’s all take a page from the Maverick…sometimes you just have to laugh (in this case, to help from crying):

Linda Hirshman, not everybody’s favorite feminist made an interesting and provocative state during an on line interview about the Democratic party in general and by inference, progressive men. The on line conversation talked essentially about the future and challenges of “feminism.”

As my young friend Jill Filipovic put it in her interview, the progressive white men who run the Democratic Party do not have to pay attention to women, because they know we always will come back to them. And we lower our value even further by adopting their causes — civil rights, the environment, etc. — as our own, whole cloth, without any trade off.

Oddly enough, I both agree and disagree with her. She welcomes ire and controversy and has established a career out of it.

I disagree that issues like civil rights and the environment are “their” issues, clearly they belong to all of us. But I do wonder about the first part of her statement.

Is that accurate? Nobody in this campaign has mentioned for example that affordable day care for families who have two working parents is rarely discussed. For good reason. Mention the words “daycare” in this country and critics on the left and the right will jump in with a haughty opinion about “who should be raising children”. Mention the pay gap that exists and pundits will blah blah on about how women leave the work force to have children and that explains it quite nicely than you. HRC is being touted as “proof” that the ceiling has cracks in it and several self described feminists have actively supported Barack Obama.

In many ways there is not an actual feminist movement in this country in the same way that a progressive movement does not actually exist. The feminist movement has largely been castigated as a group of middle class white women who have not been attuned to issues of class or race or particularly respectful to women who actively chose more traditional roles. Feminism has been blamed for making women unhappy and alienating men in much the same way that people who discuss class have been accused of fueling “class hatred and resentment.”

Yesterday, March 8th, was International Women’s Day.

To often when reporting on War the women involved, from those living in the invaded conflict countries to those who are serving in greater numbers and rolls, combat included, are not mentioned enough.

Nor is it brought up enough of the effects of Conflicts on these women involved.

I have no understanding of what it is to live like this:::

The belt made a thump when Rasheed dropped it to the ground and came for her. Some jobs, that thump said, were meant to be done with bare hands.

Magnifico asked why Afghanistan as an issue has sunk away faster than an essay on the dKos diary list… he asks this, as I have been thinking about this country and its people, after reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini.

Hosseini is, for me, pretty straightforward in his writing. Nothing grand or blazing. Yet, it is shatteringly honest writing. It gathers as you read it. Slow. Until there is this little thing vibrating inside you.  Not anger. fear. hate. It’s that wide-awake connection with one’s own free will.

I wonder. If the fight isn’t just as elemental as safeguarding our free will and therein our innate desire for freedom.

The women of Afghanistan are all of us. The atrocities they suffer belong to all of us. They tell us, scream at us that these things have mutilated earthlings through the ages. None of us are exempt from such horrors.

I don’t know how to help Afghan women wholesale. I humbly take the lesson they give, despite the horrors they endure. Their freedom of will, of thought. The dignity of these women, as captured so well in A Thousand Splendid Suns, is loud, vibrant, inspirational.

The women of Afghanistan fight for all of us. In every act of defiance in deed or thought, they taunt brutes and bullies with dignity and will. One more sentinel is revealed… these beautiful souls, guardians of freedoms unseen.

So here you go, Magnifico. Captain America was sent to save this country, but something funny happened on the way to Kabul. These nameless victims, who are called mother, wife, sister, friend… these women … may very well show us the way to salvation…