I wanted to say thank you to women of bootrib for sharing your stories. This started as a comment in IndyLib’s diary which quickly grew into a diary and I’d also like to send a many years later thank you to the friend who was there for her when she needed it, and to all those friends and family who helped these people who I care about through their own bits of hell. And thank you, Booman for providing this forum.
I haven’t been commenting much in these diaries though I’ve been reading and crying and raging for so many friends hurt so deeply. You all have my love and respect and a nigh infinite number of electronic hugs. I’m so proud of you all for the courage it takes to tell these stories.
The one thing that I found myself wishing with each new diary was that I could be more surprised, more shocked, more jarred in my sense of what my fellow humans and particularly my fellow men could do.
But I remember too well the stories that are not mine to tell. The friend of a friend that I drove to the clinic to abort the fetus of one her teachers when I was seventeen. Or when I was fifteen and held the hand of friend while another friend made the call to tell my first friend’s mother that my friend and her sister were being raped by their stepfather. I remember being twenty and catching a guy molesting a drunk friend and stepping in to stop it, and I remember how much restraint it took not to break the molester’s bones.
It is a restraint I have had to exercise too many times and I can feel that rage and that urge to avenge a friend’s pain rising each time I read one of these diaries. It is a restraint that I am helped to exercise by the bitterly ironic understanding that the urge to violence in the service of justice and the protection of those I care about is a cousin to the violence that hurt those people in the first place. It is not the same violence, and it is certainly my opinion that there are times and places where violence in the service of protection and justice is the only answer.
This was perhaps a bit of a ramble, but I felt the need to thank all of the wonderful people that make up the bootrib community.
So, once again, Thank You.
To all the men that have held us and fought for us and helped pick up the pieces of shattered lives. We love you because you were there then and now.
When I can slow down my own tears I’m reworking a diary for all of the men…and other special people…that helped us go forward.
Thank you KMc – and Booman for giving us this forum – and all the love we’ve received from the men of the BooTribe.
Thank you so much… It means more than you know… It really does… Thank you. I have no other words right now…
Thanks for being one of the good guys, {{Kelly}}! You rock.
I try. I know I don’t always get it right, but I do try.
Until this last week I’d forgotten how very hard it can be to hold that rage on behalf of wounded friends in check. I picked the three stories I mentioned above in part because they are far enough in the past and vague enough that only a very very few people are likely to recognize them, because, as I said, they aren’t mine to tell. I wish that those were the only ones I could think of, but they aren’t even half of the total and my encounters with women in this sort of pain sure as hell didn’t end with my school years.
{{{Kelly}}}
Bless you. I’m not sure whether you fully comprehend the long-term impact of your actions, but I certainly hope you do. Your support and intervention are rare traits indeed.
Friends like you are treasures. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you for helping those in need.
Thanks for your comment, though it’s hard for me to take much credit. Every one of the things I did at the time needed to be done. Some of them were hard to do and I know it mattered a lot, but at the same time I can’t imagine doing anything less.
I have had a lot of those same feelings. I can’t say that I am shocked, I can say that I did not realize the extent to which the breakdown in society had been manifest for such a long time, and from what I can discern, across all economic strata.
For those of us who have at some point in our lives, become committed to, or even developed a strong preference for, non-violence, I don’t think that there are many harsher tests of that than a situation where a lady or a child is harmed.
It can take all the strength we have and then some to remove the victim from the situation and not give in to those urges which we all have, though it shames us to have them, and shames us to admit we have them.
But if we harm the abuser, all we are doing is becoming a part of the violence. It does not help the victim, so we have to “suck it up,” as the kids say, and concentrate on what we can do for that victim, and let our nurturing urges gently and caringly kick the violent ones out the door. The nurturing ones are much more manly, anyway.
I truly did not realize how all-encompassing the situation has become, that no female, I am told, and from these stories, and also from talking with descendants, no female can hope to reach adulthood without at least one instance of unwanted hands touching her body.
I have long been an advocate of self-defense classes for girls, beginning when they are tiny toddlers and continuing at least until they reach adulthood, with periodic refreshers from time to time after that, until they become elder ladies, at which time they should resume regular classes, to compensate for any decrease in “fleeing” capacity.
It would be an excellent project, I think, for all affluent families who can afford it, to arrange a stealth scholarship for a poor girl, and take her to the classes with your own daughter. Or your own beloved elder and a poor neighbor or friend, or future friend 🙂
It would be preferable, of course, if the culture could be changed instantly, and there were no need for this. But until that occurs, until all boys get the “talk” as soon as they are old enough to hit anybody that you can make faces at your sister, you can chase her, but you can never ever hit, kick, bite, scratch, pinch, pull her hair, push her onto anything or throw anything at her that is not soft, or do anything that would harm her in any way, not to her, not to any female, ever, no matter what they have done and if you see anybody hurting a girl or a lady, you RUN as fast as you can and get a grown up or call one on your cell phone, etc etc etc.
People manage to teach their children that it is absolutely and unconditionally unacceptable to go to the bathroom on the tablecloth.
We can do the same regarding violence against women, who are much more valuable than any tablecloth.
As I have to come to expect from you DF these are wise words. I took martial arts for many years and one of the most important lessons it taught me was how to control the impulse toward violence. Knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that you have the power to seriously injure another person is, or should be, a sobering and responsibility-building realization. The dojo I attended made absolutely certain that we understood that. We were taught that violence was a tool best left in the box.
I moved back to the big city a year ago, and live near a beautiful lake and park in a fairly “safe” neighbor hood, or so it once was when I lived here ten years ago. Now I am told it is not safe to walk there alone, unless you can run real fast, which I cannot anymore because I am 65 and live with mobility limitations that require me to use a rollator or an electruic scooter now. But nobody tells me where I can and cannot go, and so last summer I spent a lot of time there.
Then came the afternoon when a carload of teenaged buys screeched to a stop near where I was sitting. They leaned out their window shouting things like “Hey Baby! Wanna fuck?” then roared off with squealing tires. I can still see their faces.
I’ll be walking alone in the park again this summer, because I will not allow them to drive me inside, but it will never be the same. I also want to know where the fathers and and male role models were for these boys.
I understand your anger, and sadness, that a place that you think of as “yours” and indeed is yours, has been effectively stolen from you, and I greatly admire that muleheadedness that says “oh HELL no” and rollerscooters on back to that park when she damn well pleases thank you very much.
However, you are too valuable, your gifts that can change lives, including lives like those of those boys, that muleheadedness of yours is too valuable an asset, to risk on the question of where you will take your afternoon constitutional.
While I do not minimize the importance of that question to your personal sense of autonomy, when compared the the question of your contribution to the community as a whole, and not just where you happen to live, but the larger community, the Resistance if there is to be one, and a little bird from Chicago today sang a very soft and sweet note, almost a whisper, a promise of spring, and all that spring has meant for thousands of years, Piya Basanti Re!, when you stack that up against that afternoon constitutional question, please consider that you just might have a lot more people to show who they think they are messing with than would even fit into that park.
Thank you for this. I will give it more thought. I may also hire someone to design some Jame Bond type additions to my scooter and go anyway. (grin)
I’d also love to hear more about that little bird from Chicago, and what “Piya Basanti Re” means.
300,000 Marched in Chicago Yesterday. Anybody Know?
and loosely translated, Piya Basanti Re means Springtime Love, yeah!
Thank you for thinking about my suggestion. You are a planetary treasure, and therefore must give some consideration to best practices of docentship. 😀