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.
