Remind Me

Away from home for the week, Zoë was sent the “Course Rules” ahead of time. There was little room for doubt about what was expected of the children. This one cracked me up: “All members must attend all meals and EAT. Please, queue in an orderly fashion.”

Anybody there...?

From “My people have this secret superfast weapon that can destroy aliens” to “Stealth bombers were deployed to target ennemy combatants” it's a rather smooth transition. But whereas in scenario number one, an agitated mom is rapidly closing in on the sandbox to take possession of the secret superfast weapon (sand shovel) while telling the alien to retract his tongue, there is no such institution, it seems, in scenario number two. Instead we see crowds of flag swirling mom's with badges on their T-shirts saying Proud to be a US Soldier's Mom.

Words that Lie

Why, he wondered, was there such a word as "lie" if lying itself was not allowed. When he came to me looking for an answer, I had to think for a moment. My cynical self had an instant reply ready, of course. About how there are many words that refer to undesirable human behavior and that "lie" was just one of those. But that would have been like flicking the lid off a box filled with nasties. All he wanted, after all, was find some sense in the world. Why spoil a perfectly fine Sunday...?

Twenty-four Seven

Where did you store that one-liner? You do remember it, don’t you? A couple of days ago, when Yahoo’s main page popped up on your screen, it was right there, the second news headline from the top.

I instinctively turned it into a ratio: Forty-eight women every hour is approximately 1 every 72 seconds...

What I didn’t do was click on the link to read on. I realize that I should have and if only in order to fully acknowledge both the horror of this ongoing atrocity and the researchers’ effort to reach our awareness.

But I was afraid. Afraid of the rage that would surge in me while reading details of the study that puts a cold number to the brutal fact of humanity.

Forty-eight women and girls in Congo are raped every hour, 24/7.

There it was. Information readily available to be locked away in a dark corner of our human experience. A truth to be ignored.

A few years ago a study done by a couple of US professors concluded that rape is not unnatural among human males. The study came under a lot of criticism and after a while I lost track of whether the public and academic outcry was about the sober conclusion, or whether it showed our inability to accept another truth or two.

When...

...there is a moment to see we seldom look.