Guns, Sex(ism), and Hugs

What a week.  One shooting at Fort Hood, then a second shooting in Orlando…a bit closer to home (Portland, OR), the 3rd shooting of the week…because she filed for divorce??  And a fourth shooting and a fifth shooting in the Portland-metro area.  In all five cases the perpetrators are men.

UPDATE (11/18):   A sixth shooting…

In the last three four intimate partner cases, it is the same old story…

1. man believes he has a right to control women

the violence in all of us

Haven Daley of the Associated Press reports:

A woman was taunted for being a lesbian, repeatedly raped by four men and left naked outside an abandoned apartment building, authorities said.

Detectives say the 28-year-old victim was attacked Dec. 13 after she got out of her car in Richmond, in the San Francisco Bay area.

[...]

Poem: Backlash 101308

This is one of my more recent poems.  It is directly inspired from a conversation with someone who lives across the continent from me in Canada.  One of her reactions was, “Do people really say, “y’all”?”  Yup.   I live outside of any city limits and I grew up surrounded by farms: horses, cows, crops.  I collected eggs from the chickens as part of the morning chores before school.  I have a rural “y’all,” but there are also plenty of folks with an urban “y’all.”

The conversation was about success, failure, lessons learned and processing recent advice given to me by an academic advisor, activist and mentor:  “First, do no harm.”  Simple, but perhaps something that we all struggle with.  But ’nuff said.  To the poem…

Reading Lolita in Tehran…in Kuwait…

On one of our last days in Kuwait, we went out to a (or the) main market place.  It’s basically a web of pedestrian-only streets lined with open shops and booths selling almost any and every type of thing people might ordinarily want to buy (and a few things that people might NOT want to ordinarily buy…).  It was definitely a highlight of my time in Kuwait, and the reason has absolutely nothing to do with what’s for sale.