If Women Ruled the World?

A couple of summers ago, my husband and I attended a wedding that took place just outside Missoula, Montana, where one of our sons lives.  The groom is an incredibly nice man whose family is from India.  He and his family are Christian, not Hindu.  His uncle, who participated in the wedding ceremony, is a minister in the Pentecostal Church.

During the ceremony, it became obvious there is a philosophical and theological divide in the groom’s family.  His generation, born in the United States, has rejected the values and beliefs, though not the religion, of the older generation.  The women of the older generation are diffident, speaking only when spoken to, wearing only traditional Indian dress.  The women of the younger generation are liberated American females.  The “best man” at the wedding, in fact, was actually the groom’s sister.  There were covert smiles passed amongst the younger generation, males and females, at the words of their uncle, who preached subservience and obedience for the bride, dominence for the groom.  It was clear, while the younger generation respects its elders in that family and holds very closely to its Christian beliefs, it does not accept its old, rigid patriarchal mores.

It wasn’t clear to me until after the wedding just how rigid those patriarchal mores are.  Because my father was a pastor in South Africa, and because the Indian preacher had also been a pastor in South Africa, I thought it quite appropriate to talk to him about our connection, but, …

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War and Rumors of War

[Note: I wrote this piece in 2003, shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq].
 
The trouble with writing these opinion pieces is they require such intense emotional energy to write.  It’s a very exhausting business.  But then, so is life these days.  We all go about our lives quite admirably, but the low hum of threat, the “war and rumors of war” is wearing on us all.  

The intense emotion that I’m experiencing these days is sadness, produced by the news, produced by the innocence of so many of our students who are willing to fling themselves into the fray in the name of God, president and country.  It’s all too reminiscent of those equally innocent boys who threw themselves, during my parents’ lifetimes, into the defense of God, king and country.  One way or another, those boys were not innocent for long.

What amazes me is how surprised some of us are by all this, and I’m including myself in the “us.”  I shouldn’t be surprised.  After all, my parents survived two world wars in Great Britain and described the horrors of the second in vivid detail.  I think, though, it’s only been since September 11, 2001, I’ve truly understood what my parents experienced.  The stories they told me when I was a child enthralled me, kept me spellbound as they recounted them to me.  But I, too, was innocent.  The stories were family saga, not reality, shrouded in the mists of mythology for me.

My parents described the adventure …

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Working in the Real World

It’s been a long week, and it’s only Tuesday.

As my bio indicates, I work at a community college. I teach English and am a writing tutor in our campus learning center, which not only provides help with writing, but with math, science, and foreign languages. We are a multipurpose facility although the individual tutors only work within the areas of their specialization. It is a chaotic place in which to work, not only because of the multiplicity of disciplines represented, but because, while each discipline occupies a specific area of the large room that houses us, there are no walls separating us, and staff are forced to share offices rather than having private spaces to which they can retreat.

Or, at least that is the reason given by some of the staff for the pandemonium. What they say contains a grain of truth, but it is only part of the story, I believe. The real cause of the difficult working conditions, in my opinion, is the lack of respect for boundaries displayed by some of the tutors who behave as though no one else works in the center except themselves. They conduct loud conversations about personal matters wherever and whenever they want, gossip maliciously in front of students, crack jokes and laugh raucously, treat students who come to them for help with something close to contempt, and disrupt the concentration of everyone around them constantly. They seem obdurately oblivious to the needs of those with whom they work, including …

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Why Do They Hate Us?

Ever since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, there has been a fairly constant refrain heard in the United States.  Americans, who once thought their country invulnerable, their culture beyond reproach and their global image impeccable, are asking, “Why do they hate us?”  Human emotion being what it is, there is no single or simple answer to that question.  They hate us for a number of reasons, some illogical, but some very understandable.  And, while hatred is never productive, never defensible, its causes should never be ignored because its consequences can be catastrophic.

One of the things I hear Americans say they hate about us is our freedom.  I would have to agree.  There are those in the rest of the world who are as offended by our freedoms as are we by their despotism.  They hate the fact that we have freedom of religion, that we have freedom of speech, that our women are becoming increasingly free to determine their own destinies.  They believe that all these freedoms are an offense against all that is decent and holy. 

I believe they are wrong.  It is because of our freedom that I am able to write what I write, however controversial, however offensive to some.  It is because of our freedom that my family moved to the United States in 1960. We left South Africa when the white government there was stripping the people, both white and black, of their freedom to speak out against injustice, to live wherever and …

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Reflections on Hotel Rwanda

I haven’t seen Hotel Rwanda.  I actually rented the movie, and my husband and I started to watch it, but we had to stop.  We knew what was going to happen, and we didn’t want to see it:  we would have known what was going to happen even if we hadn’t had advance knowledge of the story.  He and I know all about Africa.  Personally, I am too broken-hearted about what is happening there to watch it played out on a 42-inch plasma TV screen.

It’s not just happening in Rwanda.  We only hear about Ruanda more often now because this particular story has given that region a voice. 

The stories are endless, one more chilling than the next.  In South Africa, gangs of black youths who suspect an individual of not being “one of them” inflict horrible death.  And they do not reserve the torture for adults.  Children are not immune.  One favorite form of execution involves soaking a tire in gasoline, placing the tire around the neck of the bound victim, and setting it alight.  I repeat, this is done to children as well as adults.  It is done to blacks by blacks, and the rationale behind the brutality is obscure.  Sometimes it is tribal – amaZulu against any black not Zulu – sometimes there is a loosely formulated political agenda.  Sometimes it is simply a case of bloodlust.

This is no urban myth.  We have witnessed something like it personally.  On our last trip to South Africa …

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