Parents of boys, we need you to raise them to be the men we need them to be in the world.
How is that fifty women could come forward to say that one man drugged and raped them, all be lying?
How is that that man could get off, and then proclaim to the world that he is going to profit from the charges by going around the country holding “town halls” telling people how to avoid being charged with sexual assault?
How is that a seventeen year old girl could be out minding her own business leaving a mosque, be beaten, possibly sexually assaulted and dumped in a pond?
How is it that this is the year 2017, and we’re talking about North America?
What in the actual fuck is going on with the world around us? How is that we’re supposedly more evolved, and yet so far from doing right to one another in what feels like decades?
Is it because there is a spotlight shining on the microscope we all live under? Were people always this evil, sick, cruel and we just didn’t know about it because we lived sheltered lives? Or, are human beings going backward in how we live, conduct ourselves and how we treat one another?
Is it the loss of God (whatever God means to you) in our schools, our homes, our souls that has changed us into these people who take what they want simply because they want it? Or were we always this way?
I mean when you go back in time, and read about the way man “used to be” the world was a pretty savage place. Public hangings, beheadings, torture, you name it. I understand that the world was not anywhere near as orderly, just, or safe as it currently is. Often as I wander around through life I’m amazed that it is as orderly as it is. That there isn’t more chaos. For the most part the bulk of humanity are all abiding by the same universal laws in following order. Not giving into their darkest desires, whims, what have you. It is amazing thinking about the billions of people on this planet, all raised in different homes, under various faiths getting along as well as we do.
But then there are days, times, like the past couple of days. Reading the headlines and being overwhelmed by the feeling of WTAF is going on out there. How can a man like Bill Cosby, in good conscience go around and speak about how it is important for men to protect themselves from being charged with sexual assault? The comedian is planning to “get back to work” to educate others on how a “brush on the shoulder” could lead to sex assault allegations, his representatives say. With all due respect Bill. Sit down and shut the fuck up. I mean really. It was a mistrial. It wasn’t an innocent verdict. If I was leading his team I would tell him to go and crawl under the first rock he finds and stay there for a good long time, like how about the rest of his damn life. Don’t gloat. Or worse make all your victims regret speaking up in the first place. This. This right here is precisely why victims don’t come forward at all, and especially against a powerful wealthy, famous man such as this. Shame on everybody who said not guilty in that room. Shame. Shame. Shame. May you never have a daughter, sister, wife, or mother who is the victim of a sexual assault. May you never know what it’s like to wrestle with whether or not to tell anybody for fear of knowing that you’re likely to never be believed.
Then there was the brutal beating and murder of Nabra Hassanen, on Father’s Day, with only days left in the thirty days of Ramadan. A twenty-two year old kid became so enraged by something that a group of young people who were walking did, while he was driving, that his only reaction was to beat her, and leave her alone dead in a pond. Really? Like what could she have possibly done to “road rage” him so? It stinks of the “she said yes” line Brock Turner fed his family, the judge, and his legal team. There’s nothing a young girl of seventeen could have done that would ever warrant the reaction that Darwin Martinez Torres had. Not a damn thing in this world.
It’s not for men to decide to take from women whatever they damn well please. Not sex. And certainly not their lives.
People, who give birth to boys. You have to do better. You MUST DO BETTER than this. Don’t leave the outcome of the sort of men your sons will become to other people. Not to television. Not to pro-athletes. Not the guys on video games. You must make them the men you want them to be in this world. The men we need them to be. The men the women of this world need and deserve them to be.
Please.
