I just read Ann Jone’s article on the War on Women Africa. Its hard to not be emotionally knocked flat after reading about such suffering and the ability of other humans to inflict such pain and horror on others. Such a curdling mix of emotions are whirling around inside of me after reading about the horrors inflicted upon women in war torn African countries. A deep sadness, a burning anger, a sense of shame and guilt, of luck and privilege, a sense of injustice, of outrage, of empathy, of helplessness, a desire to act, a confusion as to the motives for such a desire- is it a colonial impulse imbued from the society I have grown up in?, an admiration of these women’s strength to continue on, all these feeling and thoughts are slamming into one another like the ocean waves in a storm.
Such accounts also stir a desire to share the article as widely as possible, to ensure that people know that such horrors are occurring in the world and that people must act in some way.
Such accounts also creates a context where one’s problems fade away to insignificance. Complaining about a broken printer just seems wrong/selfish/misguided when confronted with real problems that people live on a daily basis. Such depths of human actions has the tendency to suck hope from you, to question the point of writing these words when they cant respond to such suffering, cant help to ease such suffering. But paradoxically such loss of hope reaffirms the need to hold on to hope as the only way to create change in the end, that if I dont wake up tomorrow and keep working at it then nothing would change and noone would have tried.
If the women who have suffered such horrible actions, whose bodies have been broken and battered can have the strength just to recount their ordeals, and the strength to try and live their lives then surely I can do my best with my privileged position. But even so, somedays I feel like a white, male, overweight, privileged walking contradiction. fuck I hate this world sometimes.
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