Celebrate Title IX!

Happy National Girls and Women in Sports Day!

An Ugly Story

This afternoon I was tuned into NPR's All Things Considered, a program I listen to perhaps once a month. Today they featured a story about a burgeoning sexual abuse scandal in New York's Hasidic community. The presenter, with a suitably grave voice, told us of a little boy who was violated in a mikvah, and a second boy abused by a rabbi at his Talmudical school. It was an horrific story, filled with the sorts of denials and cover-ups that we all got used to when this was happening in the Roman Catholic church. It is good that we still have members of the media who are willing to dig in and unearth these sorts of stories; brought into the bright light of scrutiny, perhaps healing can begin.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

I don't mean to trivialize the very real suffering of these little boys and their altar boy predecessors, or ignore the heinous crimes committed in the name of God by their abusers, but...isn't what makes this a national news story the simple fact of the victim's gender?

More than one in six American women have been the victims of attempted or completed rape. Of those, one in five were assaulted before they reached the age of twelve. That's roughly four percent of the female population of the US, something like six million girls. For every two dozen women you know, the odds are that four of them have been the victims of violent sexual assault, and for one of them it happened in her pre-teen years.

How many little girls have to be raped before it becomes a national scandal worthy of attention of All Things Considered?

Up on Big Mesa

Up on Big Mesa, you can see for miles and miles in all directions. You can see beautiful things, like cliffs blazing red in the evening sun. Ephemeral things, like the breeze stirring up a dust devil. Improbable things, like the great, delicate sandstone arches. Things that are too wonderful and too fragile to last. Like your love.

Up on Big Mesa, as the sunset fails, you can see the taillights of the cars headed north on 191. They are already miles away, and getting farther away every second. They are hastening to another place, vanishing into a dark emptiness. Like your love.

Up on Big Mesa, the nighttime skies are ablaze from horizon to horizon with starlight. The beautiful light comes from an incomprehensible distance, from stars that emitted it in the distant past. Some of the brilliance comes from stars that don't even exist anymore. Like your love.

Up on Big Mesa, things exist on a vast scale. The horizons are distant, the heavens are boundless, and no matter how loud you cry out, nobody will hear you. Up on Big Mesa, you are alone, insignificant, and unnecessary. Like my heart.