Observe your surroundings (school,
home, neighborhood, media). Write a list about
all the scenes or situations you come across on a daily basis that you think
are unfair and/or not right in some way. Pick one of the ideas from your list
and write a longer entry about it - 2-3 paragraphs. Describe the problem,
what's wrong with it, cause and effect, and possible solutions.
1. The man on the corner of a street
begging for money.
2. A man yelling at what seemed to be
his girlfriend then hitting her and no one doing anything about it.
3. A mother yelling and screaming at
her son who looked to be about 3 for spilling his juice box.
I picked situation #2. This is
something i feel i see way too often. But yesterday it was especially wrong. I
was sitting on the train and a man and a woman were standing near the doors
arguing about something. I remember hearing her say she was done with him. And
it sounded like he hit her. Now as horrible as that is no one did anything
about it. And I didn't do anything about it either. I didn't know what i was
supposed to do I'm only 13. Everyone on the train sat and pretended not to
notice.
This to me is crazy. In a train car
maybe full of 50-60 people not a single person on the car had the courage to
come out and stop this from happening. To me that’s insane. I guess people were
scared of what might happen if they did. Who can blame them? I didn’t speak up
either which I felt bad about after. But I was scared too.
Abuse is a terrible thing but a lot of
the time the problem is that people are too scared of what might happen to them
to say anything. On trains they always say “If you see something, say
something.” Now, there they are referring to suspicious items and actions but it
could also apply to this too if you think about it, it’s another thing that we
see a lot that isn’t talked about or reported and people elt it slide way too
often.
Ruby,
ReplyDeleteYou bring up an issue that is rampant not just in our society, but in cultures all over the world. Violence against women both breaks my heart and it angers me. Your post resonated with me deeply because I know of women in my family who feel paralyzed by the men they are with and put up with the abuse they face. Like you, I felt over the years that I was too young to do anything. I have tried to approach the women in my family who feel like they have no say and have to put up with what they are going through. They feel helpless and scared.
The subway is a place where many things happen without anyone pausing to do anything about it. Similar to the book, "Terrible Things," maybe people are too scared to do anything, or they feel like it is none of their business, or the worst, they are to apathetic to even care. By silencing ourselves from speaking out when we see an act of injustice, are we complying with the injustice? It is almost as if our inactions indirectly support these horrific acts because we allow it to go on.
Your post also reminded me of a song that came out in 2007, "Face Down"-The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. The lyrics are: "Do you feel like a man, when you push her around? Do you feel better now, as she falls to the ground?" It is a song about domestic violence and directed towards the abusers. It sends the message for woman to have the bravery needed to say "It's not okay, I should not be pushed around" and have the courage to leave abusive relationships, much like Rihanna did two years later in 2009 when she left Chris Brown.
Good work.
-Ms. Hoque