Are We in the Dark Ages?? What is Happening to the Safety of Women and Children Today...

Warning: Uncharacteristic Rant from a Concerned Artist

Dear readers,

As many of you will have done this morning, I watched the news report on the latest mass shooting in Dallas.

A tragedy indeed.  What stands out to me more than anything, however, is the fact that all the victims involved are women and children.  Just as they were a few days earlier in California, and so many countless times in recent months.  I don't want to think about how often my hometown Miami has made the national news in this regard in the past week alone...

Now, it would be easy to blame the guns involved.  As a fervent supporter of gun control, my first reaction is the same.  But this time, it feels as though this sad incident is part of a larger story.  I remember every other time my stomach has lurched in recent weeks, reading about virginity tests in Georgia, women being held captive in basements, teens unnecessarily tasered to death, girls kidnapped or bullied into suicide, torrential rape threats on Twitter for putting Jane Austen on a bank note...and that's just the stuff that made the news in July!

Well, I step back to look at this wider picture and I start to wonder: are guns are really the only key to this spate of violence?  And why aren't more people outraged?  How is it we are still debating reproductive rights in a presidential election in 2012?

I realize my opinion is neither novel, nor, in its presented brevity, very academic. I could go into further debate, but rather than dwell on the unacceptable state of affairs where the rights of women and children are concerned, be it in India, Afghanistan, Zanzibar, South Africa, Georgia, England, Canada, the United States, etc...I want to focus on the good being done, on the small steps of insistent people who believe change is possible in our cyber-isolated/mobile phone-tranquilized world...

Let's make these ladies proud...

Example #1: Kristen Gillibrand's Military Reform Bill on Sexual Assault

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/08/8532679/gillibrand-predicts-majority-and-maybe-60-her-military-reform-bill

Here's hoping Congress follows through.  I will make it a point on this blog, as I did at its inception, to highlight cases as  I come across them...