...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Friday, September 05, 2003
      ( 2:01 PM )
 
Necessary Voices

In the last couple of years, amdist the screeching and whining of the fear-mongers and those who would distract us from our rights and freedoms and the true threats in this world, along with forgetting the plights of those so much less fortunate than us - the voices of the truly oppressed and terrorized have been lost. Especially the voices of women. Women's WORLD, the Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development, held a writing contest for those women. Looking for those voices, they found hundreds of women from around the world ready and wanting to speak out.

We got essays from the expected students, freelancers
and academics. We got essays from a homeless woman
living in a Bronx shelter; an illegal immigrant from Mexico;
Burundian refugees in a Tanzanian camp; an Iranian feminist
under death threat; Americans who were becoming politically
active for the first time; a Karen tribal activist; women who
had lived through wars from Wold War II to the Congo,
Lebanon, Kosovo, Armenia, Colombia, Azerbaijan, Israel,
Palestine, India; survivors of acid attacks, stalkers, kidnappers
- the stories just kept coming, stories of state violence, ethnic
violence, domestic violence, of individual and group resistance.

--Meredith Tax, president of Women's WORLD.

I encourage you to read these essays. These are the voices of the truest of humanity. Not only survivors, but women who have overcome, found victory inside themselves despite the forces arrayed against them, women who are often forgotten by the powers of the world, but should not be. It would do us all good to know their stories and to hear their voices in our heads. Please read the essays.

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