Malala Yousufzai
Meeting JoAnn you get the idea she entered
life fully formed. Smart, beautiful, and brutally honest, people listen to her,
and they should. Her words carry the weight of someone who has walked through
the fire . . . and come out the other
side not wounded and fearful, but stronger and filled with wise compassion. You
don’t mess with her. Not because you’ll get in trouble if you do, but because
she simply won’t allow it. She can’t tolerate anything or anyone who is not
genuine. She has that kind of rare courage.
JoAnn doesn’t judge and refuses to be
judged. So, she was perfectly comfortable telling me how terrible men can
sometimes be to women . . . and why so many women allow it to happen.
She punctuated her point with five
words that left me speechless and staring at my calamari like an idiot. “It’s a
holocaust of women!”
She struck me with a rare, perfect
truth. It’s a holocaust of women.
With those five words I finally saw every
moment of history scorched by the fire into which we have thrown women. And it
only burns hotter as women struggle out of the molten furnace, an inferno
fueled by their purely feminine dreams, ideas, spirits, and hearts.
Men, all men, are guilty of this
eternal arson. We started the fire. We fan its insatiable flames. And by doing nothing
to extinguish it, we have emasculated our own gender. Men and women have been
diminished by our man crimes. All of
humanity suffers, yet again, at the hands of arrogant men, men who refuse to
see beyond the limitations inherited by our fathers.
Am I being too hard on men? I haven’t
even gotten started. And please keep in mind, I don’t give a damn.
How many extraordinary, life-altering works
of art, pieces of music, books, inventions, discoveries, philosophies, laws, medicines,
sermons . . . and daughters, have been lost to the collective of our human
experience simply because they were born of a woman?
All that could have been is lost
forever in the smoke of the holocaust of women.
The story of Malala
Yousufzai alone is
enough to convict men. Malala is a 15-year-old girl who had the audacity to
speak openly for the education of females in Pakistan. She was shot in the head
for her opinions. It was men who shot her. And as a man, you and I have no
right to judge those who pulled the trigger. What I am telling you is that the
terrible evil that brought those men to shoot a little girl is in each of us.
Her
courage blatantly exposes the cross cultural cowardice carried out by men
throughout time, by all of us.
This is
not an exceptional case because she is a young woman of courage. There are
countless women and girls like her hidden throughout the centuries. No. Hers is
a story worth telling because the bullets missed that beautiful young mind.
It is a
truth we must face because this time men failed to do to Malala Yousufzai what
they have succeeded in doing to women and girls every day since humans became
sentient beings.
Perhaps we
have finally entered a point in our evolution as a species where bullets cannot
kill an idea . . . or the women who boldly express them. The world knows about
Malala now. That would not have been true only a few years ago. Now we not only
recognize her act of valor, but its place in a long journey of previously
shrouded women who were shot, burned, tortured, raped, mutilated, imprisoned or
simply ignored for their courage.
So don’t kid yourself into thinking that American
men have evolved beyond the millennia of cerebral hard wiring nor strict cultural training
that continues the holocaust of women.
We are
brilliant at MANanipulating women into thinking they must be controlled,
limited, even suppressed by the men, or the man, in their lives. They believe
they are not complete without one from whom they take their commands.
Certainly,
these are not men at all. Not one among this type can truly be described as a
man. They are puppet masters, seeking to tie their strings to whatever woman
will willingly be ensnared by them. We have convinced women that they need us
for all the wrong reasons. From troubled victims of the sex industry who refuse
to disconnect from their pimps to professional women who cannot let go of that
one man who continues to bring her sorrow and loss, why are women so eager to
be enslaved by these charming and destructive males?
Fathers
forever set the value of self-worth in the minds of their daughters. As fathers
we have become unknowingly brilliant at convincing our daughters that they are
only as good as we say they are. It is no wonder that women blindly seek men
who treat them as well – or more often – as poorly as did their own fathers.
They will do anything to fill the void their fathers created: an emptiness of
spirit, an abandoned and fearful heart.
As
fathers, we have refused to provide the emotional intimacy our daughters need,
and crave, to nurture the greatness waiting within them. We don’t openly kill
it, of course. But we do ignore it. The result is the same. It lies dormant
until she climbs up beyond our ignorance and discovers the depth of her being .
. . or it waits for another man to enter her life and suppress her once again.
This, after all, is what we’ve taught her to do: let the man take you, posses
you, control you, no matter what you must sacrifice.
The worst
damage we do to women is force our own fear and pain upon them. As a result,
they become terrified of experiencing the thing they are best at, the most
valuable and important dynamic of the human experience: brilliant emotional intimacy.
Each time
this happens the cost is yet another life unlived.
Ultimately,
men lead her to the fire. There, the flames gladly consume whatever she would
have become, whatever love she would have shared, whatever help she would have
given, whatever frontier she would have discovered, whatever healing, help,
genius, compassion, humor, and courage - her divine gifts – that were so ready
to flourish and inspire.
No doubt our world would be a far better one if the women
who have been lost to their holocaust – a holocaust started and maintained by
men - had been able to stand up and become fully formed. No doubt it would have
taken far better men to extinguish those murderous flames, men courageous
enough to stand back and let women be women.
According
to court documents, several witnesses told Connecticut State Police investigators
that their fellow State Police Trooper, Pearl Kelly-Paris, actively ran a human
trafficking operation with her husband, Jaykuan Paris. Jaykuan is the brother
of Dennis Paris, a Connecticut man who is currently serving a 30-year federal
prison sentence for “sex trafficking of a minor” among several other human
trafficking crimes. That case is the subject of my recent book, “The Berlin Turnpike: A True Story of Human
Trafficking in America.”