Not an easy read

This article from the Utne Reader is quite disturbing and not a read for the faint of heart. But it raises some important questions.

Are some people victims by nature?

Are some people made into victims by the way they're nurtured (or not nurtured)?

How can I raise my daughter (or son) to protest, to resist when confronted with evil; if necessary to fight tooth-and-nail, to fight even to the death if need be?

The woman who wrote this story had so little opinion of herself that her reaction to her rapist's prison sentence was "Twenty years? Just for this? Just for doing this to me? Twenty years is a really long time." It is almost impossible for me to imagine the life of someone whose first instinct when confronted by a mortal assault is to avoid being rude to her assailant. I don't want to be able to imagine it. I don't want my kids to be able to imagine it.

The author - a teacher - related a classroom exercise where she asked her students what they were taught by their parents that they didn't want to teach to their own kids. One student replied that she was taught always to be kind to everybody. The student had learnt, probably the hard way, that one shouldn't be kind to everybody. The teacher wondered why she hadn't learned that herself.

Jane. Byron. Listen up: You don't always have to be kind to everyone. In fact, there are some people in the world - just a very few - whom you should shoot dead if ever you encounter them under the wrong circumstances. I hope you never do encounter any of these people. If you do, please do not think you have to be kind to them. And please, please, always believe that yours is an invaluable spirit deserving of humane treatment. If someone treats you inhumanely, don't think for a second that it's something wrong with you. If you encounter this treatment, I want your first thoughts to be, "protest, resist, fight if necessary."

This story reminds me somehow of a Churchill quotation: "You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves."

Slavery, when externally imposed, is an institutional judgement that some person or group of people are less than human. It seems to me that the woman who wrote this article is living a slave's life, enslaved by her own opinion that she is less than human. It's too bad she didn't fight more effectively and whole-heartedly against that man; not because she might have prevented the rape (she might or might not have), but because she ought to have had a better opinion of her own worth.

Churchill was right. Better to perish than live that way.