On Perspective 2 (or Fighting Real Problems Instead of Making Up New Ones)

This post might very well lose me friends.  But I just calls 'em like I sees 'em, and this isn't something I take lightly.

I have never backed down from the idea that I am a feminist -- I'm kind of one of those people of the belief that if you or someone you care about identifies as a woman, than you have no right or sense to not support things that would help make the lives of women everywhere better.

But maybe I haven't been clear on my views towards those people who calls themselves activists who are, in reality, looking for something to complain about.  I came across this tumblog that literally blasted everything from meat eaters to a child abuse awareness campaign.  The campaign in question won the Gold Lion award at Cannes and depicts the cycle of child abuse, showing each child being abused and eventually growing into their abuser.  Actually, you can see them here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/copyranter/powerful-child-abuse-ads.  And why was she targeting this campaign?  Because the verbal abuse image depicts a woman yelling at her children.

She said the campaign disgusted her -- not the acts portrayed as a part of it -- but the fact that it only depicted a woman yelling, which she thought fueled the "nagging" stereotypes about women.  Statistically, it might have made sense to make the abusers in all three images men (each image represented a form of domestic abuse -- sexual, physical, and verbal) because an overwhelming percentage of abuse is male-dominated, but doing so would have been unfair to both men and women because, due to the structure of the campaign, it would eliminate the possibility of women as perpetrators or victims, and they do, in fact, fill both roles, more often than we'd like to believe.  And, unfortunately, women are far more likely to perpetrate verbal abuse than any other kind of domestic abuse -- and would it really have been better for the global image of women to have the only woman in the campaign be a sexual predator or a violent monster?  Or simply to put a woman as a passive victim?

This is just one case, among many, I'm afraid, where people get so caught up in the politics of activism that they forget what's actually important.  This campaign should disgust you, but not for it's content.  What it depicts, and the fact that child abuse is still a prevalent issue in America, one that's still not talked about because it's taboo, which creates a self-perpetuating cycle of violence as children who feel mistreated grow up to mistreat others.  Your need to be confrontational, to take an issue with everyone just so you have something to say -- has made you blind to the real issue, which makes you unable to do anything to stop it.

So until you start complaining about the real issues and stop letting the small details distract you from the problem at hand, I am still going to take issue with the way you handle things like this.  Your loss of perspective is terrifying.

(infinitesimally) yours,
Rachel Leigh

On SCOTUS, Obamacare, and Perspective

Let's get a perspective check, shall we?

While we've been squabbling over whether a government should provide health care to its citizens (heads up, America: the rest of the first world has already made a decision on this issue and, even today, we're still way behind the trend...so, awesome).

In the 12 hours since the SCOTUS decision about Obamacare

• Roughly 15,000 people died from malnutrition and starvation.  What did you throw away today?
• 820,000,000 people struggled to find safe, clean drinking water (Meanwhile, I have gone to the Brita in my fridge today three times to fill up my water bottle, and can't even begin to comprehend what it would be like to not have access to drinkable water)
• Roughly 3600 people have contracted HIV (for which we have yet to develop an affordable, accessible cure), in spite of worldwide programs designed to increase awareness and stop the spread of the disease
• 360 people were raped or sexually assaulted in the United States alone

I'm not saying there aren't things worth fighting about.  There absolutely are.  I think affordable access to medical care, education, and housing is the right of all people.  But there are bigger issues, within our borders and outside our reach to keep in mind.  We forget that the world has ACTUAL problems, problems with some obvious and not-so-obvious solutions that we can't seem to fix.  And when we get so wrapped-up in what side of the aisle we fall on or whether the wealthiest taxpayers should be taxed 34 or 35 percent, we lose sight of these real, tangible, terrifying problems and we forget to fix them.

If all this can happen in 12 hours, what could we do with a week?  A month?  A decade?  What could the world look like if we didn't get so off track?

Sorry that got so serious.  I promise, the next post will involve a picture of a kitten.

Seriously yours,
Rachel Leigh

Sources:

• Worldometers.info (http://www.worldometers.info/)
• The United Nations AIDS Clock (http://www.unfpa.org/aids_clock/)
• The Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network [RAINN] (http://www.rainn.org/statistics/)
• Basic math skills on the calculator on my laptop