These are good. I especially like this one:
7 :: If my parents / my grandma / God / whoever holds my sense of personal propriety in check was GONE (poof!) and there was no one to offend, upset, or disappoint… who would I become?
What unspeakably dark (or exquisitely light) truth would I tell? What would I (finally!) allow myself to write, publish, announce or create? What kind of closet would I come out of? What would I completely, at last, and fully… forgive?
Yes!
The 1,000th Wednesday Protest.
There was a lot of ridiculous behavior displayed by the media at the 1,000th protest that got me super angry, but I’ll write about that in another post.
For now, I just want to write about how inspiring, passionate, and courageous these women are (my favorite Halmoni, Pak Ok-seon Halmoni can be seen in the top photo wearing a blue scarf).
They are in their 80’s and 90’s and they have been demonstrating in front of the Japanese Embassy every fucking week for 20 years. In the rain, in the snow, in the heat, in the wind, without fail. They’ve faced social stigma, being called whores and prostitutes, they’ve been asked by their families to not go public but they go out there EVERY FUCKING WEEK.
FOR TWENTY YEARS.
And they do it because they want the world to know what happened to them, what’s still happening in wars all across the globe, what’s happening across national borders, what’s happening in school campuses, churches, and pretty much every corner of this goddamn planet.
And that is sexual violence against women.
And when you ask them why they’re out there every week, they’ll tell you that yes, they want their apology from the Japanese government - they want someone to look them in the face and say yes, it happened and I. am. sorry. But they’ll also tell you that they’re out there because they don’t want what happened to them to happen to a single other woman, ever again.
And that, is fucking powerful people.
