Love is a verb…
Love is a verb. I’m reminded by Kate’s works of art in our brown paper. Love breaks you open beyond those colonizing walls that keep us separate and divided.
How do you love a child molester? His own child at that? That is the penultimate on the sexual assault gradient: harassment, forced touch and kiss, molestation, unwanted touch and / or kiss, assault, rape, then with your own kin - children. That’s probably the final “stop.”
Yet not let us / me be the judge and jury. I’m hurt. Angry. Betrayed. Mad. Pissed off.
And.
Knowing Bro is a hurt person. Someone he once trusted as family violated him. Betrayed his trust. Not as rationale but context.
Holding him accountable, is that him rotting away in prison? Or banished to do his deep healing work for five ten twenty years with concrete behavioral change. Accountable to an elders / community council? Will his daughter agree that is justice delivered?
What are the alternatives if we believe Brother’s life is redeemable? Not a throwaway. Not defined by the worst thing he’s ever done, that he molested and raped his own daughter when she was a small child… how do we hold love in face of that?
No answers.
Blank. Empty.
And knowing how many women in the movement and in our racial justice organizations have put up with sexual harassment, assault, unwanted everything for goddess knows how long… our silence is suffocating us. I can’t breathe. Not no more.
Our fear overwhelms us. Overwhelms me. Like drowning in the ocean when riptides come for you and there’s no way out.
Our self-blame swallowed like paper towels stuffed down our throats. The unwanted touching, the insinuations, flirting that feels like flattery but is really pressure to have sex. All so dark, disturbing, disgusting.
Sexual battery of all kinds is insidious. Pervasive. Tolerated long enough. I held my #MeToo story for 25 years. 25 long sick years. And I’ve only spoke out on one predator - Oscar Rios - only. All the others - union presidents, nameless laborers on nameless street corners, well respected “movement elders” who shall remain protected are all sitting in plain sight. Without being held accountable to their implicit and explicit trespasses. In the end, the sour and bitter are still left on my tongue like yesterday’s curry.
What will we do about that? Will I call out those I respect to this day? Will I call them in to look at the harm they’ve caused and demand that they be held to account, for a do-over, for a chance at forgiveness? Do I dare to puncture the pretty veneer that all’s well in the fight for justice? Who will sound the alarm that our sisters and daughters, nieces and nephews are not well? Who dares to wear this target on their backs for speaking truth to misogyny’s overreach? Who dares to bear the brunt of the blowback?
How do we hold onto the light amidst all this darkness?
I need and want answers. I’m thirsty for change. Where silence is no longer acceptable. Where sexual harm is named, confronted. Where women are finally liberated from this male disease called patriarchy. When we cultivate young people to enter into this movement, we have a responsibility and duty to expose where harm has been done and for restorative love to gain normalcy. Where our pain is lifted.
I hunger for the day when we stop asking women why were you there? What were you doing with him in the first place? Why were you wearing that skimpy little tell-all top? Were you flirting with him? How many drinks did you have? What do we need to do to finally banish those like last week’s moldy muffins?