Reflections

I write these lines in the early days of the New Year, when I want to look back at the path traveled and look forward, generally think about what is especially important. Following this spirit and traditions, I want to share some thoughts that came to my mind on different topics close to my heart.

The ability to resent. I grew up in a safe environment in my own house, at school, in my city on Long Island near New York. There I did not see either terrible poverty or violence, I did not encounter physical or psychological cruelty among our neighbors. At that age, I could not recognize psychological violence.

Just going into the real world and starting to work as a young journalist abroad, I ran into the dark and ugly aspects of life, and it is not surprising that they shocked me. My boss in the news agency, who has seen almost everything in his life, amused my naivety. Faced with someone’s outrageous acts or scandalous situations, he always said with a grin: “Do not tell me that it is still shocking, baby!” Once, having heard a lot of such statements from him, I dropped: “Henry, on the day when I will stop shocking outrageous things, will be the day of my death.”

Now, many years later, I am relieved to admit that I have not lost my ability to resent, especially in relation to the manifestations of cruelty to women in many parts of the world.

The last case that attracted my attention was a report on the “murders for the sake of honor” in the Jordan. As many of you know, crimes for the sake of “honor” are cruel actions, usually murders committed by men against their women, who, in their opinion, brought a shame on the family, especially when it is connected with sex. This happens in many Muslim countries. We, Americans, are used to thinking that the Jordan is a slightly more “modern” state than most countries of the Middle East, since its royal family and elite studied abroad, often wear European clothes, and women are less limited in movement. The late King Hussein even had an American wife. But this is only a superficial impression that tells us little about the real life, hidden from us.

I was in shock, having learned that in Jordan there are young women at least a dozen, or even more, who had conducted their young flowering years in a women's prison, not because they committed a crime against the law, but because if they left prison, they would have killed a member of their family to restore family honor, and this would not have entailed punishment, the law would take them with minimal severity. How can you not be indignant at this?! How can you not be indignant at the murder of young women who could not be under the protection of prison grates?!

For the first time, I learned about the murders for the sake of honor when I read about the agitators-Bolsheviks who convinced the women of Central Asia to dump the burials, and it turned out that when they did this, their relatives killed many. It was at the beginning of the twentieth century, and such cruelty still occurs at the beginning of the 21st century.

Moreover, in the case of murders of honor, a relative of the victim, despite the mountain, have no other choice, except for the recognition of the restoration of the honor of the family. The family is their only refuge in the absence of legal guarantees of freedom and equal rights of women, in the absence of institutional infrastructure for their implementation.

What can we, living in America and Russia, in other countries, do with this? What can we do with any manifestations of arbitrariness in relation to women or men? My friend Jerry Leiber, who was shocked in his youth, learning about the use of torture in prisons around the world, cruel types of torture, united with like -minded people to create a new organization “Human Rights Observation”> (Human Rights Watch), which monitors human rights violations and urges the governments to be liable. We cannot create new organizations, but we can keep in touch via the Internet with other groups that are trying to change the situation in our and other countries where violence is committed. We can solidarize and join human rights organizations in our cities and areas, offer our knowledge, time and, where possible, money. In the 1990s, some representatives of the Western public, outraged by the murders of honor, turned to King Khussein and his wife when they traveled abroad, which led to the first small steps towards the reforms that stopped when Western society took up other problems. Public outrage, if it is weighty and constantly supported, will certainly entail changes.

I imagine how I would become a bag of shaking bones if I had only a shock from what is happening around us. Thank God, in the international arena in the female environment, things that inspire hope. Let's look at Afghanistan where at the time when I write these lines, Loya Jirga or the Supreme Council, despite the disputes and many conflicts, finally came to the creation of a new constitution, which directly guarantees equal rights to women and even promises two places in parliament from each province of women, which will be 25% of the total number of places. After the fact that the WE/We magazine, No. 25 (41), 2003 Taliban did with women, this should be considered as progress.

Anyone understands that this will be nothing more than a long and difficult struggle for the implementation of such constitutional guarantees. As the United Nations Special Representative from Afghanistan said, women will achieve improvement of their position only through education. “Instead of arranging demonstrations against Burki,” he said to the defenders of the rights of women, “is it not better to provide tables and chairs to schools for girls ... Burka will disappear over time ... It does not matter how much you organize the demonstrations, this will not remove a single burka from the face of a woman.” I would adjust his statement, saying that it is necessary to give tables and chairs, but also to perform and organize demonstrations.

Let's look at Iran, where in 2003, Shirin Abadi, a lawyer and defender of women's rights received a Nobel Prize and where women of all ages actively express their dissatisfaction with a deeply conservative dictatorial regime of IslamisTob.

Let's look at female and human rights groups in many African countries that teach women and their daughters to resist the practice of female circumcision.

We are looking for a glimpse of hope in our own countries, and we find them. Recently in the evening in the Church of Riverside in New York, I heard a speech that revived my hopes that we, Americans, eventually come to normal humanistic ideas about abortion, which was a long time for one of the most controversial topics in our country. The speaker Daniel Maguire, a professor of ethics, studying the largest religions of the world, found that the right to abortion is clearly present in all these exercises. In his book “The Holy Choice”, he writes that even in Catholicism “The possibility of choosing will coexist with the situation about the absence of a choice ... and none of these provisions can claim more Catholic or more correct than the other. Catholics have the right to make an independent conscious decision. ”

Previously, women who passed the experience of abortion were silent about this, because these experiences were associated with stress, pain, despair. Now there is a website where they can share their experiences, and many women communicate in it. A film that is documented is being filmed now

Preliminary results of women's experiences of abortion. On April 25, 2004, thousands of women from all over the United States will gather in Washington on the "march for the life of women." This march is devoted not only to the problem of freedom of choice, but also by the problem of limited access to medical support of reproductive rights, especially among poor and young women and among minorities. I will go in this march with all my friends I can collect.