This past week, I taught a class of 10th grade students about Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy who was tortured and killed in 1954, just for being black and overstepping Mississippi's outrageous racial codes. Till's death, his murderers' shamelessness, the joke of the trial that occurred - all of it's tragic. It's clear that the Till case energized the Civil Rights Movement not just because it was shocking, though, but because it represented a way of life, a way that had to go. This was a time and place when white people could abuse the rights of others in just about any way, because it was understood that others were less human, less deserving, less worthy. The brothers-in-law that killed Emmett Till actually implied that in doing so, they preserved a way of life associated with the so-called purity and superiority of their race.
Teaching Till made me think of Southeast Asia today. As despicable as the murder of a child for saying, "Bye, baby," so too is the enslavement of children, sometimes in brothels in order to be serially raped. This ravages the child, enriches the captor, and supplies the rapist (or shall I be polite? The "john"?) with a kind of exotic perversion. Beyond this, though, I wonder if a whole way of thinking is represented. In this enslavement we have a mindset that says humans can be owned, that men's sexual appetites can be fulfilled in any manner, and that children are nothing; they can be trampled upon.
Biked 47 miles this week and benched 4320 pounds one day.
TOTAL
Ran - 40.5 miles
Biked - 130 miles
Benched - 35,060 pounds
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment