Give Women a Higher Status Than Dogs

I cannot get an article I read the other night out of my head:

"Beat a Woman? Play on; Beat a Dog? You're Gone" , by Sandra Kobrin, from Women e-News.

It made my blood BOIL!

Please read it: it's well-written and ought to be on the front pages of every paper on earth.

Animal abuse is certainly inexcusable. What's the point? :-(( It's just wrong, let alone inhumane. But why do people seem to get more huffed up about a football star involved in high stakes dog fighting (and death) than some star athlete who gets arrested for spousal abuse or beating up a girlfriend?

Does this mean women are STILL second class citizens in the 21st century? In America, the most free country in the world?

That appears to be so, judging from indifference of popular media and popular national sports organizations.

I never have paid much attention to sports/sports news, except during the Olympics, which I enjoy watching. :-) But I cannot relate to what seems to be contrived aggression, or just all out uncontrolled tempers on the playing field. I am mainly targeting men here, since they are usually the ones who get in trouble during any sort of sport...that's not to say that women are incapable of being nasty to one another--but you rarely, if ever, hear about female athletes beating up the ones they supposedly love.

I don't know the intricate details of hormones, but I thought sports was a way for guys to release some of that testosterone! (What do I know? I'm a woman!) Yet the ones who are making an unimaginable amount of money can keep playing their game while beating their honey up at home. And even get arrested for it. They don't have to worry about a thing. Are they thinking: so what if I slap my woman around when I come home? I got a big game to play,tomorrow!

This tells me that the head honchos of these huge sports leagues have their values skewed, to put it mildly. Sure the bottom line is important, but is it SO important you have to keep a certain player regardless of the fact he battered his wife or girlfriend--often repeatedly, AND got arrested for it??


WHERE ARE THE REAL MEN, HERE? :-(

I hope more people will make a BIG STINK about this, so that the powers that be in these sports leagues will never, ever tolerate spousal and girlfriend abuse again.

One might say: well, domestic abuse is their damn business; whatever goes on behind closed doors is their private affair.

That is true...to a point. Once the injured woman has to seek medical help, it's everyone's business. Concerned family and friends will seek to help her, which can cause more stress all around. Fees will have to be paid for jail bail. Taxpayers will have to pay for yet another man who didn't know how to keep his balls and brains where they belong. If children are involved, then their emotional turmoil will likely go unnoticed while they try to be brave and cope with daily living.

Spousal abuse affects the community, near and far, directly and indirectly.

It'll be a fine day when society will view this sort of abuse with zero tolerance and impose severe penalties. When people on the street will recoil in horror when they hear about someone committing spousal/domestic abuse...just as if they heard about a bloody murder today.

And why not?

Abuse is like murdering someone's soul: that person trusted you and you have no thought except to satisfy your own selfish needs by physically and/or verbally lashing out at that someone who was supposed to be special to you. And you spill your poison over and over again, refusing to clean up. That's as good as a slow, painful death, to my mind.

Hey! What about the millions raked in by these fantastic athletes who abuse the women in their lives? Too bad our society doesn't value the brains of those brilliant scientists in the research halls of academia who endeavor to make our world a better place to live. I'm sure they would be happy to have some of those millions to fund their research to improve our lives.

The leaders of the sports leagues could actually make our world a better place to live by taking a step forward in a very loud way: they can announce a zero tolerance policy for ANY player arrested for spousal abuse or beating up their girlfriend. ANY player!!

OR, maybe the hundreds of thousands of sports fans will beat the CEOs to the punch and demand a zero tolerance policy towards spouse and girlfriend abuse? Imagine if all the fans began to boycott their favorite team games as a matter of principle: we don't support you because you condone the beating of wives and girlfriends!

Think the head honchos or the fans can take a stand against domestic abuse?

Perhaps it'll depend on whether or not they truly value women, equal to men as human beings, worthy of respect.

A Mountain or a Molehill?

My dear sister in-law was recently diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. :-( I am not a religious person, but I do respect and admire her steadfast faith in God and the fact that she has a large support base of equally devout friends and family. And of course, she does have fan club members like hubby, myself, my sis and bil, and other family members on the in-law side who may not be as devout or not at all religious. ;-)

My sil, S, is also a good friend as well. Not only do I admire her steadfast faith, but also her sunny disposition and levelheadedness. I have never known her to be ill-tempered in the least. Her sister recently put up a webpage for her at caringbridge.org. Check it out!

I think cancer has to be one of the scariest things known to man. When a loved one gets it, it tends to remind me of the fact that my problems are small, compared to the one that received that diagonsis. I'm starting to lose count of the people I've known who've suffered the effects of cancer.


Someone's got it worse than you, I tell myself, whenever I feel overwhelmed.

That helps me to shrink my head a bit. ;-)

One of the reasons I made a decision long ago to have at least ONE volunteer activity throughout my life was to ensure in some small way that I was giving back to the community...and to remind myself that no matter HOW sucky things may seem at any given time, there is ALWAYS someone out there who's got it MUCH much worse than I do. Or perhaps, more than I ever did.


My first volunteer activity was as a mentor. I started with mentoring an elementary school girl from a broken family (most mentoring is with children from troubled families). I did that for 2.5 years. Then we moved and I decided to try the middle school age group and I got another girl for another two years. That was great. THEN, I got a girl for one year...and that was enough for awhile. She was totally unmotivated--and despite my efforts, I began to feel I was wasting my time.

I took a year off. Actually, I'm still not mentoring, due to my schedule. But I am tutoring English to an ESL student, off and on. As long as I have at least one thing going on, I'm feeling useful. :-) I hope it's true that you reap what you sow.

All I have to do is listen to the news or open the pages of any National Geographic magazine issue to realize there is someone out there who is living in danger, squalor, without personal freedoms, or unimaginable misery. Or all of the above. It helps me put things in perspective.

In recent years, whenever I'm in a bad situation, I try to ask myself whether I'm going to make a mountain or a molehill out of it. To stress or not? Get heated and age myself...or chill and breathe? I'd like to think I'm improving on the "not stress" and "chill and breathe" aspects of healthy living. ;-)

How did I come by this thinking, you may ask?

When I was a roving reporter on my college weekly, I interviewed a student who was confined to her wheelchair and who needed someone to take notes for her. She was studying for her master's degree in liberal arts and had returned to college after raising a family.

I asked her a question which could have invited scorn on her part since the answer seemed so obvious, but I asked it anyway. I can't tell you what my question was because I'm too embarrassed to remember and I don't have my clips of written work on me at the moment! But basically, I inquired, did she feel challenged by her disability to complete her degree?

She gave me a very sharp reply with a matronly tone of disapproval: "Of course not! This is what I set out to do!" She set out to enrich her mind as did each student on campus. Her disability was not on her radar, it was only a fact of life, not her focus.

This was Mills College, for goodness sakes! Women rule! WE can do ANYTHING we want! :-))

Wow! When I wrote her story in the paper, I realized I had nothing in the world worth complaining about. Not at all. She was my inspiration for the rest of my time in college--especially when I thought I was going to die of stress during finals week/graduation week. ;-) But to this day, I still remember her, even though I can't remember her name. She still inspires me.

As does my sil in her journey to recovery. :-)

I've actually never seen a molehill, by the way. Have you?