Earlier tonight, I watched a clip of Glenn Beck making fun of the women who’ve apparently accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of rape – and making fun he does, mocking what the women are reported to have said or done and even going so far as saying that one of the women tweeting the day after her alleged assault doesn’t “fit the profile” of a rape victim in his mind.
Yeah, it pissed me off. But I’d rather talk about Elizabeth Edwards.
Edwards died this morning after a long, public battle with cancer. She’s not somebody that many of us outside of the Triangle probably would’ve heard of if her husband hadn’t run for the Senate, or vice president or president, but she’s infinitely more admirable than him.
Elizabeth Edwards touched people because she was so different from what we expect from a politician’s wife. Remember this? The world would be a happily less full-of-shit place if more people behaved this way. And now I wonder how many of the things for which I admired John Edwards back when I gave him my first vote back in 1998 – like sponsoring programs for our state’s high school students in their late son’s honor – weren’t really down to Elizabeth.
Joan Walsh quotes the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Connie Shultz about Edwards:
If I were living Elizabeth Edwards' life, I'm not sure who I'd be by now, and that uncertainty is mighty humbling.
We want to believe the best about ourselves. We watch someone else stumble and insist we'd respond differently. But live long enough, and life will bring you to your knees. I have not buried a child. I do not have incurable cancer. I have not been betrayed by the man I love, never had to set eyes on the baby the entire world knows he fathered behind my back.
I know this: I would stumble forward in pieces."
Having been through at least one devastating thing in my life, I can relate. What I went through is the very thing Glenn Beck mocks above. I haven’t ever come out and said this on this blog, but I was raped just over three years ago. And it derailed me for a long time. As bad off as I was, seeing people like Elizabeth Edwards admit to fighting depression and anger, too, does make it easier… at least eventually.
And, for the record, I gave the guy a ride home afterwards, I e-mailed a friend (whom I hadn’t told yet what happened to me) pictures from what was supposed to be our vacation and I went to work Monday morning like nothing had happened. So Beck can take his expert “profile” and go fuck himself. Because most of the time rape victims react just that way. It certainly doesn’t make it easier to handle in the legal system, but it also doesn’t erase what happened to us.
I stumbled forward in pieces, and slowly those pieces came back together again with a lot of support from the people who love me. Elizabeth Edwards went through losing a child, losing a life partner and facing her own death, and there probably were days when she felt like saying “screw it” and drinking a vat of wine. I had my share of those days. Hell, I had more of my share of them.
What’s beautiful about her is that none of those shitty things ever turned her heart, at least not if we can go by her public life. She seemed to see them instead as ways to relate to people less fortunate than her. She sure as hell didn’t go on TV to tell victimized people that the bad tings happening to them were their own fault. She never watched someone else stumble and insisted she'd respond differently.
Bad things happen, and frequently to good people. We make choices – every day – whether we’re going to turn that badness back into the world and hurt others the way we’ve been hurt, or make the harder choice and find a way to love and help.
Between the two people I write about above, I’d rather be like Elizabeth.
3 comments:
I love you! You are one of the wisest women I know. There aren't words enough to express the admiration I feel for you right now. I have only once experienced the anger I feel right now, too. That was the day I new my
Dad was going to die because of the cancer that has invaded his remarkably advanced brain. You really activated the bitch in me! Love it :) I will gladly organize a hunting party (I read the other blog, too) to go get the insensitive asshole and notify him what kind of non-human he really is! Julie Lawson
Thank you! Big hugs. I forgave him a long time ago, and I think he genuinely knows what he did was wrong - which is really what matters to me since it means he's less likely to hurt someone else.
You amaze me. I am inspired, humbled, and in awe of you. You have done something that many of us would or could never do. Know you are loved deeply.
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