This I Believe

This I believe: There is a voice in every body.

I grew up in a small suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles in the 50′s. In those conservative years no one in my family discussed world politics. Mostly, I felt that the world lived around me and that I was not apart of it. Busy dealing with the life problems of adolescence, I was unaware of threats such as the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, Communism and the impending Cold War. But the events in Dallas, Texas and Memphis, Tennessee a few years later brought the world into sharp focus.

I watched as my generation embraced change by brazenly thwarting conventional behavior, raising their voices in loud protest, screaming at the top of their lungs for justice. I stood on the sidelines in silent protest. I felt passionate about the things that needed to be changed v ending a feckless war that had killed tens of thousands of young men and women; bringing equality to a segregated nation. But I did not lend my voice to help the process of change.

After the stifling conventions of the 50′s, the upheaval of change through the 60′s, the new culture that emerged in the 70′s, the graft, corruption and money mongering of the 80′s, we returned as a nation to a sort of equilibrium and economic stability in the 90′s. I had silently journeyed through a cycle.

I felt safe and secure until the new events of the millennium v the 911 attack and the war that followed. Like a coin unwinding itself from an entwined piece of string, I saw the cycle was beginning again. I wondered what I could do. I had been without a voice so long that I did not know what to say. And then I realized that if I had lived through so much, I had witnessed. If I witnessed I had learned. If I learned I could tell someone what I saw. If I spoke about it, I had a voice.

I began to speak. I started a women’s political group and we began to speak up. I engaged and was engaged by others. It was miraculous. In that small group we found our voices together. I think often of women far more resilient than I who have yet to find their voice. I use my voice for them, for women everywhere who are without a voice, until they are strong enough to speak for themselves — young girls in Serbia, in Russia, in Pakistan, in Israel, in Iraq and Iran; women who were brutally raped by Rwandan rebels; African women living with HIVAIDS, victims of their own husbands; young Afghanistan women who suffer the tortures of clitoral castration and death at the hands of their families; girl-children born in China who were and are shunned, abandoned and killed.

This I believe — there is a voice in every one, a valuable, courageous voice waiting to speak out –it is the one thing we come in with and the one thing we leave behindaour voices.