This essay, Flight of the Hawk, won the the Brooklyn Film & Arts 2012 Non-Fiction Prize in December, under the title “Death in Brooklyn.”
It’s up now on Brooklyn Voice:
http://www.brooklynvoice.com/2013/02/24/flight-of-the-hawk-by-christine-benvenuto/
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By and large, it is women who teach our children. Which means that school violence is often violence against women, as well as violence against children. Witness the six teachers killed at Sandy Hook Elementary.
I was reflecting on this yesterday as I listened to Massachusetts State legislators discuss gun control laws, among other issues, at Congregation B’nai Israel in Northampton, MA. IF NOT NOW, WHEN? This quintessential Jewish expression of the need to take action and responsibility, said State Representative Ellen Story, applies to gun control if it applies to anything. Seconding Story, State Senator Stan Rosenberg pointed out that the NRA wields political power wildly in excess of its membership of some 4 million, because it is funded by and represents gun manufacturers. Gun manufacturers want to sell guns – the more the merrier. When the NRA refuses to consider any curbs on who can access guns, and what weapons are available, they aren’t defending American freedom. They’re defending gun manufacturers’ right to make a buck.
Who does the NRA speak for? Not me.
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No matter how you look at it, a day to celebrate romantic love, named for an obscure Christian martyr, is a decidedly odd thing. And I say this as a confirmed, against-my-better-judgment romantic.
I can’t help but think that, unlike most silly things in the world, whoever thought up Valentine’s Day must have been a girl. Do any men actually like Valentine’s Day? Or, like flowered bed linens, kittens and love songs, do they tolerate it because they know they must?
Women and girls – many of us – love Valentine’s. The idea of it anyway. We’re suckers for courtly love, despite knowing well all the real-life complexities behind the fairytales. Despite being the targets for trigger-happy athletes, despite being beaten to death on buses, raped on college campuses, bullied and threatened and abused physically, emotionally, socially in our own homes. Despite economic and legal oppression.
Why don’t we shake off our romantic dreams? Our hopes? What is it embedded in days like this we can’t, or don’t want, to live without?
What Valentine’s Day makes me think of is my father bringing home a big heart-shaped box of chocolates for my mother, and a small heart-shaped box of chocolates for me, every year when I was a little girl. I have few happy childhood memories, even fewer involving my father. Few positive images of my parents’ marriage. This one I never shake. Never even try.
That’s it for now. I have to go – I’ll admit it – out to dinner with my sweetie. It’s Valentine’s Day, after all.
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Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine published a letter and response in The Ethicist column, to which I’ve posted a comment. Here’s the link.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/magazine/should-i-become-a-woman-and-risk-causing-pain-to-my-wife-and-children.html?comments#permid=59
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Helen Boyd has posted her own commentary, and comments from others, on yesterday’s interview with me:
http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/2013/01/31/why-trans-partners-should-tell-their-stories/#comments
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christinebenvenuto 