The last weeks have been a test of my willingness to engage, and have put a bit of a dent in my normal fondness for talking with people of a different mind. In all honestly, I usually like having political conversations with different minded people, more than I like talking with like minded people. I find the former so much more interesting, and I don’t learn nearly as much from the latter. The recent conversations about guns have felt different, and many of them are pushing my limits. These conversations have generally followed a few similar scripts. Of course none of these are word-for-word, and they’re clearly written in a way that gives me more time to think about things, and phrase things more articulated (and probably kinder) than I would when I’m trying to respond before somebody else does on FaceBook. Either way, here’s what they sound like…
Month: June 2016
Rape Culture
The ways that people, particularly women, are mistreated has gotten a lot of attention in the wake of what many (including me) see as a horrible miscarriage of justice. A former member of the Stanford University swim team, Brock Turner, was found guilty on three felony charges: assault with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated or unconscious person, sexual penetration of an intoxicated person, and sexual penetration of an unconscious person. Late last week, he was sentenced to six months in a minimum security facility, called a “camp” on the facility’s website. No surprise, people were outraged. I was too. My FaceBook feed was (and is) covered with stories about the incident, statements by the victim, disgust over the statement by Turner’s father, who argued that 20 minutes of bad behavior shouldn’t negate a lifetime of him being a good boy (where’s the vomit bag?). On one of these posts, somebody I don’t know asked an important, but complicated question. Something that I wanted to explore, but didn’t feel like exploring so openly, making Hitting Bregma the perfect avenue.
So there’s the question, summarized as follows: what do we do about this?
Hitting Bregma 