As a daughter of America I have been blinded,
coddled, grown fat on the luxuries of fast food and our
staggering, ill-defined 'freedom' so easily unappreciated. I have
felt poverty, lived in group homes, been the rag doll orphan of Birmingham,
lived through beatings and been broken by the hands of my father.
And even so, I cannot imagine, not even fathom the screams
ignored in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kosovo.

"This is overplayed, nobody wants to hear this," recites our editors, our
news anchors, our country. This is where you tune out, where your heart
either falls or turns away. This is where America stops caring.

The Drini River holds the souls of more than a hundred men. The bones
still surface, never claimed. Shells left scars along children's feet,
imprints of the vessel that stole their fathers, their mothers, their
laughter. The horror of the world contained in a single act of
fanatical brutality. A village burned to the ground in hours.
My father's hands could not prepare me for their stories: the women
with shotguns fired into their cervix, constantly pissing themselves, shitting
themselves, splashing their dignity along their feet and leaving a trail
of tears and piss wherever they wander. My scars bear no
water against the starving children, fifteen million young lives lost
each year to rib cages screaming against their skin - their dark eyes
incredulous of a life without hunger, malaria, rape camps, machine
gun fire breaking the dawn and sweeping terror through their villages.

I could tell you of the women risking their lives in Jalalabad, long before the war,
creating secret schools for young girls, their gender forcing them into
hundred-fifteen degree weather under miles of fabric, barely able to even
breathe beneath their burqas. When it's no longer a religious choice
to cover one's body and hair, but actually forced. When women are shot,
decapitated in the streets to teach a lesson to those who disobey. I could tell you
the taste of freedom is the copper tinge of blood, and is not only fought
by soldiers, but by each person willing to sacrifice time to simply care.
To care before yourself, your children, your nation.

I was not prepared for the apathy of my country. Not prepared for
blank stares, the excuses, the ignorance of anything beyond their country's borders.
Birmingham had made me hard, blossomed scars into my neck,
along the curve of my spine. I was never meant to live past that day.
Never meant to stand in court, retrace the footsteps of my mother.

I did this for her, who in 1989 sued my father for raping her.
She had a rape kit, spent days in the hospital from her fractured
bones, body, heart. The case was cast aside: she already had
a child from this same man she accused of rape. I did this for my grandmother,
who, half crazed, drove a truck into a tree in Mexico when hitchhiking after
being told she'd be raped. I did this for the women of Ciudad Juárez washing up
in ditches and rivers, mutilated and left in back alleys to rot. Over
four hundred women left as garbage for their mothers.

I will never be another girl whose case was thrown to the side,
another girl whose scars broke her tongue, her will, her compassion.
Another girl who must be telling a lie.

I will not wait on God's judgment.

I will not excuse the actions of our fathers, our brothers, our lovers. I will
let no faith harbor blame, no tradition hold the weight of wild dogs
dragging thirteen year old girls from rivers, gnawing on the swollen
fingers of children that once clung to their mother's skirt, drew curls in their
sister's hair. Spare me the riddles, the politics, the corruption.

I ask for nothing more than recognition
of the atrocities of this world,
recognition and reaction. Recognition
and action. Recognition for
getting up in the morning
and holding the conviction that you,
you and your tiny world, your tiny dreams,
your tiny hands,
can change the world.