We spent a few nice days in Chicago with my husband's sisters.
...
We had a very nice trip, but it is also nice to be home.
cat tail
church
chasm
cues
Chicago
Today would have been my 30th wedding anniversary.
Looking back, the way that life turned out was NOT what I had planned (although most of what I had planned was about what I didn't want...I didn't want to live in a small town my entire life and I didn't want to marry a farmer).
There are good memories and bad memories. Some of the bad memories are really, really bad. I choose to let go of the bad ones. My goal is for my children to remember their dad in the best way that they can.
It was a long, weird ride. I don't regret it.
I regret my part in making the challenges...but I don't regret doing it.
The Afghan lawyer defending a journalist on death row in Kabul has been bombarded with death threats urging him to drop the case.
Islamic extremists repeatedly threatened to murder Afzal Nooristani after he agreed to defend Sayed Pervez Kambaksh in his high-profile appeal.
The 23-year-old student writer was sentenced to death for circulating an article about women's rights. He was tried in a closed court, and denied a defence lawyer. His case has sparked worldwide protests.
emphasis mine...yep...sounds like complementarianism..(NOT)
~~~
The Afghan lawyer defending a journalist on death row in Kabul has been bombarded with death threats urging him to drop the case.
Islamic extremists repeatedly threatened to murder Afzal Nooristani after he agreed to defend Sayed Pervez Kambaksh in his high-profile appeal.
The 23-year-old student writer was sentenced to death for circulating an article about women's rights. He was tried in a closed court, and denied a defence lawyer. His case has sparked worldwide protests. (emphasis mine)
I'm sitting here listening to the "noon whistle" - every first Friday of every month of the spring and summer months, the tornado siren goes off for two minutes. "This is a test, this is only a test." No matter where you are in the city, you can hear the siren.
A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of working with a very cool student who was born in Bosnia. (He has since passed the exam and become a US citizen...that was a wonderful day)
He remembers the air raid sirens. He remembers hearing the sirens and hiding...and then hearing (and feeling) the bombs.
When he came to the States...he'd hear a siren and panic. Fire engines, ambulances...all causes for great alarm.
Every single siren was a cause for panic.
I see that out there - in the Calvinims vs. Arminianism deal...comp vs. egal...Protestant vs. Roman Catholic...Mormon, Islam, yada, yada...
If, in everything we read, we read it through the lenses of what is worst in our own past, we will think the worst of everybody else out there.
If we read articles, blog, books...with the lenses of our own abuse (whether we were the victims or perpetrators), we are more likely to see abuse.
When I read an article about cessationism, I read it through the lenses of a person who believes she has had brushes with the prophetic. It is hard for me to comprehend a "silent" God.
When I see women out there who have been open about their past with controlling, neglectful or abusive (or any combination of the three sins) reading blogs and articles and seeing only the possibility of abuse, I wonder how much of what they see is the article and how much is the the set of lenses they are looking through.
I have my own set of lenses. I can see neglect (where none is there). I can see a husband with a skewed sense of priorities (when I may be wrong, the priorities may be shared). I can see a person who does not care about one thing (when they really only have different priorities than I do).
I can dread doing one act because I fear what the next step might be...even when I know in my brain that is not the case.
~~~
The "D" I know now...when he hears that "noon whistle" - no matter where he is, he runs outdoors and stands, eyes closed. Just listening to the whistle.
He hears the fire truck and tells everybody around him, "do you hear that? They're going to help somebody."
He's learning not to use his "Bosnian" lenses.
He's getting over his past.
~~~
Perhaps the healing starts when we learn that the lenses of the past can sometimes keep us from seeing clearly.
Perhaps the healing begins when we stop automatically fearing the worst and start expecting the best.
Yesterday, tiro said,
the new rumors that women are just as abusive (specifically physically) as men and maybe even more so is just a bad rumor…. which I explained further in post #6.
I would say be careful what you label as "rumor"...
While it is possible that more violent women is new...it is not rumor. I've worked in a public high school fairly recently and in that school, the majority of physical fighting was done by the young women.
I can offer a lot of possibilities that could contribute to a "new" phonomena. Removing dads from the picture, or relegating them to a minor role could be preventing the teens and young adults from knowing how to interact with males in a positive way. The scarcity of male teachers adds to that absence of positive role models.
The research shows that women instigate violence as much as men and that the greatest number of violent incidents include both partners. To dismiss the research means denying men and women the help they need (either as violent partners or victims) AND serves to continue the "women good-men bad" attitude that political feminists seek to serve up.
(My computer got rebooted - by my son - and the tabs where I had the research got closed. I am in the process of locating them again. )
At any rate, we're packing for a long weekend in Chicago so I'm setting the comments to "all comments need to be approved"...feel free to comment, but everything is held in moderation and I'll get to it several times.
Since his message is that women can be violent also, I'll be assuming that Sue will find him "not credible" as well).
Several studies, including large and nationally representative samples, have found that female-only violence is as prevalent as or more prevalent than male-only violence, and that the most prevalent pattern is mutual violence. The 1975 and the 1985 National Family Violence Surveys both found that about half of the violence was mutual, one quarter was male-only, and ne quarter was female-only (Gelles & Straus, 1988; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). The National Comorbidity Study (Kessler, Molnar, Feurer et al., 2001) found similar percentages. Other studies showing similar results include (Anderson, 2002; Capaldi & Owen, 2001; McCarroll, Ursano, Fan et al., 2004; Moffitt, Caspi, Rutter et al., 2001; Williams & Frieze, 2005). In all of these studies, the predominant pattern was mutual violence.
Not a Dutton to be found.
Stets and Straus - 825 respondents:
49% reported reciprocal violence
28% reported that only the wife was violent
23% reported that only the husband was violent.
The men reported:
men struck the first blow 43.7% of the time...they reported women hitting first 44.1% of the time
The women reported:
women striking first 52.7% of the time...men hitting first 42.6% of the time.
Women are more likely to hit back (24.4% vs. 15%)
Stets and Straus (1992) combined the 1985 US National Family Violence Resurvey (N = 5,005) with a sample of 526 dating couples to generate a large and representative sample of male-female relationships, in which they reported incidence of intimate violence by gender. Using a subset of 825 respondents who reported experiencing at least one or more assaults the authors found that in ½ (49%) of the incidents the couples reported reciprocal violence, in 1/4 (23%) of the cases the couples reported that the husband alone was violent and 1/4 (28%) reported the wife alone was violent. Men (n = 297) reported striking the first blow in 43.7% of cases and that their partner struck the first blow in 44.1% of the cases. The women (n = 428) reported striking the first blow in 52.7% of the cases and that their partner struck first in 42.6% of the cases. Stets and Straus (1992) concluded that not only do women engage in a comparable amount of violence, they are “at least as likely” to instigate violence. The results also indicated that women were more likely to hit back (24.4%) than men (15%) in response to violent provocation by a partner (Straus & Gelles, 1992). This latter result is difficult to explain from the patriarchal view that women are more afraid of male violence than the reverse. Stets and Straus also analyzed for level of violence x gender. They concluded that equal levels of violence by both men and women were the most common form of violence (40% of married couples). The second most frequent form was women using severe violence against men who were either completely non-violent or who used only minor violence (about 16 % of married couples). The stereotypical pattern (male severe, female none or minor) was found for only 8% of married couples. (emphasis mine) (Donald G. Dutton)
from one of my walks...