Mary Taft
Even as I write this this narrative, I am a victim of a crime
against which I thought I had taken all the appropriate safeguards-the
computer virus. While technology does improve our lives, the
flip side is that is also creates opportunities for criminals.
There are few people in our modern times who have not been a
victim of some kind of high tech crime or of abusive situations
which are borderline criminal. In a era of identity theft, e-mail
scams, disappearing pensions, dysfunctional workplaces, downsizing,
Enron, government spying, and church sanctified cover-ups, we
are abused and betrayed by the very people and institutions
that we are expected to trust and upon whom we have relied.
But while modern times bring new crimes, enlightened and progressive
thought also recognized as criminal, activities that were once
considered completely acceptable.
I have lived long enough to have lived in and been personally
affected by a time when discrimination and harassment, both
sexual and racial, were common, not criminal. A time when
the division of the front and the back of the bus was drawn
in color and drinking fountains and businesses, could openly
proclaim “white only." A time when a young lady
was seen, not heard, when “boys will be boys”
and it was, most assuredly, a man’s world. A time when
a husband was “master” of the house, when spousal
abuse was a dirty little secret, but not a crime. How do you
safely express your thoughts, emotions, frustrations, in such
a time?
For me the answer lay in the written word. Baptized in ink,
swaddled in paper, I could laugh, cry, scream and rant unbridled.
In prose and in poetry I would find not only release and but
the strength to overcome.
|
