A 12-year-old girl learns that she is pregnant after being raped by her stepfather.
A mother learns that her daughter is dead after being denied a life-saving procedure made illegal by an abortion ban.
Another mother runs for miles to try and find her fifteen-year-old daughter, whose school has been involved in a mass shooting and isn’t answering her phone, and finds that she has been shot.
These weren’t just abstract stories told during the “Unite for America” online event organized and hosted by Oprah Winfrey last week on September 19. The people who are living these experiences were on hand personally to tell their stories themselves, in some of the most powerful and personal moments in politics ever recorded. Preventable pain – this was their tragic, recurring and connecting theme.
The profound courage of these women, rightly pointed out by Kamala Harris, to appear in a public forum and expose themselves – to bear witness to their deep personal pain and extraordinary strength – is something that deserves to be amplified and seen widely. Policy decisions in the United States concerning reproductive freedom and guns are not only causing preventable pain, but they are also killing people. Again, to quote Kamala Harris, it’s immoral.
What follows are the videos of the testimony of three women of different ages and races, united in their deep desire to prevent the pain they must live with – forever – from ruining more lives. I urge you to watch each one all the way through.
Hadley: I want to be a light to those like me
Amber: The worst pain a mother could feel
Natalie: We are ready to fight to change this
If you know anyone in your life who thinks that their vote doesn’t count, or that it doesn’t make a difference who is elected, please send them these videos. Politics matters. Policy matters. Real people rise or fall, prosper or suffer. Politics in the US has become, literally, a matter of life and death for women and children, and they aren’t alone. The American right wing is causing untold – and totally unnecessary – pain in communities across the country with its fictional and fantastic attacks on immigrants. And you don’t have to take my word for that:
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) on CNN denounced false claims that Haitians in Springfield, part of the district he represents, have been eating residents’ pets…
‘This is incredibly tragic and completely untrue. This should not have happened, it’s been tearing the community apart,’ Turner told Jake Tapper”. – The Hill, 9/20/2024
Preventable pain and predatory policy go hand in hand. The testimony of these courageous women forces us to ask ourselves: how much suffering are we willing to inflict in the name of political ideology?
L’articolo Oprah and Kamala: Preventable Pain and Profiles in Courage proviene da ytali..
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