So we’re walking back to the car parked along the frontage road when a coworker says, “there’s an Amber alert on the freeway” and I look up to read the lit up message on the huge billboard “….brown Datsun 200sx…” and the license plate number that harbors a fugitive kidnapper and abducted girl (probably).
And I think about that fourteen year old in Salt Lake City who was hidden in plain sight for 8 months in her home town, in local restaurants, at street fairs, all around the neighborhood in fact unseen by people who were looking at posters alerting them to her abduction in the same room where she was standing but not seeing her because “she was veiled.”
She was encased in white robes, only her eyes showing. Her captor-mother was also veiled. And all those hundreds of people not really able to speak out (or not wanting to) and say “why are those women being hidden?” Why are you making them invisible?
When we accept in our open and democratic society the normalcy of veiled women, women hidden from public view, prevented from speaking, not allowed to have faces, or voices, or–let me be perfectly clear–not allowed to exist in their own right, then we have abandoned them. If we do not see the veiled girls and women we have lost them even as they walk among us.
The veil of invisibility
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4 responses to “The veil of invisibility”
We, so eager to accept restrictions to our own selves, so politically correct that we allow silence to become our jailer.
we the blind
Referring to the teenager recently liberated, briggs saysWhen we accept in our open and democratic society the normalcy of veiled…
these veiled women do have personalities, they are ‘seen’ (but as people rather than objects), and dont feel that they are ‘not alowed to exist in their own right’. the use of a veil helps them to focus on their religion, of whch modesty plays a major part. it is people lke you who try to say that they are captves or restricted that create distance between their culture and ours, it is not by any means up to us to ‘free them’ from that which s a deep and meaningful personal choice which they voluntarily choose to make.Conclusivly, stop trying to be a hero for that which doesnt want to be saved.
these veiled women do have personalities, they are ‘seen’ (but as people rather than objects), and dont feel that they are ‘not alowed to exist in their own right’. the use of a veil helps them to focus on their religion, of whch modesty plays a major part. it is people lke you who try to say that they are captves or restricted that create distance between their culture and ours, it is not by any means up to us to ‘free them’ from that which s a deep and meaningful personal choice which they voluntarily choose to make.Conclusivly, stop trying to be a hero for that which doesnt want to be saved.