Violence Against Women

I literally have nothing to talk about this week. This has been a particularly uneventful week for me. Not much got me riled up this week nor did anything remotely exciting happen. Oh wait, what am I talking about. MY BIRTHDAY IS ON WEDNESDAY. MY BIRTHDAY IS ON WEDNESDAY. MY BIRTHDAY IS ON WEDNESDAY. If you can’t tell, I’m super excited about it. I love holidays & birthdays. I can’t wait until I’m older to wear those “tacky” Christmas sweaters. I actually think they’re really cool but because I’m in college, I’ll at least wait until I’m a mom to start wearing them. Anyways, I love to celebrate everything! Life is just so short & full of bad things that I like to celebrate the good, such as the day that I was born.
So I don’t have any plans for my actual birthday except maybe going out to eat. So the actual birthday may not be that special. But that weekend I’m going home to Hampton & spending Easter weekend with my friends & family there. On Saturday, one of my friends is planning me a party! It won’t be that big of a celebration because my very best friends are away at school but it’ll still be fun! Eek! I can’t wait! So you guy’s, don’t forget, Wednesday March 31st is my birthday! I expect posts on my facebook wall & happy birthday’s in class. Okay, so that only took up 250 words, 250 more to go.
Something that touched my heart this week was the “Take Back the Night Rally.” It was incredibly sad but uplifting at the same time. This was all about stopping violence against women. The first part was the sit down portion where there were different women speaking about how to get involved and then there were personal stories. It was hard to imagine that these women had been through these things. I would consider these things to be tragedies but most people don’t even know that they’re going on. Now, I’m not much of a crying person but these women’s stories got to me. They were just so incredibly brave to come up & speak in front of a room packed with people. One of the most touching was when Morgan Harrington’s mother came up to talk about the loss of her daughter. This was the saddest part of the whole night. I cannot even imagine how hard it must be to lose a child to violence. She talked about how some people had tried to blame Morgan for her abduction and later death because of what she was wearing. Her message was that it doesn’t matter what she was wearing or what she was doing. Her mom even said that she helped pick her outfit out before the concert. There is no justification for inflicting pain on a woman simply because of their gender. She finished up by reading a poem that she had written or her daughter. The next part of involved lighting candles and walking around campus shouting chants. This part made me feel powerful! Like because of what I was doing, something was going to change. This just makes me want to continue being active in my community. I want change.