Victims

I have just spent some time with Lady Gaga, a person I have always admired. The song she wrote with Diane Warren — “Til It Happens to You” — is about rape victims. One of my growing aims as a writer is to locate the true sources of violence and there is no truer source than our unwillingness to face the shame and cruelty around intimate sex.

Yesterday I redid my Twitter header and posted this:

Today I realized that I had never looked at this from the perspective of the victim. All that is good above is what a victim wants or already has, even through pain and tears. The sadness that rises from the choice of the values below are searingly existential to the victim. She has been ganged up on. He has experienced rejection. I do not need to continue.

My aim is to get to the truth that the person is the protagonist of the story that is this cosmos and that as victim or perpetrator or, as most often is the case, both, remedy begins by the heart-head action of turning from the items below and climbing the steps needed to get to the top, to truth and beauty, justice and love and goodness and freedom.

And the good news is that the steps needed can be the subject of every consideration. In other words, the decision to live by values consciously is coming home. There is nothing between us and them.

That’s all.