It was just after 2 a.m. on a pitch-black Friday morning when Bernadette Greene-Placentia’s life changed. The Democratic candidate for Congressional District 8 strolled across a parking lot to repair a damaged campaign sign. It was a routine she’d followed all summer. This time, she only made it a few yards.
An attacker smashed her over the head. She blacked out. She woke up to find a strange man on top of her.
Greene-Placentia struggled to open her eyes. She felt a sharp pain below her waist. The attacker was pulling his penis out of her.
She heard him mumble something like, “-ic bitch, not a very good fuck,” which her mind filled in as “Democratic bitch,” she recalled. She wasn’t sure that was exactly what he said.
One leg was out of her jean capris. She wore brand-new tennis shoes and a campaign t-shirt. Another man came over. Greene-Placentia felt his weight nudging her left leg further apart. She began swinging her foot at him. “Not even worth it,” she heard the man say as he moved away. He wore black boots and had small feet, she recalled.
The two men left Greene-Placentia face down in the parking lot. The hatch of her silver Jeep Grand Cherokee was still open. The car was still running. She heard music.
She doesn’t remember pulling up her pants or picking herself off the asphalt parking lot. She doesn’t remember closing her Jeep’s hatch and putting her foot on the gas. She doesn’t remember pulling her car into the driveway and collapsing into her bed.
“It’s just these little tiny flashes of things that I do remember,” Greene-Placentia said in an interview with Phoenix New Times. “As much as I don’t want to remember, I’ve tried very, very hard to remember more stuff. But that’s where I’m at.”
Agreed, even a half step is better than none in the right direction. It’s a worthwhile pursuit to spend time figuring it out. I don’t see any benefit in inflicting pain and suffering on someone as retribution or “teaching”. The system is deeply flawed as it stands now, there’s an endless number of things to be fixed. I have no idea what an ultimate solution might look like (not as a monolith but a process over time) but I have faith it can exist. I’ll take being proven wrong over giving up.
You have hope and it’s a bit infectious. Kinda need as much of that as I can get these days. Thank you for responding, I appreciate it
I strongly believe it lies in education. Sex education, reading from different perspectives, understanding what consent is and is not, understanding empathy. We need to be teaching our youth the value of respect and consent. They need to read books written by women from the perspective of women. We need to teach them that women deserve a place in our government, our universities, everywhere.
There’s proof there that we can create a better society for everyone this way.
Even if our pursuit is doomed I believe we still owe it to ourselves and each other to work for a better world. It’s both a matter of practicality and a matter of character. Surely things can be done better, but also we must every day choose who we will be, we choose the contents of our souls continually, and since we choose we can choose better, and when we don’t know what choice is better we can do our best and try to learn where we can.
I choose hope because we are people, even when things are bleak, and people can change. We can innovate. We can reorganize. We can learn and choose better. Perfect is impossible, but better always is possible.
Two books I recommend for hope are The Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow, which show that society has been organized wildly differently in the past in ways most people don’t know because it’s relatively recent archeological and anthropological knowledge, but also it goes against the two competing “common knowledge” accounts of how civilization got to be this way. And The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuinn (cw the protagonist does rape someone), which imagines an anarchic society, struggles and all, which feels very real and like it may someday be possible, especially to those who’ve had plenty of experience in anarchy adjacent communities, spaces, and projects.