PUTNEY — Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's words have kept rising up for me lately, as the war against women keeps taking us backward in time.
From Supreme Court decisions affecting basic rights for access to health care for women to a recent incident of a sports-radio announcer calling a woman reporter a ”gutless bitch” because he didn't like the way she interviewed an athlete, women continue to be targets for oppression.
Many women are speaking out and calling others to activism to push back against these assaults on individuals and on the progress that has taken decades and generations to accomplish.
Not enough men, though, seem ready to speak out and stand shoulder to shoulder at the barricades. It's time our silence is not mistaken for indifference or quiet acquiescence.
While Brattleboro's Women's Freedom Center has highlighted how some men are stepping up to support the rights of women to feel safe and to be treated as equals, we can be doing more and better.
There are a lot of good guys out there who feel as bad as I do about the above mentioned incidents. We cringe every time some guy steps up to a microphone to utter some nonsense about rape or the struggles of single mothers or to chastise someone who pushes back.
Yes, it's time for more men to stand, be counted, and join our sisters, daughters, wives, partners, friends, and neighbors and say, “Enough.”
It's time to stand shoulder to shoulder at the barricades - and at the bar and in the market and coffee shop and especially at the ballparks and stadiums, those mostly male environs.
When we are silent, we are acquiescent.
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What, then, to do?
Locally, therapist Bill Pelz-Walsh, who specializes in preventing domestic violence, and I plan to offer an opportunity for men to gather in support for women, against the words and actions of those who hurt women, and to honor the cause of progress for women.
In our everyday lives, though, it does help to start stepping up and speaking out when we see and hear injustice. And modeling for ourselves and other men and boys to make the Golden Rule applicable to all - especially our sisters, our daughters, and all the women in our lives.
Unless I hold myself accountable, and unless other men do likewise, we become accessories to the acts and add evidence to Elie Wiesel's words connecting language to violence.
We can do better. We all deserve better. And there's no time like now.