To be sure, writing Power Women has given me perspective. For example, when prison inmates “strike” because of “cruel and unusual treatment” when their color televisions have been taken away or their leisure time working out in the gym has been withheld, I think of what the Romans would say.
I think of how people rotted in dungeons year after year after cruel torture, not just under Roman rule but also under European rule of the Spanish Inquisition–and many, many other periods of time. I think of how tongues were removed, hands cut off, ears and noses sliced away because people did or did not believe in some sort of religion: Christian, pagan, Jewish, Buddhist, Taoist, or animist.
In the twenty-first century, we have just seen how the Iraqis have suffered the same tortures under Sadaam Hussein in a civilized time but not a civilized place. I think of how if people were seen on the streets–not just in ancient times–they would be torn apart by the savage mobs. Today, ISIS publicly commits mass atrocities. The Red Army and the White Army of the early 1900s committed unbelievable atrocities on innocent people because they did or did not support the Czar. The Nazis, under the madman Hitler, in the 1930s and 1940s, experimented on innocent humans before sending them off to the gas chambers. Race, Color, Gender, Religion, and Politics have created grand excuses for humans to exercise their most basic and persistent dark side. No matter what extreme measures of punishment and terror, if you can imagine it, people have inflicted it on other people.
Most recently, I attended a Rotary International Conference and learned from an exchange program team that in Tanzania girls are married at a young age, sometimes nine-years-old and become mothers at age fourteen or fifteen. Because their bodies are not mature enough to pass the baby through the birth canal, the agonizing belabored birth lasts beyond 72 hours, and the child dies. The doctor on the team told us that because of the long labor and the contracted pushing, the mother’s urinary tract is often damaged. If the woman lives, she becomes incontinent, anathema to the tribe. She is forced to live on the outskirts of the tribe as an exile—just like the leper of ancient days. She is another throw away human—just another woman. Early marriage has been practiced since the ancient times. Maternal and infant mortality has–until recent times–been a fact of life.
Barbarism still exists. There are those in every society whose deranged behavior poisons the flowering of civilization. One has only to open the daily paper to read about rape, dismemberment, and murder; abandonment, kidnapping, genital mutilation, and molestation of children—right here in the most civilized and advanced society on earth. Beyond even that, terrorists in the Middle East have captured innocent people, bound and blindfolded them, drowned or burned then to death in cages, and captured their beheading on videotape distributed throughout the world.
Another form of barbarism is slavery. Traditionally thought to be society’s necessary evil, prostitution—willingly or unwillingly—flourishes in every country. It has since Paleolithic times. And, yes, slavery still exists! The slave trade, including white slavery, brings women into prostitution yearly. Prostitutes are used and then abused. Women who ply “the world’s oldest profession” are stalked and brutally murdered by serial killers who think they are providing a service to mankind. All this, in the twenty-first century.
Yet, in spite of all this, we think we are at the apex of civilization. These are “the good old days.”
April 29, May 2, October 30, 2004, Amended April 24, 2016.