I would like, on this peaceful Friday night, to pontificate upon something that's been on my mind as I've been writing. An event that took place a few years ago at the end of my college days that has stuck with me, will always stick with me, and probably always should.
A few years ago, I did a summer stint working for a theme park (that shall not be named) that had a university program where participating college students from all across the country would be bussed in to work at the park -- running rides, selling tickets, cleaning and maintaining the hotels, that sort of thing. They had dorms and a commissary set up for all of us. It was supposed to be a fun trip. It should have been.
The setup they gave us was the barest minimum they could manage to pay to extract the most profit out of us. The pay was only $8 an hour back then -- pre-covid, remember -- the walls were bare cinder blocks, the mattresses the kind of cheap vinyl ones you see in shelters and prisons, the furniture bare and rare. The other collegiates there were... well, it was fucking pandemonium. Partying day and night.
A month into my stay, a girl in another dorm building was raped by another worker.
The girl tried to report him.
12 other girls, who were friends of the rapist, found the victim and cornered her in another building, commanding her to forgive him under threat of her life.
When I learned this, I tried to find the poor girl to try to help her. Console her, help her go to the police, something, anything. I wasn't able to.
Stuff like that is so... common, but never talked about or even acknowledged. It's treated as normal and everyone is expected to tolerate it, expected to allow it to pass with no consequences for the offender, expected to forgive and move on.
The fact that this is seemingly a normal aspect of our culture makes me worry for the future, makes me worry for the Zoomers who have likely already experienced something like this by now and the Alpha Genners who in the next ten years will.
I suppose no one will acknowledge or read any of this either.
Why are people just expected to accept the fact that at some point in their life, they will be raped and their peers will band together not to help them, but to suppress them? How long will the cycle of rape continue? When will we good people band together and fight/kill evil motherfuckers who do stuff like that, and break it once and for all? Make them so afraid they wouldn't even think to try it? When does that day come?
How can behavior like that possibly be normal?
#mastodon #society #injustice #corruption #abuse #rape #cover-up #retaliation #suppression #victim #revenge