I have never really sat and thought about how great America is.
I was so excited to get back to the United States after Israel, but not because I was so grateful for the freedoms I enjoyed at home or anything. It was just because I missed it.
"And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion. And whenever those twin poisonous flowers began to sprout in the parched land of that field, Mariam uprooted them."
-Khaled Hosseini
This past week I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns,
a book centered on the fall of the beautiful Kabul and the people within it.
As the war began within the city and within the home of one family I cried inside.
But when the Taliban took over I screamed inside. I yelled at them. I cried for those women and I sobbed for those children. It was so difficult to read of a mother being beaten by the Taliban on a daily basis because her husband refused to accompany her outside of the home.
What kind of a society could allow that?
What kind of a world exists where an entire nation of people could be oppressed?
What world is this that sees men, women and children suffering and hasn't stopped it?
I can’t describe to you how sorry I am that I haven’t been more grateful
for the life and freedoms I enjoy in this land.
But I am so thankful that I now can say that I truly do understand the greatness
of this nation that I call home.
How hard it would be to live in a city
where you risk losing your hand because it is better than dying of hunger.
where breaking society's norms results in a loss of everything you know.
where a woman can’t remember the last time her body was whole and healed.
where a woman has no opportunities to miss
because there are no opportunities for anything other than submission.
How hard it is to live with no rights, to regret being born a girl, to regret birthing a girl.
I am happy to be a woman in a place where I hold my own power and
I weep for women in places where they do not.
