Lets Be Inspired to Keep On Giving A Dam About Women's Rights

It is wonderful to hear that three women’s rights activists will share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Congratulations to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, activist Leymah Gbowee of Liberia and activist Tawakkui Karman of Yemen. They were chosen “for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.” I hope the prize aids them in their ongoing struggles for equality and liberty for women. I hope it will uplift the spirit of the women’s movement worldwide and encourage us all to continue to keep on giving a dam about women’s rights, to keep on believing in our own individual power to make a difference. It strikes me as crucially important that these women were awarded the prize for their efforts to create SAFETY for women. Women of the Bahamas know well what it means to live without safety. We need to wake up and talk about the crime situation in our country in terms of it being an issue of women's (and children's) human rights. It was the brutal murder of a mother's child that caused the Prime Minister to address the nation and promise reform last week. He made no mention of crime being a women's rights issue, but of course it is. Crime in the Bahamas denies women and their children the right to safety, which is a human right. The new Nobel laureates I hope will remind Bahamian women of this human right to safety , and inspire us to courage enough to speak out when this right is denied to us. I hope they will inspire women in the Bahamas and in the Caribbean to wake up and join the global women's movement, to stop disavowing ourselves from feminism (we all owe pretty much everything that is good in our modern lives to the feminist movement), to get educated about women's issues locally and globally, to join the cause in word and action, to begin to care about the lives of other women, to take a handful of that precious love they all reserve for Jesus and give it to a sister at risk instead, to give our best creative work to the global women's movement and to the idea of a world where women are safe, free and happy. Lets think of ways in which we can contribute to the creation of this world. It could happen. And everyone would be blessed.