Nothing much has changed...

Last night, I finished watching a show and, after a few minutes, found myself bursting into tears.  Wrapping my arms around myself, I bent over and wept as my body shook from head to toe.  Amos pawed at me until I was able to calm down enough to pull him into my lap.  What a comforter my beloved Fluffernutter can be.

My mind was racing as to why I was weeping, why I was so very, very sad.  At first, I started to spiral, fearing that I was having another hormone flare and wondering just how bad things could get for me if menopause, for me, might means hormones no longer working to even out my levels.  My thoughts were getting bleaker and bleaker until I considered the fact that if I were having a hormone surge—at least all the other times—I was unaware of my insensibility.  And I was insensible, not sad.

That thought alone helped me to crawl back to a place of quietness in my mind.  For a while, I just let myself weep and clutch Amos and wait.  After a long while, I started to think about what I had just watched, an episode of "Madame Secretary."

I really love that show.  I mean, I was prepared to dislike it, thinking it might be another agenda show coming out of Hollywood.  But the show is nothing like I expected.  Teá Leoni is magnificent, as is Tim Daly as her husband, a religion and ethics scholar.  I really like their relationship and their interactions with their children.  But as Secretary of State, Leoni shines.  She can be rock hard one moment and gentle the next.  She is witty and intelligent and always thinking on many fronts when presented with the difficulties that comprise her job.  I think the show has excellent writing and is cast exceptionally well.  Bebe Neuwirth plays the head of Leoni's staff and brings class back to television that has been sorely lacking in that department.

So, why this episode?

Finally, it dawned on me.  The main topic was sex trafficking of women and girls.  The staff became rather depressed after their attempts to save one well-known kidnapped missionary failed.  So many others were rescued, but a truckload of women and girls were found dead.  Suffocated.

Secretary McCord asks them why it was this terrible thing that they saw that felled them when they are daily privy to the horrors of humanity.  I am not sure a real answer was ever given.  I mean, answers were given and I think the point behind them was that McCord had come into the office as a bit of a firebrand and shook up the playing field, but now the work they found themselves doing was more playing to the middle and to compromise where deaths like what they witnessed were par for the course.

I didn't get a sense that the secretary felt smitten by their words or had taken them on as judgement in any fashion.  I am not sure the show writers meant for the audience to join the staff in their conclusion.  I think this was more of an episode ending that was leading viewers to ponder what they had scene and if they themselves were a part of actually making a difference or merely going through the motions having given in to the inevitable.

It took me a long while to realize why I was weeping.  It was not the show or how it was presented.  Again, I find "Madame Secretary" to be truly a cut above most everything else on television.  I realized that what I was weeping for was my own sense of futility that cloaked the staff in melancholy.

Just as the trafficking of women and girls is getting no better, despite public figures coming out staunchly on the side of females all over the world, the plague that is sexual abuse is getting no better.  What I survived is no better.  Despite the progress in the public eye of at least taking the topic out of the darkroom, despite the spotlight that "Law & Order: SVU" has placed on the topic for nearly two decades, the sexual abuse of others is no less common.  Actually, a part of me wonders, with so many shows now having the violent rape scenes that were once seen as too scandalous for television, if sexual abuse has actually become too common.

Mankind will always be comprised of sinners, at least until Jesus returns.  So, this sinful world will always be full of sin, including sexual sin.  But with so much outrage out there fueling the pressure to be politically correct on so many social fronts, why can we not become outraged over sexual abuse and make that the next politically correct behavioral norm? By that I mean, make it so that sexual abuse becomes such an outrage and results in the social bullying of a person to such a profound degree that no one dares take the risk of harming another.

People are "outraged" by so much these days, but I do not see and hear the drumbeat against sexual abuse that I see against the slightest word of intolerance.  During the Australian tennis tournament, I believe, an ESPN broadcaster referred to Serena's play as her guerrilla tactics.  It is a phrase that had been prolific in tennis commentary before (and most likely will be again).  Only the hair-trigger public assumed he said "gorilla" tactics and shortly got him fired (forced to resign).  I know the broadcaster is now suing and, in this instance, I'm all for litigation.  He should not have lost his job.

Besides, to describe Serena's play as employing guerrilla tactics is no longer accurate.  The woman, when at her best, embarks on a shock-and-awe approach that is unmatched in the world of women's tennis, in the world of tennis.  Get with the times when it comes to warfare metaphors!

It is stupid that he lost his job.  It is stupid that the bullies came out in full force against him.  It is stupid that there was such wholesale ignorance shown in the matter.  And yet I want that hair-trigger response to come out in full force against sexual abuse.  I want the bullies and the trolls and the arrogant judgmental pontificators of the world to decimate anyone who dares hurt another sexually.

In the world of Hollywood, the only ones grieving the deaths in that truck were the families of its occupants and the horrified staff.  I am hoping that the writers meant for the message to be that the staff were as equally horrified over the complacency shown in the face of the horror of human trafficking as the deaths themselves.

We live in a world where "boys will be boys" and girls "were asking for it" through their dress or drinking or demeanor.  We live in a world where what goes on behind closed doors can easily stay there.  We live in a world where churches prefer to save face than call out the sin committed against those most vulnerable.  We live in a world where public face in our schools and military and other institutions matter more than the human lives devastated by sexual abuse.  And we live in a world where a professor can assault me and keep his tenure and I, his victim, did not bat an eyelash over the outcome.

I was weeping for the little girl who I was and the woman who I have become, because, in nearly 50 years, nothing much has changed.  There is a part of me exultant over my realization, over not remaining lost in the emotional storm.  And yet there is also a part of me grieving deeply the futility I see in ever hoping for change, for success in the fight against sexual abuse in our society ... in our world.