On Fear, and Bad People
Normally I'm not a big note-writer, and I tend to be pretty private with my emotions. However, this Annie Le thing has hit me really hard, for some reason, and I thought that maybe writing would be the best way to work out my feelings about this.
In case you haven't seen the news on this subject, Annie Le was a twenty-four-year-old doctoral student at Yale who disappeared Tuesday, a few days before she was supposed to get married to a guy she'd been with since her freshman year of college. The police and the FBI looked through dumpsters and waste disposal plants for evidence. While Kanye West was dissing Taylor Swift on national television, and on what was supposed to have been her wedding night, police dug Annie Le's body out of the basement of the lab where she was doing research.
Maybe it's that I was so recently a grad student, and probably will be again soon. Maybe it's because I really value my independence and don't want to have to wonder if someone will attack me everywhere I go. This woman was murdered in a restricted-access lab on an Ivy League campus in the middle of the day... if it can happen there, where couldn't it happen? Maybe it's just that it makes me so angry, on the part of this woman I never met, that someone with the dumb luck to be stronger than she was probably overpowered her. It makes me angry that a lot of women, maybe myself included, may never know what it's like to feel completely safe, to never worry that someone will hide your body so well that it will take five days of constant searching to find it.
I know that this was neither the first nor the last time that a woman will be murdered, but I'm always shocked at the audacity that it must take to end a human life. Presumably, whoever did this had access to the lab, and was educated enough to be associated in some capacity with Yale. I think of the Ivies as bastions of enlightenment, and educational institutions in general as places of possible, if temporary, escape from the real and scary world. That's another reason that this is upsetting me so much.
This has also been a wake-up call for me. I love yoga because I love the peace and serenity that it preaches, and I've always been pretty opposed to violence in my own life... but I'm seriously considering taking up a martial art, because I have a much better chance of being attacked than attacking someone else. And this is not a rhetorical question, but is totally up for discussion: what good does it do to be peaceful and serene if you can't defend yourself?
I do, however, wish all the peace and serenity possible for her family and fiance.
To all the women that I know and love: please be careful. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to carry around pepper spray; clearly, though, this is not the place to be idealistic.
In case you haven't seen the news on this subject, Annie Le was a twenty-four-year-old doctoral student at Yale who disappeared Tuesday, a few days before she was supposed to get married to a guy she'd been with since her freshman year of college. The police and the FBI looked through dumpsters and waste disposal plants for evidence. While Kanye West was dissing Taylor Swift on national television, and on what was supposed to have been her wedding night, police dug Annie Le's body out of the basement of the lab where she was doing research.
Maybe it's that I was so recently a grad student, and probably will be again soon. Maybe it's because I really value my independence and don't want to have to wonder if someone will attack me everywhere I go. This woman was murdered in a restricted-access lab on an Ivy League campus in the middle of the day... if it can happen there, where couldn't it happen? Maybe it's just that it makes me so angry, on the part of this woman I never met, that someone with the dumb luck to be stronger than she was probably overpowered her. It makes me angry that a lot of women, maybe myself included, may never know what it's like to feel completely safe, to never worry that someone will hide your body so well that it will take five days of constant searching to find it.
I know that this was neither the first nor the last time that a woman will be murdered, but I'm always shocked at the audacity that it must take to end a human life. Presumably, whoever did this had access to the lab, and was educated enough to be associated in some capacity with Yale. I think of the Ivies as bastions of enlightenment, and educational institutions in general as places of possible, if temporary, escape from the real and scary world. That's another reason that this is upsetting me so much.
This has also been a wake-up call for me. I love yoga because I love the peace and serenity that it preaches, and I've always been pretty opposed to violence in my own life... but I'm seriously considering taking up a martial art, because I have a much better chance of being attacked than attacking someone else. And this is not a rhetorical question, but is totally up for discussion: what good does it do to be peaceful and serene if you can't defend yourself?
I do, however, wish all the peace and serenity possible for her family and fiance.
To all the women that I know and love: please be careful. In a perfect world, we wouldn't have to carry around pepper spray; clearly, though, this is not the place to be idealistic.