I am stunned and somewhat ashamed.
Balpreet Kaur
This young woman's picture--taken without her permission, posted to Reddit without her permission--didn't really register much with me at first. Then I happened to skim the text beneath it. So I went back and looked at her, realizing what I hadn't really paid attention to in the first place (the dichotomy between her face/head and the rest of her).
Then I read the text (EDIT: the post on Tumblr was eaten, as so often happens. New link goes to Jezebel, which has Balpreet's original text and! amazingly! an apology from the original poster. The following still stands, even now:).
Miss Kuar is... She is made of stern and true stuff, sterner and truer than I. I am sure she has her doubts and fears and moments when she wishes the rest of the world would just fuck off already, but to invite people to approach her, speak with her, to look at her, just as she is... And in this world, full of people who cannot understand the difference between 'Sikh' and 'Muslim' so deem them all 'evil', full of people for whom cruelty to strangers is perfectly acceptable sport because hey! it's funny*, that is something that takes a courage I don't possess.
Her words are beautiful, cutting, and as I said they make me feel a little shamed. She lives so boldly, while I have this terror in the back of my head that that will be me on Reddit, on Fark, on imgur, and thousands of strangers will say openly what I only catch the barest whispers of at the moment. Will say worse than what I only catch the barest whispers of.
And then she fucking apologizes at the end of it. She is the wronged party, here, she has every right to feel angry and violated and the desire to rip people new assholes should she wish to. But no, she apologizes. And that too is stunning in its own way, another touch of forgiveness in a statement overflowing with it.
* It isn't. It really, really isn't. It never has been, to me, never will be.