I received an interesting request from a Facebook friend yesterday. This woman has been very supportive during my time of grief, helping me to believe that life will become new again. Because of this, she’s become not yet an offline friend, but more than most of my faceless Facebook friends, so I would have been inclined to grant her any favor.
As it turns out, responding to her request was easy and hard at the same time.
She wrote:
I am now the National Director of Public Relations for UniteWomen.org, a non-partisan women’s rights organization with a social media reach of over twenty million people around the world, and we are about to embark upon our “Unite Against Rape” campaign, which will involve posting an array of memes with short quotes taking a stand against rape. Some of these quotes will be from celebrities, and some will be from everyday men and women. We are hoping to get as much “star power” as we can at the kick-off of the campaign, and I thought of you and your books and I thought maybe we could use you in the campaign as a novelist. I am hoping you might like to participate by completing the statement “I stand united against rape because…” for an Internet meme.
Your quote would only need to be a sentence or two, and we would be incorporating it into a graphic that includes a photo of you (high resolution and from the waist up).
It is time to change the collective mentality and show that we are united against rape, and that we will stand up and speak out about it. If you would be willing to lend your name and likeness to UniteWomen.org’s “Unite Against Rape” campaign, I think it would be good for our campaign and give you some additional exposure for your blog.
Of course I said yes, that was the easy part. The hard part was the “because.” I stand united against rape because . . .
It is so self-evident that rape is wrong that I simply could not come up with a response. I thought of mentioning that rape is illegal, morally wrong, demeans all of us, steals our humanity. I thought of saying that such a barbaric custom has no place in the twenty-first century, but all of that is obvious. I mean, really — who is for rape? I bet even rapists would come out against rape since they probably don’t see what they do as rape.
In the end, all I said was, “I stand united against rape because rape is wrong. It’s as simple as that.”
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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” All Bertram’s books are published by Second Wind Publishing. Connect with Pat on Google+
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