By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.
Trice Edney Wire
One of my very good friends often quotes R. Buckminster Fuller, who was the chairman of his university’s design department and who designated himself as a ‘comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.’ Fuller’s most famous design is the geodesic dome, that circular puzzle most commonly associated with Space Mountain at Disney World. As a self-styled futurist philosopher, Fuller is also famously known for his quote, “I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”
The personal connection that Fuller makes for himself with Earth is a connection that he makes and accepts for humanity. It is a connection that I have seen firsthand in my travels across the nation and around the world, including my travels to much of Africa. There, I met many incredible people who share the same desires for their families as we do here in America — food, shelter, education, security, peace. Those are the common threads that bind us all.
Our commonalities extend not only to the positive, but to the negatives, too. In the US, as well as on the continent of Africa, there are areas of metropolitan affluence that offer the best that money can buy and areas of poverty in which personal prosperity and security are tenuous, at best. Common to both of these parts of our world, my assessment is that the lack of opportunity and devastation of poverty result from the neglect of the “haves” who control available resources and who are well-insulated from the effects of poverty.
Despite the problems of poverty or even those of the less affluent, there are few places in the world that would tolerate nearly 300 girls being abducted without massive police and military mobilization to find and retrieve them. I’m fully aware that in many US locations, and around the world, girls have been shot and killed, beaten, raped and have disappeared–never to be found, but not in such large numbers at once and not for the purpose of rape, prostitution and sexual slavery.
Questions loom. What factors influence a seemingly lackluster response to this abduction by the Nigerian government? Why has it not sent out its forces in sufficient numbers to achieve a successful search? If incapable of finding them with its own resources, why has Nigeria not aggressively sought the willing assistance of world governments which have already volunteered technologically sophisticated means to conduct a successful search? Is the failure to find these girls the result of a systemic cultural value that supports the convoluted idea that girls were born to serve at and for the pleasure of men?
Violence of this nature against women in any location in the world is unacceptable. Governments, organizations or individuals brazen enough to commit or support such acts of gender terrorism should be dealt with in a manner of harshness commensurate with their involvement in that crime. International support against those who engage in stealing, buying and selling girls, or boys, must be the rule rather than the exception. The conscience of “civilized nations” can no longer, and must not be allowed to, ignore or trivialize crimes against humanity that occur in African states.
My organization, the National Congress of Black Women, Inc. has been working tirelessly to call attention to the repeated criminal acts of Boko Haram, and we will not stop until these criminals are brought to justice. We call upon all citizens to make their concerns about this and other horrendous crimes known to their legislators and national policymakers. We pose the question to you that was posed by Bucky Fuller, “If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do…How would I be? What would I do?”
