MountainMornings

I laughed out loud while watching the White House Correspondent’s Dinner last night. The whole “Orange is the new black” about Speaker Boehner; and “Mecare” getting young people into doctor’s offices so they can see what a magazine is really like. And the bit about CNN still searching for their table… I’ll tell you one thing, this news junkie is fed up with CNN. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel started speaking in German at the Rose Garden conference the other day on CNN, and kept speaking in German without any translation, I switched to MSNBC and I’m not looking back. If you missed any of last night’s joke fest, here it is http://www.c-span.org/video/?318916-1/white-house-correspondents-dinner

But the abhorrent act of kidnapping 300 young Nigerian girls from their school by Boko Haram terrorists was not a joking matter, and the fact that Western news outlets took their time getting around to the story only doubles the crime.

International outrage has been slow to build, but it’s coming now – the story has been covered extensively in the media, and girls’ education proponent and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Malala Yousafzai spoke out against the abductions. Nigerians are marching in the streets demanding the girls be brought home alive. #BringBackOurGirls is trending on Twitter.

On the surface, these kidnappings follow a theme we’ve seen across the globe: religious extremists don’t want to see girls getting the kind of education that will allow them to enter the workforce, because they correctly understand that education sets girls on a path to economic independence and self-reliance. Education also makes girls (and women) less dependent on men, less subservient to authority and less acquiescent to the social and religious strictures that don’t serve girls’ overall interests – educated women are more likely to refuse practices like female genital cutting, for instance, better able to resist domestic violence, and less tolerant of discrimination at home and in society.http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/02/kidnapped-nigeria-school-girls-boko-haram-education

Ah religion, I just can’t say enough about it. But here we see again, how black girls in another part of the world are not valued by Westerners in the same way white girls are perceived. We saw it in the time lapse of our response to Rwanda, as opposed to Bosnia. Genocide by blacks or by whites, one trumped the other. Time and again we’ve seen Amber Alerts for white girls, but the black child’s family is left waiting for some time period to pass because somehow that child must be complicit. Imagine what would have happened if 300 school girls outside of Paris had been kidnapped?

The trial of Alexis Murphy’s kidnapper and murderer, a local girl I wrote about before, is getting started this week. Without a body, it will be a hard case to win.

Our media outlets would rather cover a missing Malaysian plane, or a racist rancher’s rant. Sparring with Putin is at least newsworthy! But time has passed for these Nigerian girls who have most likely been sold into slavery. If we can do one thing, it would be to pressure our legislators to demand more resources be used in helping to find these girls. We can also write to the Nigerian embassy in DC.http://www.nigeriaembassyusa.org/index.php?page=contact-us