Essay: Prelude To Women Walking Part 1 of 2

I love Southwest Florida and I feel privileged to live here in Paradise. One of the things I enjoy most about living here is being able to walk year round in beautiful parks and nature preserves. One of my favorite places is Eco Park where it is so lovely and peaceful. Whenever I hear a twig snap, or leaves rustling, I turn in delightful anticipation of seeing something wonderful, a mother fox and her kittens, a family of raccoons, or perhaps a beautiful bird...but the other day I watched the news before my walk, and the program focused on the increasing violence against women and children around the world. It so distressed me that the solace and peace I sought on my walk for the first time completely eluded me. At every rustle, my stomach leapt, at every sound, my body tensed, my heart pounded, and finally I had to turn around and go home. I had lost my sense of peace and security in life and I felt desolate. Now I don’t know the answer to the problems of the world, but what I do know is that what humanity is currently doing isn’t working. It doesn’t take a great genius to see this. Everywhere we look around the world we can see that what we are doing isn’t working, and Denial ain’t a river in Egypt folks. What I also know is that Scientists have mapped the human genome and have found that each and every last one of us on this earth can trace our origins back roughly forty thousand years or so to a tribe in eastern Africa. That’s right, every single last one of us all came from the same place. We all have the same base of origin. We’re all made of the exact same stuff. We all may look different but we’re really not. We are the family of mankind. Humanity is all in the same boat, and if some of us are sinking, all of us are sinking. Continued