The scale of tragedy

To me, tragedy isn't just something bad happening to someone, it's the loss of a future, of opportunity, take the cliche in cop movies of the partner who is two days form retirement, nowadays we know that when we here that phrase it basically dooms the partner, it's old and unoriginal, but it started out because it works, knowing the character had something to look forward to meant we as an audience got a little bit invested in him, which we needed to be because his death is a motivator for the main character and we needed to identify with the main character to support him as he wreaks havoc through a bunch of people who probably don't deserve to be killed in creative ways. When a nameless person with no goals dies no one care, when we know that they have plans and feelings, suddenly it is worth paying attention to.

Which brings me back to my post from a couple days ago of women who sacrifice their future for another person. I've talked before about how lack of opportunity has probably held back the development of our culture and sciences by decades if not more, how many Einsteins died at 30 of black lung working sixteen hour days in a coal mine for example?

In the case of women we have to expand that tragedy to nearly half the population, see it isn't just about overt abuse, but the cultural expectation for the majority of the world is that it doesn't matter what dreams you have, if you possess a vagina you are expected to put them on the backburner to your husband or male relatives goals.

Cavemen arguing biotruths point out that the majority of the advances in science and art were made by men, they do this to show how men deserve to be in power over women but they aren't wrong men have had an outsized impact on the development of the world, albeit not quite as much as these guys claim, but they don't get that that is a symptom of a problem, not evidence of superiority.

The saddest part to me is that very few people realize the scale of what we have lost, we hear anecdotes like I made the other day, and perhaps we even acknowledge that it happens to a lot of people, but we don't really internalize what that means, in fact we use it as an excuse not to care. Imagine if we treated other things like that, oh the Holocaust, yeah that is pretty bad, too big to do anything about though, hell one of the great injustices of the twentieth century is that the USA did treat it like that.
Or slavery, we didn't wake up one day and decide the institution was evil, we knew it was for a long time, but it was too big, to ingrained in our culture, it took a war to break it here in the states.

What we have been and are doing to women has lasted longer, and affected more people, than any of the greatest human rights tragedies in history, and this isn't to minimize those tragedies! It shows the scale of the problem, we are approaching eight billion people on this planet, there are nearabouts four billion women on the planet today, most of whom live in cultures that expect them to sacrifice for their family, if even one percent of those four billion don't want to do that, but can't escape it, that is forty million women who, right now, don't get to even try to achieve their goals, forty million more stories like I told you the other day.

It's a tragedy of near unimaginable scale, and if it took a civil war to break one institution, and a world war to stop another tragedy, what needs to happen to stop this one?