Things I'm Doing While Waiting for my Knee to Heal

I've been a LOT less mobile lately. A knee problem has kept me from fully participating in activities, so I've been doing a lot of reading and TV watching, when the batteries on my devices die.

Last night, I watched One Child Nation. It's available on Amazon Prime, and I highly recommend it. In the film, an immigrant to America from the Chinese mainland reflects on her experiences after giving birth to her own child. She grew up during the period in which Chinese families were largely limited to raising one child - all others would be destroyed by abortion or exposure. Forced sterilization of the fertile was the norm.

What amazed me was the frank admissions of those who were involved in the abuses, either directly or indirectly. The women who had forced other women to abort - whether or not they thought the policy was morally right - expressed regret for their actions, not unlike Abby Johnson from Unplanned. They saw the pain they were causing the mothers, and continued with their work.

In Chinese culture, open discussion of painful subjects is considered a bad idea. Better to repress the experience, they feel. The people she interviewed for her documentary were most upset about her questioning, rather than the government's directives and the pressure that was put on them to acquiesce.

I've also been reading Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign. It's been slow going, not because it's not fascinating (it is), but because the book is just jammed with details. Unlike most books about HRC, which either promote her to sainthood, or try to pin all of the evil of the world on her, this one is relatively clinical, dissecting the problems that were created by the personality and working style of the candidate.

The other book I wanted to mention is Phyllis Chesler's Women's Inhumanity to Women, about the many ways that women target women for destruction, and how the women's movement was torn apart by it. Chesler looks at the history from the perspective of psychological analysis. Her own relationship to her parents and siblings clearly influences her thinking. But, the techniques and strategies of women-initiated sabotage are described fully and fairly. You may argue about motivations and meaning.