Bob Herbert’s Column Today Is A Must Read

We haven’t talked on Delaware Liberal about George Sodini, the right-wing misogynist who killed three women at a fitness club in Pittsburgh. He wrote some very disturbing things on his blog about race and women. Sodini was obsessed with women and sex and how he wasn’t getting his fair share (according to him). Hint: it probably had something to do with the crazy.

Bob Herbert discusses the incident and puts it in the larger perspective of the continuing misogyny of our culture and the violence against women:

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

All I have to say is thank you, Bob Herbert, for writing this column.