Susana Trimarco was a housewife who fussed over her family and paid scant attention to the news until her daughter left for a doctor’s appointment and never came back.

After getting little help from police, Trimarco launched her own investigation into a tip that the 23-year-old was abducted and forced into sex slavery. Soon, Trimarco was visiting brothels seeking clues about her daughter and the search took an additional goal: rescuing sex slaves and helping them start new lives.

- Argentine Mom Rescues Hundreds of Sex Slaves During Long, Failed Hunt for Kidnapped Daughter

Out of a horrific situation, something very good. If something like this ever affects me, may God give me the grace to respond in such a positive way.

What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world.

[…]

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

Paul Graham (How to Do What You Love)

Of course, there is nothing wrong with feeling appropriate levels of pride for accomplishing something only 1 in a million dreaming high school athletes will achieve. And there’s nothing wrong with having that sense of accomplishment intensified by the remembrance of obstacles personal and racial. And there’s everything right about allowing your example to encourage and inspire others who watch and appreciate you and share much of your experience–personal and racial. Nothing wrong with that at all.

But Smith’s comment–in its effect–differs only in tact and subtlety from Parker’s. Smith is rightly irritated by the double-standard forced upon Black athletes by a wider society, but he’s not as irritated by the hegemonic gaze of African Americans themselves. He rejects the white gaze but assumes the rightness of the black gaze. Smith’s comment reveals the limits and constraints placed on personal freedom from inside the idea of blackness. Under the black gaze one can only go a certain distance in individual freedom before they’re required to pay explicit homage to race, place, and culture.

-Thabiti Anyabwile, (“I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me”: The Intra-Group Gaze of Race and Identity)
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” - The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) by Margery Williams, 1922
View Separately

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

- The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) by Margery Williams, 1922

(via rebelsigh)

Source: calantheandthenightingale