Always Becoming...: Dear Chris Brown Defenders.....

Why do we seem to think that the future should be filled with people who never say "no" or tell others they are wrong. Hate to break it to you, but not every thought in your head is an "opinion" and you still can be just plain wrong. Just like Chris Brown was just plain wrong to hit her. There is no room for opinion here. It is wrong. Period.

He was wrong, and he should be punished for it. But he was not. I don't care what a court said. A court also let a man out on parole for beating and raping someone i know as well as a couple other women. If you think that court was right, please, imagine being the women who got beaten & raped finding out that by simply violating his parole he can come back and kill you. Or just rape and beat you again, and get another couple years in jail for it.

I come from a place where I see crimes of all types, against males and females, being committed and the offenders getting completely disproportional sentences. Any major act of violence against any one should hold far greater ramifications then a year or two in jail with parole. Because when those people get out, I've noticed that they tend to get angrier and more violent.

We can't sit here and accept it. Nor can we even think to say that he should get a second chance. Because out there, right now, are thousands of women in the U.S. who have been the victims of abuse, who will continue to live in their abusive homes. Not because they feel trapped, not because they have no where else to go (though there are many cases when these are the reasons) more than not, a woman will stay with a man who hits here because the next day he comes back with an apology. He begs and even cries and she wants to give him a second chance. Surely it was just this one time, right? It was my fault anyways. I shouldn't have made him so mad.

Wrong.

A week, a month, sometimes it takes a whole year. But it always happens again.
This is a fact that my mother has drilled into my head since before I was old enough to even want to date. Because she had been there. Because she knows exactly what it's like, and what it leads to.
It is dangerous to give in to the first act of violence. Each time you forgive you become more submerged in the world of abuse. The apologies slowly change and so do the after thoughts.
I shouldn't have made him so mad.
I shouldn't have said that.
I shouldn't have opened my mouth.
I shouldn't have disobeyed him.

Slowly you lose your self esteem & your independence. You soon really and truly believe you deserved to be hit.

And in world where most women never even get to experience any conversation about the signs and cycle of abuse we do not need to be teaching girls to be that woman. Rihanna was smart enough to get out. But here we are taking her place in the cycle. Accepting his half hearted apology and assuming that it will never happen again. Rihanna just shouldn't have made him so mad.

This is not matter for discussion. This is no matter for opinion. This was just wrong. Everything about it was wrong. And we should have been yelling from the very beginning that Chris would receive, at the very least, a few years in jail. We should have been using this at a platform to discuss how awful the current system is for domestic violence. We should be talking about how the penalties for expressing anger threw your fists on another human being should far greater than they are.

But we're not.

We're using it to discuss his next album.
We're using it to discuss is performances.
And we're using it to discuss how violence against others is ok, and not a big deal.