Ayelet Waldman Quotes
I really hate alcohol. I hate it because it's linked so closely to sexual assault in our culture.
Waldman, Ayelet. A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life. Knopf, 2017.
At the time. the Islamic government supported forces in Sudan systematically raped as many women as they could in order to intimidate the Christian rebels. At around the same time, a village council in Pakistan had ruled that a Pakistani woman should be gang raped as punishment to her family for the alleged transgressions of her brother. African rebels were also using the tactic as an intimidation tactic.
There are over 600.000 reported rape cases in South Africa each year. Since most rape goes unreported the real total is much larger, making South Africa the worst country in the world on a sexual violence scale. There are many reasons suggested for the South African extreme. However, since apartheid was overthrown, all ANC Governments had had a reluctance to have heavy police action for anything and there is a general reluctance to imprison people as this was what the apartheid regimes did. So all criminal activity is relatively high in South Africa.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. The Congressmen who voted for Prohibition in the next century had not read or believed this quotation of Twain’s.
He was describing the way that the Colonial America, Native American communities coped with the adverse consequence of violence brought about by liquor which had been given to the Indians by white traders for the purpose of impairing the Indians’ judgment so that they would trade more easily and on better terms. Since then and into the 21st century, business people have entertained’ potential customers with alcohol for the same general purposes.
At the time, the traders were mostly French who traded all kinds of goods and especially alcohol—usually rum—for fur animal pelts. Many of the Indians were partial to the French and French oriented traders who did not covet their land and would provide the Indians with alcohol and guns, lead and powder while English traders sometimes tried to restrict these items. Many tribes of American Indians are genetically very susceptible to alcohol—both in terms of immediate impairment—getting drunk and in developing a dependency on having alcohol—addiction or alcoholism.
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
