On TV this morning, a brave little girl from Pakistan, on her 16th birthday, addressed the United Nations!
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education, was given a standing ovation at the United Nations Friday as she declared the attempt on her life had only given her strength and banished any fear she once felt.
“Dear friends, on the 9th of October, 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends too,” she said in her first major public appearance. “They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed.”
Speaking on her 16th birthday, she said the “terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this — weakness, fear and hopelessness died, strength, power and courage was born.”
“I am the same Malala, my ambitions are the same, my hopes are the same and my dreams are the same,” she said to thunderous applause.
The heart of the shooter was blinded by deafening cacophony sounds of cultural and religion radicalism. The group he represented was a blinded group of males who see themselves as the superior humans of the male gender who denigrate all females formal education. If the heart is blinded so also is the mind blinded.
On August 31, 1967 world news from Paris, France was that Diana, the popular Princess of Wales, and wife of Britain’s Prince Charles died in a horrible car crash. Diana was a beautiful, compassionate activist of humanity who was revered the world over. The news was stunning! Nine AM the next morning, I was out on the famed Venice Beach boardwalk with my usual long display of ‘spiritual shock essays’. At the center of the 200’ display, was an easel with a white dry erase board I had done the previous night. The title was simply ‘’Di’’. Below was my eulogy. In near 20 years of active free speech displays, the throngs of people that Saturday and Sunday were by far the most I’d ever experience with my signs. Couldn’t help but see the waves of teared eyes standing before it! Was her life abruptly ended by a blinded conspiracy? We don’t know for sure. but certainly if there was, it had to be another case of blinded heart and mind.
