Saturday, May 02, 2009
I'm glad I went for the Aware EGM today. It was a tough journey, it took almost 9 hours of nail-biting tension and wrangling, but we won in the end. And it was a victory the "old guard" of Aware deserved, for all the years they have contributed to the thankless job of NGO work.
The EGM was an inspiring lesson in ethics, leadership, political participation and passion. We showed the exco (now former) that we didn't tolerate their tactics of seizing power and their authoritarian leadership style. We showed them that we didn't tolerate their lack of transparency, their utter arrogance, their corporatism and their disrespect for homosexuals. We showed them that they had been hibernating since the 1950s and have slept through Second and Third Wave Feminism, postructuralism and postmodernism. We showed them that they had no right to treat us like we were children who couldn't make choices for ourselves on how to live our own lives.
Never before have I seen so many women willing to come forward and speak up, with logic, passion and eloquence. I'm proud of all the women and men who have had the courage to take a stand, and I'm proud I decided to be one of them. This has been a life-changing experience. From now onwards, I'm not going to simply whine about patriarchy anymore. It's time to do something about it.
kaoru said at 9:21 AM
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