An unbelievable list of ‘perpetrators’

By Letter to the Editor on December 13, 2017.

I grew up, from birth to the age of 14, during a more or less “warring” time, including the closing years of the Second World War. The steamroller of the Soviet advance on Berlin caused many traumatic memories, even for a young kid like me. Those memories would be the stuff of much longer ‘stories than is feasible in a relatively short letter to the editor.

Nevertheless one memory does deserve being included. Toward the end and in the aftermath of that brutal time — including spending a limited number of years growing up in a corner of Europe where the occasional beating of one’s wife, the disdain for any man who actually “helped” his lady doing what’s necessary, where for some years past there literally was no point in reporting anything even closely resembling sexual harassment, nevermind actual sexual assault, where the Biblical admonitions to “obey your husbands, etc.,” were taken to sometimes violent extremes — I learned just how much I ought to, nay, how much I must respect and admire the courage and emotional strength of women.

I supposed men are perhaps better at “fighting” wars, but there were very few men around; most were either still fighting, prisoners of war somewhere, badly wounded physically or “shell shocked” or were on some list of the latest casualties.

But women — grandmothers, mothers, sisters, daughters, though often just as “damaged,” if not physically certainly emotionally — all I can say is that they were almost always capable of the most wondrous deeds. It would take a book to list all the things they were capable of. I had been well on the way to becoming a man’s man, if you know what I mean, so that was a real revelation.

I learned to have the greatest respect for the so-called weaker gender.

But now, well, now I don’t know. The pendulum has swung, in my opinion at least, way too far the other way. One hopes pendulums being what they are, will eventually swing to a “just right” position, where men who habitually say and do things that are so offensive and damaging to women, will know better; a time when the ever longer list of victims and victimizers will eventually grow shorter and shorter. But now, again, when someone is accused of sexual harassment by saying something as innocuous as “what a pretty face,” meant as a sincere compliment (and that statement has been included recently in a list of offences) then I say — and I am sure I speak for a lot of men and women — things have gone way too far.

That’s how pendulums usually go,an issue has to be grossly exaggerated before some folks pay any attention at all, backlash occurs, the pendulum swings a little less far, a little less again, until finally, hopefully, it comes to an acceptable stop and “reason” triumphs.

Ted Kohlmetz

Medicine Hat

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