This Is My Daughter, This Is Your Daughter: Egypt's Blue-Bra Girl

I have daughters. I demand freedom. I will not be a slave nor will I stand idly by for a single moment while ignorant animals of power abuse the innocent. I am a warrior by nature. I have a voice and I have a fist.

Many people want to know why an entrepreneur, lawyer and father with children to get through college took several months out of his life to write The Lotus Blossom. The answer is plain. It is incredibly simple -- I did it because of Egypt’s Blue Bra girl. I did it because I insist that my daughters not be trapped in a world that tells them to be cute, weak and submissive. I did it because I am absolutely fed up with greed and oppression and I know something that many do not. We enslave ourselves. We allow ourselves to be swindled and oppressed.

Before I wrote The Lotus Blossom I saw two photographs on the internet that were so very deeply disturbing to me. One was of a Muslim woman buried up to her shoulders in dirt. She had lovely eyes. She was also dead having been stoned to death by her own husband and his hysterical male clan members. Such a lovely woman, taken by men who are less than apes in intelligence and awareness. For apes , while fully endowed with ferocity, do not know the first thing about sadism.

The second photograph was the picture of a woman after she had been shot in the back of the head having been executed by the Chinese government. I was struck by how she had come to her one and only appeal so nicely dressed in her neat slacks and pink sweater. She was somebody’s daughter. After her appeal was denied they took her out to a field that had been bulldozed to create a berm to trap the bullets that would end the lives of scores of prisoners that day. Three soldiers executed each prisoner. Two held this woman’s arms and the third shot her in the back of the head with an assault rifle. There was an after photograph. Bits of white skull and pink tissue were lying like fragments of a broken coconut on the ground by this woman’s corpse. Her family had to pay for the bullet that killed her before they were allowed to collect her body.

So why do I write with this fever inside me? I write for all of the daughters of all of the fathers who should be standing up for their girls and teaching them to take a fully empowered place in this world with or without its permission. I write because I cannot sit at my desk idly drafting business plans knowing full-well that the world is perfect and that human consciousness is largely a perfect mess. I have voice and I must use it. Even if only a handful of people a day hear my plea, I must use this voice of mine to shout my demand for compassion and justice. I must, I must, I must.

Egypt’s Blue Bra Girl is why I write. She is Missouri’s Blue Bra Girl, she is my neighborhood’s Blue Bra Girl. She is someone’s daughter. She is my daughter. Take a good look at her. This is happening to you.