A fourteen-year-old Pakistani girl is determined to get an education; she speaks out about it. No telling what she endures in the way of emotional, verbal and physical abuse. Then one day the unthinkable happens: Armed members of the Taliban board her school bus and shoot her at point blank range, in the head and neck. A child. They could not have expected her to survive. But she has survived and is now at a hospital in England, condition "stable." People around the world are praying for her. May she still have full capacity to think and talk and continue her activism—hopefully from a safer place, another country.
Malala is with me every day–in my heart and thoughts and prayers. She will change the world—I feel a shift already. We are wise to be wary of religious extremists in our own Country. I'm thinking of the religious right and their determination to tell us what women and can't do with our bodies, who think of our country as a "Christian nation" rather than as a free nation— and then define it in their fundamentalist terms. And I think of the Apostolic movement I don't want a Theocracy in this country; I don't want to see the emergence of an American Taliban.
I honor you tonight, beautiful girl. May you heal completely, brave Malala.
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