Amy Miller: “I’ve been turned down for jobs because I was a woman. I’ve been sexually harassed at work and on the street. Men have exposed themselves to me in parking lots, public parks, and my own driveway. I’ve been in relationships where I was expected to cook because I was the only person in the house with ovaries. I’ve cut hikes short because the trail got too desolate; I walk with pepper spray in supposedly safe neighborhoods. And none of this is uncommon—ask any woman. I don’t know how you can be alive in the world today and not be a feminist.” (website)
Amy Miller: “I keep thinking about what I would say to those four teenagers who broke into a Foster Farms barn near Fresno on Tuesday night and brutally killed 920 chickens for no apparent reason. This is one of those stories that send me to the depths of despair and make me think that we humans don’t deserve this good thing we have on this planet. But I realized, after the initial thoughts of vengeance—always tempting, like a stiff drink—that what I really wished for those kids was a time capsule to take them back to some place where they could make a connection with an animal, just one, to know it in their bones and carry that feeling to that later fork in their lives, when maybe they would have made a different choice. I guess I wish them love, as clichéd and ineffectual as that sounds. There’s a lot of talk right now about whether empathy is overrated. But I think empathy is our gift as a species, one of the best uses of our unusual brains. We simply haven’t used it to its fullest yet; we haven’t evolved enough to live up to it. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying.” (web)