276 Teenage Girls Kidnapped, And Apparently, No One Cares

By

Sitting at work today, one of my bosses came over to my desk and asked me if I’d heard about the 276 Nigerian girls that were abducted in the dead of the night ALMOST A MONTH AGO.

I was deeply ashamed to have to tell him that I had not, in fact, heard about anything of the sort. To be fair and honest, I do not care to pay attention to the news in any capacity on a daily basis. I sometimes hear things at work, and get the occasional ABC update to my iPhone, but otherwise stay pretty out of the loop on day to day happenings. However, the fact that I have heard over and over again about how much of a racist asshole Donald Sterling is via Twitter, Facebook, etc, but haven’t heard about 276 teenage girls being stolen, is crazy.

I will absolutely take partial blame for my ignorance on this, but I want to focus more on the bigger and more important question – did you know about this? Has it been widely publicized? Did any credible US news source report on it when it happened (some are starting to write articles on it now, almost a month later)? How is it that when an airplane goes down across the world with 300 valuable human lives on it, EVERYONE gets involved to help find it- but when a group of almost 300 high school girls gets abducted from their boarding school by armed militants, no one talks about it, let alone helps get involved in the search.

Again, I am not writing from a political perspective – and I’m sure there is one within this story, possibly even explaining why no one is helping to locate these poor girls. I am writing from a human perspective, one that knows that if my little sister were stolen out of her bed in the middle of the night, I would damn well expect people to be actively looking for her and enlisting others to do the same. I don’t wish to go into the details of the story here because I do not know all of them for certain, but I do encourage you to do some research on this and get involved. Spread the word, write letters to government officials enlisting their help, do SOMETHING. Do anything. If it isn’t on us to try and help in any way we can, who does that responsibility fall on? Are we allowed to look away and ignore the fact that these girls are being tortured and sold into marriage simply because we’ve never seen them before? Fuck no. Someone needs to care about them and their families, in the same way we would want (need!) someone to care about us and our families if we ever experienced something even remotely as frightening and tragic as what they are going through. It seems to me that if our country can get involved in wars and politics overseas, we can get involved in SOME capacity in saving the lives of hundreds of young, innocent girls.