Today is International Women's Day!

I checked the Trinity Exchange and wanted to see something about March 8th. There was nothing specific about today in history and about today in presence. The today I celebrated is for me in the past, too. Will it be in the future—I do not know. I celebrated the today with women on the street and listened to women leaders—unionist, parliament members, etc. On this today, I attended lectures about women to know more about them and their struggle. I knew very well today came from the struggling American women. I knew about their exploitation and their fight for equal rights.

I will not celebrate the today I used to; I do not see any crowd outside my window to join and listen to what they say. Am I detached from the past; perhaps I am. I am perhaps I post-celebratory man. I might be someone who thinks about the past and comes to other conclusions—yes time is the judge as to what we did and what we will do.

And I will not celebrate and say “Happy Women’s Day!” I will think about a few women that I knew and I have heard about. I know a woman whose son got taken away by the military on September 12th 1980. He never returned and since then the woman goes with other similar women to a place in Istanbul to protest her son’s abduction. She is one of the Saturday’s Mothers. I know another woman who visited her son in the military prison of Diyarbekir. She talked in Kurdish to her son in the presence of military personal. The military personal forbade her speak in Kurdish; she was supposed to speak in Turkish, which she did not know. Every time she communicated in Kurdish, her son was flogged in front of her eyes. She would cry whenever she saw me, for I was her son’s equal. I heard about a woman who was asked by the military to choose on of her sons—she had three sons--to be spared. She could not pick anyone of them. She said to the military: “Kill all of them!”

I will not celebrate this today anymore; I will only think about them and bury them in my memories for today—Today is the International Women’s Day!