Lisa Gibson lost her brother in the Lockerbie bombing (PanAm flight 103) in 1988. On August 20th of this year the man convicted for the terrorist attack, terminally ill Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds so he could return to Libya to die. On September 23rd Gibson met with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation at a time when many American voices were saying that Megrahi’s release was a political ploy and a mistake.

Gibson is the executive director of the non-profit Peace and Prosperity Alliance and has chronicled her struggle to come to terms with the death of her brother in her book Life In Death: A Journey From Terrorism To Triumph. She has reached a state of forgiveness and believes that the lessons she learned along the way can help and encourage others who find themselves on a similar path.

J.B. Rabin: What was the process like to get to the point you’re at now?

Lisa Gibson: For many years, we didn’t know who was responsible, so I struggled with who I was supposed to forgive and love. Like the other family members, I struggled with anger at those responsible and at God for allowing it to happen. It shook my worldview and my faith. Ultimately, it was really painful and I had to feel the fullness of the pain and then give it to God so I could move forward.

JBR: When we receive media images of meetings like the one you had with Gaddafi, it is often difficult to ascertain the level of connection between the participants. Can you give us some insight into whether or not your exchange with the Libyan leader felt meaningful on a personal level or if it was more diplomatic in nature? What do you feel your meeting with Gaddafi accomplished?

LG: I had a dream several years ago that I would meet with Gaddafi face-to-face. I had hoped it would have happened on my personal reconciliation trip to Libya in January of 2005. I did not get to meet with him on that trip, but some of his senior cabinet officials. As you can imagine, it was shocking for them to see my desire to come and meet with them. Throughout the last several years, I have been working in Libya through my nonprofit, the Peace and Prosperity Alliance, with the purposes of overcoming evil with good. So, I also had written a letter to Megrahi letting him know that I have forgiven him, it seemed only natural to meet with Gaddafi as well. But I also wanted him to know about the work I am doing in Libya, to help the Libyan people. While everyone else seemed to be criticizing and mocking him when he came to the US for the UN, I welcomed him. I also gave him a pen as a gift and a card. In the card, I told him I had been praying for him for the last three years since I went to Libya and I blessed him and the Libyan people. From my perspective, it was meaningful and he seemed touched by it as well. I think few can resist true heartfelt goodwill motivated by love.

JBR: It has been reported by some media outlets that al Megrahi was released as part of an oil deal with Libya. Whether or not this is true, do you think that this clouds the issue of his compassionate release, or do you feel that compassion is a singular act that is not affected by other circumstances?

LG: You cannot escape the politics that have been intertwined in this case since the beginning. The UK and Libya had previously entered into a prisoner transfer agreement, which would allow Libyan prisoners convicted of crimes in the UK to serve their time in Libya. Megrahi first requested to be transferred under this agreement. But the US objected saying they had made it clear in the beginning that he must serve his time in Scotland. Megrahi then requested release on compassionate grounds. I believe it was a release on compassionate grounds, but I believe that political motives are invariably connected. In much the same way, US foreign policy was connected into the Lockerbie families civil lawsuit against Libya. Included as part of the “deal” was the requirement that Libya get rid of weapons of mass destruction. Either way, the Scottish government responded in the more honorable way by allowing Megrahi to go home to Libya to die with dignity. It is more honorable and compassionate then would likely be the response of Libya if the tables were turned. That speaks a very loud message. That love triumphs over hate, which is at the heart of terrorism.

JBR: What do you say to people who feel that compassion is not indicated in a situation like this one, where the action [the Lockerbie bombing] was a political one, and where little remorse is shown? What are your feelings about the fact that al Megrahi was given a hero’s welcome upon returning to his home country?

LG: Sometimes it is helpful to stop and look at events through another’s worldview. The Libyans have always believed and been told that Megrahi was innocent. In fact, when I went there to meet the people and tell my story, people were shocked to see a real live family member of a victim. They had always been told it was an American conspiracy.

I don’t believe he received a “hero’s” welcome, but merely his tribe celebrating the return of a man they believe was innocent. When Fhimah the second defendant in the Lockerbie trial returned home after being acquitted, he received a hero’s welcome. There were parades in the streets. Megrahi’s release was much more subdued, compared with that.

Libya has always consistently said they were not responsible for this bombing. Twenty years after the fact, Megrahi’s case was on appeal before he dropped his appeal to go home to die. Arguably there were some legitimate questions in this case. But from the world’s perspective, he was guilty and Libya took responsibility. That is justice in my eyes. Allowing him to die with dignity doesn’t in any way change that, nor would requiring him to die in prison bring my brother back.

JBR: Is it harder to forgive someone who does not accept responsibility or show remorse for his or her actions? Or does forgiveness have more to do with the forgiver and less to do with the forgiven?

LG: From my Christian worldview the Bible has a lot to say about forgiveness. We are called to forgive others, because we are all forgiven for our sins. The act of forgiving someone when they have hurt us is not easy. It requires a dying of our desire to hold on to bitterness. Sometimes people try to simplify it and thereby undermine the legitimate pain that the “sinned against” have experienced. It is difficult to forgive someone that hasn’t changed their behavior. No one should attempt to reconcile with someone who will continue to hurt them. Sometimes behavior speaks louder than words in showing true commitment to turn from their wrong behavior. Even in the case of Libya, we have seen a conscious change in the way they do business.

In cases where it is impossible to reconcile, because the offender will continue to harm us, we can only transfer the case to heaven’s courtroom and trust God to right the wrong and bring justice. We are then called to love our enemies, because it is a tremendously shaming thing for someone who really is responsible. The hope is that will bring them to repentance. Either way, forgiving someone is the most freeing thing anyone can experience. If we continue to litigate the case in the inner courtroom of our hearts, we become bitter because we can’t seem to find relief. If we let God handle it, we will find peace.

JBR: Do you believe that modeling compassion and non-violence to people whose cultures have been ingrained with violence for hundreds of years, will eventually lead to change?

LG: Yes, I believe that in many parts of the world there is a culture of death. If people don’t value life, why else would they think it acceptable to kill innocent people? I am not a passivist, and believe it is important to defend your people and nation, or chaos will ensue. But, we should engage in pre-emptive peace, and that involves building relationships with other cultures and learning about each other so we can understand the others worldview. I believe one of the ways Muslim terrorists justify their behavior is that they think we hate them. When I have traveled to these parts of the world and reached out in goodwill and love, the people were amazed that I was actually nice and wanted to be their friend. I believe education is also important, because changing from a culture of death to a culture of life doesn’t happen overnight.

JBR: In your opinion, is there a circumstance in which a person is not deserving of forgiveness or compassion?

LG: There are circumstances where people continue to be a danger to others and need to be kept locked up. Justice is more about deterrence of future behavior than it is purely about punishment. If it was about punishment, than the sentence would better fit the crime. As an attorney, I understand well that our justice system doesn’t really do much to rehabilitate people. So, if they continue to be a danger to others, than they need to be kept away from others.

JBR: I have a personal interest in prison reform and I’d like to ask you a question that is not directly related to what we have been discussing, although it touches on similar themes:
In this country our model for dealing with criminals is a punitive one, though we espouse rehabilitative ideals. How do your ideas about forgiveness translate in this sphere? Do you think that punishment is a necessary component of handling wrongdoing?

LG: Yes our system is primarily punitive. But with prison overcrowding, rarely does the punishment fit the crime. In addition, if you don’t deal with the root issues for a person’s criminal behavior, than you are just buying time until they are out again engaging in the behavior. That is why I am a huge advocate for prevention. Especially with kids, because having worked in the criminal justice system previously, I can say that kids learn what they live. I never met a criminal who just one day woke up as an adult and decided to begin engaging in a life of crime. The roots go deep and often back to childhood wounds, character issues in upbringing and mental health issues. Unless someone intervenes and teaches another way or gets help. Without God’s grace, they will likely follow the path.

One of the most powerful approaches at rehabilitation involves juvenile victim offender mediation. That involves nonviolent cases where the juvenile and the person they offended against sit face to face and mediate through what happened. It can be a powerful tool for reforms, because it causes the perpetrator to come face to face with the person they have hurt and understand how their behavior affected them. This forces the offender to really understand the cause and effect of this person they have hurt. It moves from being a nameless person, to a real life they have hurt. One of the only things that keep ordinary people from hurting others is the ability to empathize. It is a moral compass that causes us to think about how we would feel if someone hurt someone we loved like that. Many offenders, through attachment issues or other issues don’t have this moral compass. When they really are forced to understand how their behavior has affected the person they offended, and that person is able to forgive them, it can be a powerful conduit of restoration.

JBR: Can you tell us a bit more about the work you’re doing with Peace & Prosperity Alliance?

LG: We are a nonprofit that exists to bridge the gap between the developed and developing world through cross-cultural partnerships between government, civic, and religious leaders that will result in lasting change. We desire to attack injustices such as terrorism, oppression, and other social evils through humanitarian and education projects.

We exist to:
• Build and strengthen relationships between the leaders of the developed and developing world through partnerships and diplomacy.
• Facilitate cross-cultural partnerships between local governments, businesses, charities, schools, religious entities and other community-based organizations.
• Facilitate training, humanitarian assistance and infrastructure creation for developing nations.
• Facilitate dialogues between legislators from the United States and developing nations to explore solutions for the challenges that face nations.

In a new blog post for The New York Times Timothy Egan explores the medical-industrial complex’s resistance to end-of-life palliative care. According to the article, close to a third of the money spent by Medicare goes towards the last two years of a person’s life desperately trying to stave off the end. Egan sites as an example Annabel Kitzhaber,¹ a terminally ill patient for whom Medicare “would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for endless hospital procedures and tests, but would not pay $18 an hour for a non-hospice care giver to come into her home and help her through her final days.”

We treat death as a pathology in this country, as something that needs to be kept away, battled, banished. So too do we disavow the aging process as we dye, peel, inject, lift, and bleach ourselves into eternal youth. As a woman in her thirties who is being introduced to the gradual loosening and graying of things, I look around for models of healthy aging to help me transition gracefully into midlife. But what I have found is that there aren’t any. As I look at our public figures, I see 50-year-old women without a line on their faces, dating twenty-year-old boys, running around as if to say “Seventy is the new fifteen!”

How are we to embrace the end if we cannot even face what the middle looks like?

We have been programmed to intervene in the aging and dying processes at every stage. If a gray hair sprouts up, pluck it out. If a crows foot appears, inject it away. If systems begin to fail, even at the end of a long meaningful life, do everything you can to ward off the inevitable. Nevermind that the quality of his or her life is diminished. I don’t believe, though, that this reflects our deepest desires as human beings. I think that most people want to die peacefully at home with as little intervention as possible. So where are we getting lost?

One such place is in the corridors of the medical-industrial complex. As the spouse of an emergency physician I have an interesting perspective on the matter, because I am able to see through the eyes of someone trained to save people’s lives without question. What I have learned is that because of Medicare’s willingness to pay for heroic life saving measures even when palliative care is indicated, much of the responsibility to navigate these hard decisions is shouldered by the health care provider. The hair in the soup though is that most health care providers do not want the responsibility. Far easier for them to say that they did everything they could to save a person’s life than it is it to sit down with that person’s family and talk about what it would mean to discontinue treatment, how it would feel to prepare themselves for the death of their loved one.

No one expects doctors to function as social workers or counselors, but we need to train our physicians that their job is not always to extend life. Months ago I asked my husband how his day went, in the way that I often do. “Save any lives today?” I said. “Nope,” he replied. “But I helped a family let someone go. And that felt just as good.”

In a post I wrote a few weeks ago about mercy, I commended the Scottish government for granting compassionate release to the Lockerbie Bomber, Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, who is terminally ill. By doing so, they have allowed him to die at home in Libya with his family. After publishing the post, I got a note from a friend who always lets me know in a very kind and respectful way whenever he disagrees with my position. This is what he wrote in reference to the fact that al-Megrahi was essentially given a parade when he got back to Libya:

“You touch on cultural differences [of mercy], but omitted an obvious one…the Libyans. If you look at events in the Middle East over the last 60 years, you will see that power trumps compassion or discussion every time…
The reception of Megrahi orchestrated by the government and his meeting with Qaddafi only reinforces this notion. It may have been noble for the Scots to let him go, but it was a mistake. The reaction on the Arab street will be one of victory over the 270 innocents lost that day.”

His comment got me thinking about whether or not the Libyans’ behavior should matter when we decide if al-Megrahi’s compassionate release was the right thing to do. Should an action’s merit be judged by the way in which the action is received? I understand that it does not sit well for anyone that a convicted terrorist would be given a hero’s welcome upon his return to his homeland. I can see how anyone would take that as a slap in the face, as further evidence that this person is not worthy of our compassion. But if we draw this scenario out to another example, the answer seems clear to me: Imagine if you give someone a letter opener for his birthday and he turns around and stabs someone with it. Does his terrible behavior diminish the kindness of your gift? Does it make your gift a mistake? I believe that your responsibility ends when your friend takes possession of your gift. At that point, whatever he does with it becomes his responsibility. And I believe it is so with al-Megrahi and the Libyans.

It is a frightening position to take. I try to think about how I would feel if al-Megrahi committed another act of violence after his compassionate release. It would be devastating. But as hard as it would be to separate ourselves from it, I believe that such an action would be on al-Megrahi’s head, not ours. I feel strongly that we can only lead in this world by example. The only way to prove to others that compassion should trump power in their lives is by practicing it in ours.

I read an AP article yesterday about Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland in the late 80s. The so-called Lockerbie Bomber, who is terminally ill with prostate cancer, was released from a Scottish prison on Thursday so that he could return to Libya to die at home with his family. The U.K. government granted al-Megrahi a compassionate release, after he served eight years of his life sentence, as “an expression of the Scottish people’s humanity.”

What interested me most about the article was the way in which it illuminated different cultures’ attitudes about punishment and compassion.

Obama released a statement that Scotland’s decision to release al-Megrahi was a mistake. Secretary Clinton is outraged. The American families of the victims are speaking out, saying things like, “‘I don’t understand how the Scots can show compassion. It’s an utter insult and utterly disgusting,’ said Kara Weipz, of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old brother Richard Monetti was on board Flight 103. ‘It’s horrible. I don’t show compassion for someone who showed no remorse.’”

On the other hand, “Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said although al-Megrahi had not shown compassion to his victims – many of whom were American college students flying home to New York for Christmas – MacAskill was motivated by Scottish values to show mercy.” Likewise, a British man whose daughter was killed aboard flight 103, “welcomed the Libyan’s release, saying many questions remained about what led to the bomb that exploded in the cargo hold. ‘I think he should be able to go straight home to his family and spend his last days there…I don’t believe for a moment this man was involved in the way he was found to be involved.’”

Mercy and compassion seem to be part of the cultural landscape in the U.K., values that its citizens continually aspire to possess. In America we have confused mercy with weakness. When I looked up mercy in the dictionary it said, “compassion or forgiveness shown toward someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” In fact, mercy is a show of great power. It is a grace offered to those who are weaker than we are. The greater the act of mercy, the greater the show of strength.

I am not advocating that we let all the criminals go; I think there should be consequences for people who break the law; but I believe that most people who do bad things are in need of help. I believe that violence and crime are a result of desperation, a lack of resources, and the exposure (and subsequent inurement) to violence over the course of one’s life. People who promote violence deserve our pity not our hatred.

But the American families of al-Megrahi’s victims feel that by granting him a compassionate release, we are not punishing him enough, and are thus forsaking their loved ones. Al-Megrahi has spent the last eight years in prison suffering for his crime and will spend the next three months–the last three months of his life–getting intimately acquainted with death. To those who think he is getting off easy, I would say that over the next three months he will be going through a process far more frightening than anything we could impose on him in prison.

The argument can be made that al-Megrahi’s victims did not have the opportunity to die in a loving environment surrounded by their families, so he should not be given that luxury. I understand that reasoning completely, but I think it reveals a lot about our beliefs in justice, retribution, and punishment. The conventional wisdom is that if someone does something bad to us or to a loved one, it will help set things straight if the perpetrator is made to suffer as much as possible for his crime, that his suffering will act as balm for our suffering and for the suffering of our loved one.

Is there another way to think about it? Might the death of a loved one be less in vain if the person who killed them was given a different view of humanity, a chance to retreat from violence and revenge, to make something of their life, to serve their community instead of rotting in a cell, a victim of continued violence and hatred, further reinforcing the negative belief system that caused them to commit the atrocity in the first place? Might we have more to gain by modeling compassion for our prisoners, by exposing them to a way of being they have not yet experienced?

It is too late for al-Megrahi to turn his life around and to be of service, but his release has given us the chance to look at our views on justice and punishment, and to re-examine the principles upon which our penal system is based.

Comment away, my sweets.

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, we are in the midst of a major mayoral scandal.¹ To bring you up to speed: Brand new mayor named Sam Adams. Openly gay. Everyone thrilled! Three weeks into term, a local paper prepares to expose him for having had sex with his 18-yr-old mentoree named Beau Breedlove² a few years back. Adams preemptively confesses. Local papers print headlines like Mayor Has Sex With Teen! Gay Mayor Likes Little Boys!³ People are at first upset about the sex. Then indignant about the fact that he denied the affair during his campaign. The sex! No, the lies! No, the sex! The lies! They launch an investigation to determine whether or not Adams and Breedlove consummated their relationship before Breedlove was of legal age. Adams apologizes to his constituents in a humiliating press conference during which he gives what I believe to be a reasonable explanation for why he lied about the affair:

He says, in essence, that during his campaign, his opponent was out to slander him by sensationalizing the details of his completely legal, completely consentual (albeit ill-advised) affair. He is acutely aware of the public’s lingering perceptions about gay men. He knows that some still think of them as pedophiles or hunters who pray on young men. He knew that once word got out about the relationship that the newspapers would print headlines like Mayor Has Sex With Teen! Gay Mayor Likes Little Boys! and that the burden of proof would rest entirely on him. He says that it is almost impossible to disprove a negative and that if he hadn’t lied, his chance at being Mayor and his career in public service would have been ruined.⁴

As with most political scandals, we are failing to look beyond the sensationalism to discuss more nuanced matters that profoundly affect our culture. Let’s start with the most obvious and work our way down:

The Sex
I think politicians need to agree to a new approach when asked questions about their sexual lives. It would look something like, “It’s none of your business. Next question.”⁵

By expecting our politicians to discuss their sex lives with us, we force them to lie. And when they do so, we unleash our fury upon them. If their sexual behavior falls within the bounds of legality, it should remain a private matter. If they are having sex with minors or with prostitutes who supply them with meth, than I am all for an investigation. But it should be clear in those instances that we are not investigating their sex lives per se, but their illegal activities.

Sam Adams did not have to apologize to us, which he did many times at the press conference, for having sex with an eighteen-year-old. He kept saying that he recognizes how inappropriate the relationship was given their two decade age difference. If it is true that he waited until Breedlove was eighteen, it is none of our business. And I find the need for a statement like that puritanical and hypocritical. Older men regularly court much younger women–often thirty or more years their junior–and as a society we look the other way because we see it as the natural order of things.

I understand that our statutory laws serve to protect our children. But the numbers are fairly arbitrary. If Adams had sex with Breedlove a day before his eighteenth birthday it would have been rape. One day later and it’s a fling. Also, a seventeen-year-old of today is much more savvy than a seventeen-year-old was when these laws were written. If Adams had slept with Breedlove while he was seventeen it doesn’t arouse any different feelings in me than if he’d slept with him when he was eighteen or nineteen.

The Lying
With the election of Obama we have reached a new era, one in which we demand transparency and authenticity from our leaders. I don’t like a lying politician any more than the next person. But I agree wholeheartedly with Adams that if he had not denied his relationship with Breedlove he would have lost the election because the media machine would have spun something sensationalist and torrid from something entirely legal.

The most salient thing Adams said in his press conference was how impossible it is to disprove a negative. That is the kernel we should be taking away from this debate, what we as a culture should be meditating on. We live in a world where people will believe anything. By the time it hits paper or LCD screens it is as good as gospel. No longer is it enough to be truthful and forthright. Public figures must wage constant offensives against the slander and liable hurled at them from every direction. Anyone can end anyone else’s career in the blink of an eye with a few well-chosen and well-placed lies. And this creates the need for public figures to lie even when they shouldn’t have to.

The Really Important Stuff
Adams is the mayor of the 30th largest city in the U.S., a city that has long lead the way in sustainability, green infrastructure, and energy independence. He has been elected during a watershed period for America when the country has the chance to make huge advancements in our energy policy and during which, hopefully, Portland can act like a beacon for cities that are reticent to adopt a new way of life.

That said, Adams’s most egregious crime–far worse than the sex or the lies–is his choice of Amy Ruiz as his sustainability and strategic planning advisor. Ruiz, 28, is a former reporter for one of Portland’s alternative weekly newspapers and “has no experience in sustainability, planning or government,” according to an article in the Willamette Week about her.

There are allegations against Adams that he offered her the job as hush employment so that she wouldn’t continue her reportage on the Breedlove scandal, which she says she put to rest years ago after being unable to mount sufficient evidence to write a story.

Frankly, I don’t care why he hired her. I care that he hired her, that he put an inexperienced person⁶ in arguably the most important position of his administration. It hearkens back to Bush’s misguided appointment of Sam Bodman to the post of energy secretary, his only previous experience having been as deputy secretary of commerce and deputy secretary of the treasury. This was at a time when the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation encouraged the administration to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.” Swap out “loyalty” for “enthusiasm” and we seem to have Adams’s model.

Maybe if we spent less time worrying about whom our politicians are screwing, we’d be better able to make sure it wasn’t us.

I just applied for a staggeringly large writer’s grant. The application was grueling and involved many essays, one of which was a response to the following quote by Virginia Woolf:

“Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.”

My response:

It is undeniable that women have emerged at the forefront of countless fields in the last decades, years, even months. We read articles in the newspaper about the glass ceiling being shattered into a million pieces. We now have women running multi-billion dollar corporations, receiving the most prestigious awards in the arts, and occupying high government office (who can forget the first time George Bush uttered the words, “Madame Speaker”?) Women enjoy more power now than in any other time in history. But if we look closely, we will see that theirs is a conditional power, one that has not reached full maturity.

First, it is such a salient event in our minds when a woman achieves unprecedented prominence that it gives the impression that equality is more a part of the culture than it truly is. In fact, women are woefully underrepresented in the highest echelons of most fields. According to National Census figures, women living in this country began to outnumber men as early as 1999. And yet an informal online search for the names of influential women in the field of postmodern architecture, for example, reveals something quite interesting: nothing. Not a single name. A similar search for influential postmodern artists and authors shows that women comprise about 15-20% of the names noted. In politics the numbers are similar: about 16% of U.S. political representatives are women.

Even more important than the numbers, though, are the qualities of the women whom we have anointed in this country. Politics is a good microcosm in which to examine this issue. Certainly women in politics are at the front of everyone’s minds and on the tips of everyone’s tongues at the time of this writing. The women who have emerged most recently—Hilary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice—are as divergent in their politics as they can possibly be from one another. But in the context of women’s roles in America, they are merely four faces on the same body. They wear the same suit, the same pearls—they are expected to look like ladies on the outside—but their feminine qualities are to remain in the aesthetic and superficial realms only. They have reputations for being “tough,” “fighters,” and “ballbusters.” They must be single-minded, unemotional, and unflinching (even better if they can appear somewhere carrying a gun). In short, they must behave like men. But isn’t this to deny the creative power of women? In her book A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes that “…[women’s] creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men. And one must conclude that it would be a thousand pities if it were hindered or wasted, for it was won by centuries of the most drastic discipline, and there is nothing to take its place.” Doesn’t the masculinization of our women in politics hinder and waste their true creative power, and so deny their contribution to society?

A woman’s strength lies in her ability to be intuitive, receptive, collaborative, and emotionally intelligent. But unfortunately, we have been conditioned to think of these traits as a crack in the armor of professionalism, power, and accomplishment. When Senator Clinton became teary eyed on the campaign trail speaking about how much she loved and respected her country, how passionate she was about helping people, some felt that it was her truest and most authentic moment. But the media eviscerated her for it, calling into question how fit she could be to govern (never mind that Joe Biden broke down more recently when speaking of his son’s death, and was perceived as sensitive and sympathetic).

Imagine if women were given the opportunity to rule in a way that was more aligned with their basic nature. Imagine a president who sat down with her country’s so-called enemies to find common ground, who brought people and nations together, who did not lead with her power but with her heart. Imagine a president who was allowed to become emotional, to be overcome by emotion, and to use those feelings to govern with empathy for those who are suffering.

We have not yet come to a collective reckoning about the value of what women have to offer the world. And our confusion is not limited to the sphere of politics.

Women in business face many of the same challenges as women in politics. And women in the arts, while given more latitude for expression by the nature of their pursuit, are still subject to the predilection of the critics who tend to give more attention to men. In writing and publishing—the facet of the art world I am most interested in and qualified to comment on—there is a prototypical author and a prototypical style of work that continues to be most lauded. Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—post modern writers of the Literary Tome—are celebrated in a way that their female contemporaries are not. These men are the decendents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Joyce, Faulkner, Miller.

When I think of the most decorated female authors of recent times, Joan Didion comes to mind. She is a writer of indescribable talent possessed of a clipped, surgical style highly revered in this country. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking about the time immediately following her husband’s sudden death won the 2005 National Book Award. It is a study in stark, dispassionate prose, as evidenced by her description of one of the worst moments of her life:

In outline.
It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004.
Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

Didion is a highly effective storyteller, but one cannot escape the masculine quality of her writing. If you were to compare her style to that of Mary Morris, for example, who wrote the memoir Nothing to Declare, you would be struck by Morris’s spectrum of expression. Her prose is round and full, soft and warm, but it is also strong and centered. It embodies, for this reader, the great strength of women:

Women remember. Our bodies remember. Every part of us remembers everything that has ever happened. Every touch, every feel, everything is there in our skin, ready to be awakened, revived. I swam in the sea. Salt water cradled me, washing over all I had ever felt. I swam without fear in the line of moonlight radiating on the surface of the sea. The water entered me and I could not tell where my body stopped and the sea began. My body was gone, but all the remembering was there.

Unfortunately this type of writing is not as well regarded as the lean, pragmatic prose of male authors. We tend to take the qualities of men more seriously than the qualities of women, perhaps because they fought or posed imminent threat over the course of history. But now that we are at a time when we have the luxury to honor women’s contributions, our appreciation is often misguided. When women captivate our attention in mainstream culture it is very often a prurient or dismissive attention. A feminine style of leading, like a feminine style of writing, is seen as impotent at best, and a liability at worst.

Women are not the cracks in the armor of this country, though they are often portrayed as such. They represent the possibility that perhaps we might be better off without armor in the first place, that we can value vulnerability over protection, creativity over destruction, and emotion over reason. And this possibility, this force, “has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.” And though women have begun to chip away at the glass in the ceiling they are, alas, still bound by bricks and mortar.