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A woman's scary story of harassment got an infuriating reaction from men

Still, she came away from the viral experience encouraged by all the good people out there.

Photo by Molly Blackbird on Unsplash

With one simple tweet, Nathalie Gordon had the attention of men and women everywhere.

Women who saw her tweet probably knew more or less what kind of story was coming.

Men, on the other hand, were in for an eye-opening ride.

Gordon began by recounting a seemingly casual encounter with a man on a bus.

The conversation between Nathalie and the stranger quickly escalated from casual to obnoxious to downright scary.

"I'm horrified and turn to ask him to stop doing it. He laughs at me," she tweeted next.

When she ran to the front of the bus to report the man to the driver, the driver reportedly told her to "sit somewhere else."

The bus driver was no help.

"You're a pretty girl, what do you expect?" the driver asked her. Gordon had a pretty powerful answer to that.

As Gordon's tweets went viral, similar stories from countless other women poured in.

Several women responded about their own run-ins with creeps on public transit.

One woman wrote that, in her case, it was the bus driver himself who wouldn't take "no" for an answer, actually following her off the bus one day and insisting on a date.

"The stories I'm being told [from women] are harrowing," Gordon explained over Twitter direct message. "There's a real sense of hopeless when you see these messages en masse."

Then men began responding to Gordon's story, many unthinkingly proving her exact point: They just didn't get it.

Quickly, the Not All Men brigade was out in full force. So were the Victim Blamers, and the This Never Happened gang.

Some of their responses were truly vile.

One man even responded by writing a lengthy screed from the perspective of Gordon's bus driver, in which he tried to explain that the bus driver's right to say "no" to helping a female passenger avoid being sexually harassed or assaulted is what equality really looks like because the bus driver shouldn't have to "fight her battles for her."

To them, Gordon has one simple answer: "Men, your input isn't necessary here. Just listen."

"Don't find fault or shout your opinion over people talking about actual experiences," she later wrote. "Just listen, read these stories and be a better, kinder, more informed, supportive and understanding man for the women in your lives."

Despite the critics and the doubters, Gordon says she came away from the discussion feeling encouraged.

"For every guy saying something cruel there's 10 rushing to my defence," she explains.

"They've recognised that women don't want, need or expect to be saved. We want people standing beside us going 'This is wrong, we need to find a way to stop this from happening.'"

"I know so many good men and this has confirmed that there are plenty more out there," Gordon says. "I just hope they are as vocal in real life as they are on Twitter because they have such power if they do."


This article originally appeared on 5.11.17

Family

I told a kid a riddle my dad told me when I was 7. His answer proves how far we've come.

This classic riddle takes on new meaning as our world changes for the better.


When I was 7, my dad told me a riddle.

"A man and his son are driving in their car when they are hit by a tractor-trailer.

Photo via iStock.

(We were driving at the time, so of course this was the riddle he decided to tell.)

The father dies instantly.

The son is badly injured. Paramedics rush him to the hospital.

Photo via iStock.

As he is being wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon takes one look the boy and says:

'I can't operate on him. He's my son.'

How is that possible?!"

Without missing a beat, I answered:

"The doctor is his mom!"

Photo via iStock.

My dad first heard the riddle when he was a child in the '60s.

Back then, most women didn't work outside of the home.

Few of those who did had college degrees, much less professional degrees.

Female doctors were few and far between.

Back then, it was a hard riddle. A very hard riddle.

By 1993, when I first heard it, the notion that women could be highly skilled, highly trained professionals wasn't so absurd.

To me, it was normal.

I knew women who were lawyers. Bankers. Politicians. My own doctor was a woman.

To be sure, women still faced challenges and discrimination in the workplace. And even 20 years later, they still do.

But at its core, the riddle is about how a family can work. And that had changed. Long-overdue progress had rendered the big, sexist assumption that underpinned the whole thing moot.

A very hard riddle was suddenly not a riddle at all.

I never forgot it.

Now, I'm 30 — almost as old as my dad was he first told me that riddle.

My dad at 30 (left) and me at 30. Photos by Eric March/Upworthy and Mary March, used with permission.

I don't have kids, but I mentor a child through a volunteer program.

Once a week, we get together and hang out for an hour. We play ping pong, do science experiments, and write songs. Neither of us like to go outside.

It's a good match.

One day, we decided to try to stump each other with riddles.

He rattled off about five or six.

I could only remember one: The one about the man, his son, and the surgeon.

Photo via iStock.

I thought it would be silly to tell it.

I was sure that, if it was easy in 1993, it would be even easier in 2014. Kind of ridiculous, even.

But a part of me was curious.

It had been 21 years — almost as long as it had been between when my dad first heard the riddle and when he shared it with me.

Maybe it wouldn't be so easy.

Maybe I was missing something obvious, making my own flawed assumptions about how a family could work.

Maybe the world had changed in ways that would be second nature to a 13-year-old but not to me.

So I began:

"A man and his son are driving in their car, when they are hit by a tractor-trailer. The father dies instantly. The son is badly injured and is rushed to the hospital by paramedics. As he is being wheeled into the operating room, the surgeon takes one look at the boy and says:

'I can't operate on him. He's my son.'

How is that possible?!"

Without missing a beat, he answered: "it's his other dad"

Photo via iStock.

Times change. Progress isn't perfect. But no matter what shape a family takes, at the end of the day, #LoveWins.


This article was written by Eric March and originally appeared on 06.21.16

From Your Site Articles
Joy

Janitor and cook stayed to care for residents when nursing home shut down and staff left

Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez refused to abandon the residents who got left behind in the "chaotic mass evacuation."

Image by Carola68 The world is colorful...... from Pixabay

When a nursing home shut down, the janitor and cook stayed with the remaining residents.

True
#WhoWeAre

There are certain moments in life that determine your character. This was definitely one of those moments for Maurice Rowland and Miguel Alvarez.

Rowland was working as a cook and Alvarez as a janitor at an assisted living facility when suddenly they found out that the facility was going to close.

The Valley Springs Manor assisted-living facility was shut down by the California Department of Social Service in October of 2013, prompting a "chaotic mass evacuation" of staff and residents. Staff left because they weren't getting paid, but Rowland and Alvarez stuck around. There were around 16 residents left at the home with nowhere to go and nobody to take care of them. Some of them were sick and bedridden and some had dementia.

Rowland and Alvarez, who have been friends since middle school, had a conversation about what they were going to do. They decided they couldn't in good conscience abandon the residents who were left behind, so for the next several days they stayed and cared for them, making sure they were bathed and fed and got their medications—all without pay.

"I just couldn't see myself going home," Rowland said. "Next thing you know they're in the kitchen trying to cook their own food and burn the place down."

Alvarez said he would go home for one hour a day to take a shower and get dressed and then head back to the facility. His wife was upset at first because he missed a planned family trip during that time, so she drove to the center to see what was more important than time with her and their kids. What she found when she arrived left her "heartbroken," she told SF Gate.

Alvarez told StoryCorps that he'd been abandoned by his parents when he was young and knew how them leaving would make the residents feel. "I didn't want them to go through that," he said.

"If I would have left, I think that would've been on my conscience for a very long time," Rowland added.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

The facility had a history of regulatory violations and inadequate care that led to the shut down, but the transition for the residents who needed to be transferred to other facilities was fumbled by the authorities.

"“The Department fell short of its mission to protect the health and safety of residents in Valley Springs Manor,” the Department of Social Services said in a statement after the fact. “The Division erred in not ensuring, through successful engagement with local partners, that relocation arrangements for all of the residents were complete.”

When one resident started to deteriorate, Rowland and Alvarez called 911, which alerted authorities to the situation the men and residents were in. A proper evacuation of residents then began, relieving the men of the duty they'd taken on to care for people who had no one else.

"Even though they wasn't our family, they were kind of like our family for this short period of time," said Rowland.

According to SF Gate, Rowland and Alvarez were honored for their sacrificial service with an award from the American Veterans Association, a certificate of special recognition from Rep. Eric Swalwell's office a commendation from the California Legislature, and a wave of donations from people who were inspired by their selflessness.

""We didn't expect any of this," Alvarez said. "We've never expected anything from anyone in life."

They may not have expected anything, but their big-heartedness paid off not only in recognition and financial support, but in the satisfaction of putting other people's humanity before themselves.


This story originally appeared on 9.29.16 It has since been updated.


From Your Site Articles
humanity
Joy

13 truck drivers parked side by side in the middle of the night to save a life

Humanity at its best.

Around 1 a.m. on April 24 2018, semi-truck drivers in the Oak Park area of Michigan received a distress call from area police: An unidentified man was standing on the edge of a local bridge, apparently ready to jump onto the freeway below.

Those drivers then did something amazing. They raced to the scene to help — and lined up their trucks under the bridge, providing a relatively safe landing space should the man jump.


Fortunately, he didn't.

The impressive line-up wasn't a coincidence — the drivers were prepared for exactly this sort of situation.Sgt. Jason Brockdorff of the Huntington Woods Police Department told The Detroit News that the response was something local police and truck drivers had actually trained for. But what was unusual was the sheer number of drivers who responded to the call.

"That's a practice we use if we have a jumper," Brockdorff said. "We try to do it every time, to lessen the distance someone would travel if they were to jump. Fortunately, that didn't happen."

The incident lasted nearly four hours, into the early morning. However, once the trucks were in place, the police were able to more comfortably negotiate with the unidentified man.

Eventually, the man walked off the bridge on his own and is currently receiving medical help.

In a pair of tweets, the local police department called attention to the incident to remind people in similar situations of the importance of seeking mental health services (emphasis mine):

This photo does show the work troopers and local officers do to serve the public. But also in that photo is a man struggling with the decision to take his own life. Please remember help is available through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
You can also call a loved one, member of the clergy or 911. There are so many people that can help you make the choice to get help and live! It is our hope to never see another photo like this again.

Working together, the police and everyday strangers saved a life.

Ordinary people heeded the call of service to help a fellow person who was struggling. It's a powerful image that's impossible to ignore, and a reminder of humanity at its best.


This article originally appeared on 04.24.18

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