Saturday, April 30, 2011

a SACRED STORY

Edit Magyar enjoying friends !!!!

I am not always prudent about playing and having fun. Warmer months invite everyone outside to release the tensions of guarding emotions, steeling self against storms. It feels better barefoot, in shorts, laughing, and talking trash, or whispering affectionate endearing words into a lover’s ears over coffee, or in the backyard. All the enjoyable things about living, and being young like smoking a good cigarette, or cigar, eating thick hamburgers, drinking wine coolers, listening to, and laughing at nasty jokes, or making fun of oneself creates memorable moments you can drink deeply from later in life. Living is about the countless moments that make up an afternoon in the park, standing next to a pile of dirty city snow, incredibly good sex, reading the life-changing books in your library for the third or fifth time.  These are a few of my favorite things.

But today I am in the mountains pouring for a sacred lodge ceremony in West Virginia. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

Friday, April 29, 2011

CONTRARY RIGHT


There is no God higher than Truth, though it must be planted deep in the Heart and Soul to become nourishment to all life. Not only Truth when it suits or to get 'our' way or to decieve by maligning the Truths of any other. – Merana Taki

Thursday, April 28, 2011

V. DENISE BROWN

“You don't need a priest, guru, ayatollah, preacher, credo or dogma to find the divine. The kingdom is within you. Creator is omnipresent. That means she is in the brothel or bar as much as in the church or temple. More importantly, he is in your heart. If you dare to look, you'll discover that the sacred is in you.” - Leslie Fieger

Ngaronoa Mereana Taki's enormous aura

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

reparations: White America has already paid the Bill

Paris Hilton in a white top, thick gold necklace


In matters of race, it is the one itch we cannot scratch; the stone in our shoe that does not go away, no matter how much we shake it.



Slavery. And the debt it brings Black people from white people. I’m not one of those who shrugs off the value of apologies — even for social injustice…


Anyone who has betrayed a loved one knows why. No one can really move on until the betrayal is admitted, explained and atoned for. It’s why a jilted girlfriend or cuckolded husband insists on hearing the reason why — even when they already know.


But when it comes to slavery, I think white America has already paid that bill as much as it ever will. And insisting on more seems less about healing and progress and more about Black people basking in white folks’ guilt and shame.


Will a slavery apology pull more young Black men from prison, or get more of them through high school and college? Will it curb the alarming tide of AIDS in Black communities or bring Black fathers back into their children’s lives?


Will it pull an ounce of trash from a rundown Black neighborhood or create a single, well paying, working class job?


We have seen institutions apologize for past inequities connected to slavery and Jim Crow…


Did any of these apologies bring new initiatives for covering people of color or insuring underinsured Black neighborhoods? Of course not. Because in America action often stops at apology.


… I suggest we simply look at some institutions that have already apologized for their part in the centuries-long enslavement of Black people.


… No doubt these apology initiatives were undertaken with the best of intentions. But these apologies, passed without a substantial discussion of the White privilege or Black poverty they enabled, were incomplete — like a thief apologizing for stealing your wallet while using your cash to buy his next meal.


Unless an apology for slavery comes with a comprehensive agenda of initiatives aimed at erasing the historic inequities it created, White America can keep it. As any cuckolded husband will tell you, an apology doesn’t mean much if you don’t right the wrong you caused in the first place. ~ Eric Deggans, excerpt from EBONY magazine august 2007

Parisian woman in streets of Paris by the Sartorialist

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

exquisite elements

bridget moynahan !!!!


“every breath a new birth!” - Francesca Milanato


reparations


A people can only see as far ahead as they can see behind. A future of a people is always to be found somewhere in the internalized image of its past. When the mirror is shattered or warped, when a race of people is stripped of a long-term story of itself, that races’ prospects for success over the long-term are damaged, if not crushed altogether.



This is what European and North American slaveholder societies did to millions of Africans for more than 400 years. This is why America owes African-Americans an apology — and more…


During the Middle Passage alone more than 30 million Blacks were killed. Millions of families were destroyed… Over the brutal centuries, our people lost the value of their labor and their lives, but, even more consequentially, they lost all historical memory — the psychological, health sustaining apparatus of our ancient cultures: languages, religions, mores, names, our very identities as human beings.


History has shown the economic poverty we suffer as a result of slavery can be recovered from far more quickly than the psychological poverty resulting from the organized obliteration of our cultural memory.


… The act of slavery has long since ended, yes, but its time-release social toxins are deep inside us now, killing our unsheltered souls with greater lethality than ever before…


One of every eight prisoners in the world today is an African-American. This is still another discrimination-driven consequence of slavery that threatens the very existence of Blacks in America. Few Blacks speak of this stunning fact — for we, as a people, are now all but wholly outer-directed…


Others less damaged — Jews and Japanese-Americans — who were abused over much shorter periods of time, and survived with their cultures intact, demanded and received the reparations they deserved. The case for reparations is infinitely stronger for African-Americans — heirs, as we are, to a past greatness we have been caused to remember little, if anything, about. – Randal Robinson, EBONY magazine excerpt August 2007

Sunday, April 24, 2011

FORM & FORMLESSNESS

Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend." Bruce Lee

Mineral ritual

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Constance Marie is an elegant woman

CIVIL WAR: former slaves



These former slaves were photographed at Fish Hall, a Hilton Head, S.C., plantation owned by the family of Emma Pope, the wife of Confederate General ThomasDrayton. The plantation was taken over by Union forces following the Northern victory over Drayton's forces in the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861. The workers in this photo were still planting, harvesting and ginning cotton but were now keeping the profits


(Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

Friday, April 22, 2011

FATHERHOOD: the Warrior

asian woman in Stockholm by the Sartorialist


 WARRIOR
"There are two aspects to the Warrior. One is well known and publicized in movies, and stories, and on the streets as bravado, the taking of, etc. We all know this, but what we don't know kills our women. What has been taught is killing the place we come from as men, as the sons of our Mothers, and the Earth, our Mother. The teachings of the Warrior merge with the Priestcraft of Fatherhood in a beautiful and powerful way far beyond the meandering verse of Tupac, Snoop, Jay-Z into the metaphysical domain of Kahlil Gibran, Black Elk, Fools Crow, Lynn Andrews, Angaangaq, the teachings of the Buddha, the Christ, and further beyond form when the spoken word came from the Womb and birthed life forms into Existence, and Mother’s love, and Mother’s Medicine breathed Life into Existence.

Teaching from the great Medicine Wheel teachings requires much from oneself, and a relationship of compromise with the truth of who one actually is!" - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories


pregnant Latina

HISTORY: a story of Black peoples

Jasmine Sendar pregnant


1862 SLAVERY LETTERS


http://ncccha.blogspot.com/2011/03/1862-slave-letter.html

Thursday, April 21, 2011

AMERICAN STORY: supremacy

Bethenny Frankel's profile

True African history depicted by the artist, not the imperialist dictators. What amazes me about this piece is how astounded and overwhelmingly shocked the British were to find that we had been creating art like this when they were still living in caves. I guess that would be shocking, to say the least, to find out that the very folk you've been labeling savage were actually civilized long before you ever thought about it. We have to dispel the myths of white supremacy, as that is all that it is; a myth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBxlnh4XWyU&NR=1
--
Ty Gray-EL, CSMT
Chairman & CSO
Breath of My Ancestors, A Non-Profit
A Cultural Enrichment Ministry
http://www.tygray-el.com/


Joyful Drake, actress Let's Stay Together



actress Constance Marie on red carpet at Genesis awards


Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Pioneering aeronaut Thaddeus S.C. Lowe


When the war broke out, pioneering aeronaut Thaddeus S.C. Lowe cut short his experiments with hydrogen-filled balloons, which included meteorological explorationand a proposed transatlantic voyage, and volunteered his services to the Union. Eventually, he commanded a unit consisting of seven balloons inflated by hydrogen gas generators. In this photo, the balloon Intrepid is being inflated in order to make observations at the Battle of Fair Oaks during the Seven Days Battles in 1862. “The Civil War has been called the first modern war because a lot of new technology was being used in war for the first time,' Knauer notes. The balloons did not play a major strategic role in the war but helped usher in the age of aerial warfare



AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Officers of the 114th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment while away the hours during the lengthy Siege of Petersburg in 1864-65. “There’s a lot of daily lifethat goes on backstage behind the camps around battlefields,” Knauer says. If these men from the Army of the Potomac joined their unit at its founding, in 1861, they may have served at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, among other major battles of the war.  (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)




Monday, April 18, 2011

FAMILY together in 1861

Wives and children followed their husbands



Wives and children sometimes followed their husbands to war, particularly in the early period of the conflict. “(The soldiers) were in the camp, and thewomen were right there and the kids were right there. They called them camp followers,” Kelly Knauer, editor of 'TIME Civil War: An Illustrated History.' This image, from 1861, may be a family portrait; the soldier was a member of the 31st Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, attached to the Army of the Potomac in Washington. View more photos in the new book TIME The Civil War: An Illustrated History (Apic – Getty)

pregnant woman in short top

Child's Play

Child's Play



CHILDREN & FOOD


http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/2011/04/banning-home-lunches.html

“If children were a major priority in this country, and food was sacred, and the making of it was a sacred process I would not object to this notion. But this culture is repulsed by the sacred, de-values its children, and cannot fathom the essential quality of food at the government level. So either way the children are screwed.” – Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories

Sunday, April 17, 2011

NIECY NASH, actress & talk show hostess




“Niecy Nash exploded, for me, on a show called Clean House. She, as the hostess, led a fix-it-guy, an interior designer, and a woman who is a master of details into houses not too many miles from their studio. Problem solvers led by a Black mother approach to personal problems that breathed dysfunction into the homeowner’s lives, and their awful homes transformed the dirtiest, and most cluttered homes. There was nothing demeaning about her carriage, speech, or demeanor. One hundred years ago the producers of the show would have fed into the expectations of their public and Niecy’s role would have been subservient, and felt good for white audiences. Black artists would be seething beneath their appearances, and Negroes would justify it in short-winded clichés laced with pride, hope, rage, and compliance.” – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 

Saturday, April 16, 2011

PREGNANT & famous

Tina Fey at 20th Bunny Hop hosted by Soeciety of MSKCC in New York City

Tina Fey takes a down-to-earth approach to parenting: “I don’t care how many (magazine) covers you’re on. When you’re chasing a three-year-old around with a pull-up (diaper) hoping she won’t poop on the floor, you’re just like every other mom on the planet.”


She felt “stricken with guilt and panic” when her 5-year-old daughter Alice — probably “the only child in her class without a sibling” — would say, “I wish I had a baby sister,” and the Fey recalls how she would “debate the second-baby issue when I can’t sleep.”



“I get up to go to the bathroom and study myself in the mirror,” she writes. “Do I look like someone who should be pregnant? I look good for 40, but I have the quaggy jawline and hollow cheeks of a mom, not a pregnant lady. It’s now or never. This decision can’t be delayed.


“Science shows that fertility and movie offers drop off steeply for women after 40.


“What’s so great about work anyway? Work won’t visit you when you’re old. Work won’t drive you to get a mammogram and take you out after for soup.


“Hollywood be damned. I’ll just be unemployable and labeled crazy in five years anyway.” - Tina Fey, "Bossypants"
 
pregnant mother Sophia Gallegos 37 weeks with twins

"Does pregnancy move the divisive lines between regular mothers and famous mothers, or are there lines?" - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

 
 

Friday, April 15, 2011

FORGIVENESS


FORGIVENESS


“Forgiveness is one of the hardest things to learn, and master. Teaching it is impossible. It has to be emulated. If you embody it you are teaching it.” – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

NIAGARA FALLS 1969

.
A view from the top of the de-watered Niagara Falls in 1969 in New York. Unearthed after 41 years by American Russ Glasson, they were taken by his mother and father in law and show when the famous waterfall was turned off for almost six months. For six months in the summer and autumn of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were “de-watered”, when the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. During that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible landscape

Photo courtesy of http://www.famepictures.com/ 

1969 was an important year for many reasons.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

JENNIFER LOPEZ VOTED PEOPLE'S MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN WORLD

Jennifer Lopez in a sequinned haute hippie mini & Christian Louboutin heels


NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jennifer Lopez has been named People Magazine's most beautiful woman in the world. The 41-year-old New York City-born singer, actress and current "American Idol" judge, joined former winners Halle Berry, Jennifer Garner and Beyonce Knowles to top the magazine annual list of the world's most beautiful people, the magazine said on Wednesday.

"I feel not worthy, you know? I feel happy and proud. Proud that I'm not 25!" she told People.

Lopez, who is married to singer Marc Anthony with whom she has twins, has a new album, called "Love?" due out in the United States in May. Her single off the album, the dance pop hit, "On The Floor," has been topping singles charts around the world.

Asked by People whether she felt better now than aged in her twenties, she replied, "Yes . . . In my 20s, I just wasn't there in my mind and my soul and my spirit. It's just great to be in the position I'm in now and be able to share that with the world." (Editing by Jill Serjeant)



Marc Anthony & Jennifer Lopez 1st UNICEF Women of Compassion luncheon in 2001

actress Jennifer Lopez




DIVINITY: Samyra Gellatly-De La Torrezz

“There are so few Queens today, and historically have been only a few comparatively speaking. I hesitate to bestow the title on you because of its weight when it is your light attracting people’s attention. Cloth transforms intangible elements into a form around the body into an expression of soul. In your story, Samyra, this cloth has engaged the higher part of your soul in a dialogue with the beauty many people admire, fear, need, or desire to hold or suppress.” – Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

MOTHER MURDER

Kristen LaBrie


http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-national/20110412/US.Medication.Denied.Death/  

"What have we created in, and expected from single mothers, the isolation of the nuclear family, and the judgement that follows its failures? Our fear of death, and reluctance to embrace it pushes the most vulnerable, vital, and potent segment of our society to face death, pain, and life/death decisions alone, and what do we typically do? We judge from a distance as if the dilemas faced by those women don't belong to us.



They are our Mothers!" - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories


MALCOM X

“The coming together of ideas that on the surface appear different within the communities of Black America has proven to be the catalyst for resistance among a large segment of America, and the cruel sense of justice the US government embraces. Deep thinkers agitating the consciousness, and the good common sense of average people trying to provide for their families historically become threats to the status quo, and the privilege of the shallow, brittle sense of being American. The defense of America tells the story of its fragility.” – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

Monday, April 11, 2011

ART


Super talented blogger Mia of Hey Lila Hey painted this blogger series featuring Zanita.


Sunday, April 10, 2011

The Curse of 27



Jimi Hendrix

The Curse of 27


Jimi Hendrix

Not much remains to be said about the primal genius of Jimi Hendrix. He could play any style. He reinvented the electric guitar as an instrument of musical expression. He wrote several of the most enduring and important songs of the rock 'n' roll era — including "Purple Haze," "Foxey Lady," "Are You Experienced?" and "Crosstown Traffic" (and so many others) — helping to define several generations of music and popular culture. He was impossibly cool. He was impossibly great. And he died a most gruesome death, choking on his own vomit after taking too many prescription sleeping pills and drinking too much wine on September 18, 1970.




"the Curse of 27 on some of the great talents in the United States has validity, but like prophecy it can change." - Dawn Wolf, Keeper of Stories


Jim Morrison of the Doors
The Curse of 27


Jim Morrison

Third — though in many ways first — in the trifecta of '60s icons who died within a year of one another at the same tender age, Jim Morrison is the one whose death remains the most mysterious. This much we know (or think we know): The Doors' frontman died in a bathtub in his Paris apartment. He had been drinking whiskey. He had been shooting heroin. His girlfriend Pamela Courson was in the apartment with him. She found his body. No autopsy was performed. The conspiracy theories attending his death run a staggering range from "he was murdered" to "he never actually died." We'll never be sure. One thing was certain: When his death was reported to the world, on July 3, 1971, Morrison was 27 years old.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. making a point


Dr. King
“It must be a natural process the way rage subsides, and loses it potency, and becomes vaguely disturbing when we think of the thing(s) that caused our rage to spill out, and into the streets, or history. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's. murder in 1968 altered the world shaping American politics, city planning, police policies, and group interactions... From 1968 until now in 2011 who is alive, and who is dead?” - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories http://www.mlkonline.net/speeches.html 


 

Saturday, April 9, 2011

BLACK POWER: actress Gabrielle Union

Gabrielle Union host Nintendo launch event

ROLE MODEL

“Hispanics living in the United States belong in the United States. They belong here for good reasons, and the fact that their lives are challenged, and is a struggle is wrong and understandable. Their presence is a conversation about Spaniards, the indigenous people of African, and Central and South America in one body. American-Hispanic actresses, and actors deep within the momentum of accumulating power are changing the United States at every level. It is a dizzy stage that isn't clear, but presently they are placing psychological burdens upon the industry. This is exciting and as dangerous as plunging into hell, or a volcano because of the forces against them, and their progress. The acting profession is a perception, and as a prophecy it is a reflection of the hopes millions of people have placed their energies, their hopes into the famous actresses like Constance Marie.

For millions Constance Marie is the focus of their energies, and star of the George Lopez show, now in syndication.” – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories


actress Constance Marie on red carpet of 25th anniversary genesis awards held at Hyatt Regency Century plaza hotel

Friday, April 8, 2011

Thursday, April 7, 2011

A Story Of The Origin Of Corn And Tobacco - a Koasati story



Six Indian brothers traveled about. The youngest did not have enough to eat,
so he left the people and went off by himself. He took nothing with him
except an earthen pot which he carried on his back. He went on, camping each
night and traveling in the daytime. Going on camping in this way he settled
at a certain place near which he saw that two persons had built a fire. But
he stayed by his own fire watching it. In the morning the two persons saw
him and called to him to come over. When he got there they said, "Cook and
eat," and they gave him food which he cooked and ate. He remained to watch
the camp, but when day came those two men started out to hunt. After they
were gone that Indian took the little earthen pot, made it grow large by
snapping his fingers against it, set it in the fireplace filled with water
in which he had placed some food, and kept up a fire beneath until it
boiled.

The two persons traveled about and came back. When they got there he said,
"I am cooking for you." "Alas! (Hiha)," they said, "it is spoiled for us.
Now we must leave you."[1]

"To-morrow I will drive bear," said one of them. Together they went on to
drive the game toward him. They went on and camped four nights driving bear,
and saying to him, "You must drive bear this way." Then he himself went
along the trail. The Indian went. When he got where the men were standing
together they said, "We shot in this direction. The ground is bloody."

Following the trail for a while, they saw some red corn dropped on the
ground. The Indian took it and went on with it. Again they found two ears
(or kernels) of corn in the trail. He picked them up and carried them on.
Again they found two or three lying in the trail which he picked up and
carried along. Presently it was bright in front of them because there was a
big field there. When they reached it, it was something ripe (grain). The
men said, "You must stay here," and they went off. They showed him how to
make corncribs before they went. Then they left him alone. But they also
gave him tobacco seed, saying, "Plant some of this tobacco and smoke it."



Footnotes

[1] This is not clear. Perhaps he should not have cooked the food for them
because they were supernatural beings. They leave him after showing him how
to hunt bear and giving him corn and tobacco.



Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians, by John R. Swanton; Smithsonian
Institution, USGPO, Washington, D.C.; Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin
88 [1929] and is now in the public domain.( Koasati )

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Iman al-Obeidi



"I have looked in the eyes of rapists before, and asked myself many questions. There have been times I have wrestled with the urge to physically destroy those men when the opportunity presented itself. I have feared the terror of rape when young men I know are carted off to jail, and my heart continues to long for a way to be a part of the healing process of the 13, and 14 year old rape victims who sit in my circles in public schools. But I am in the United States, and as violent a society the US is the ravages of a dictatorship have no check system, and so can freely act out their contempt in a way our constitution won't allow." – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

rape victim in Libya Iman al-Obeidi

For the past week, journalists stationed in Libya's capital city, Tripoli, have pressed government officials for information on Iman al-Obeidi.

The 29-year-old Libyan woman made international headlines last weekend after she burst into a hotel housing the foreign press corps. Visibly bruised, she alleged that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by 15 members of strongman Muammar Gadhafi's armed forces. Libyan security then whisked her away from the battery of cameras and tape recorders.

After the widely publicized incident, Libyan officials kept mum about al-Obeidi's whereabouts, and the country's state-run media carried out an aggressive smear campaign painting her as a prostitute and madwoman. Her family, however, said that she was a post-graduate law student studying in Tripoli.

But al-Obeidi emerged from seclusion Monday to offer more public testimony about her alleged gang-rape and captivity.

"I showed to the journalists my hands and legs. I was bound and tied up. I was beaten and tortured," she told CNN's Anderson Cooper through a translator in an interview that aired in part on his Monday prime time show, according to a transcript the network provided to The Cutline. "For two days they violated my freedom ... I want to convey to the journalists that the brigades who are supposed to protect people, look what they did to me."

In addition to the Cooper interview, Obeidi recounted the story of her initial detention to NPR and a Libyan opposition satellite channel. Her ordeal began, she said, when soldiers stopped her taxi at a checkpoint in Tripoli.

Once she was detained, she said, the assaults began. "They had my hands tied behind me," she told Cooper, "and they had my legs tied, and they would hit my while I was tied, and bite me on my body, and they would pour alcohol in my eyes so that I would not be able to see, and they would sodomize me with their rifles, and they would not let us go to the bathroom. We were not allowed to eat or drink. This is because I resisted them and tried to stop them from raping me."

During her second imprisonment--after she burst into the hotel lobby full of journalists--al-Obeidi said that she was pressured to recant the rape claims on Libyan state television. She refused, she said, "because the TV station does not tell the truth."

Details of al-Obeidi's release remain sketchy. Her present location is unconfirmed, but she reportedly made a second attempt to speak with journalists at the hotel this past weekend and was again rebuffed.

"There is no safe place for me in Tripoli," she told Cooper. "All my phones are monitored. Even this phone I am speaking on right now is monitored and I am monitored. And yesterday, I was kidnapped by a car and they beat me in the street and then brought me here after they dragged me around. They told me whenever you leave the house we will do this to you, meaning that I was not allowed to leave the house or see the journalists. I had asked to see the journalists. They beat and hit me and sent me back. Tell all the human rights organizations to return me safely to my family."

Also on Monday, a Libyan government spokesman told the Associated Press that al-Obeidi had made a deal with the country's attorney general that prohibited her from speaking with reporters.

"She broke her agreement with the attorney general by trying to speak to the media and was taken away," the spokesman told the newswire, which also spoke with a woman the government claimed was an attorney representing al-Obeidi in the rape case. "She doesn't want to speak to journalists because she said she wants to get justice through the courts," the woman told the AP. "But she is comfortable, living with her sister in Tripoli, and is in good spirits."

Al-Obeidi has come forward with her story at a critical juncture in the efforts of Gadhafi's regime to clamp down on the work of the foreign media. Journalists working out of Tripoli say they are contending with tightly monitored and almost surreal working conditions. Some even fear that their hotel-prepared food is being spiked with sedatives, according to NPR.

"That was why the outburst of Iman al-Obaidi was so revelatory," writes Liz Sly in The Washington Post. "In an instant, she crystallized the harsh realities of the Libya the government goes to such lengths to prevent journalists from seeing."

It's also possible that the widespread media exposure saved al-Obeidi's life.

The New York Times' David Kirkpatrick, who is on the ground in Tripoli, notes: "Thanks to the publicity in her first interviews ... she may have gotten off easy. Others in her situation, human rights advocates say, are typically confined for years in so-called rehabilitation facilities, subjected to unscientific virginity tests, deprived of any entertainment or education except lessons in Islam, and subjected to solitary confinement or handcuffs for any sign of resistance to authority."

As for al-Obeidi, she told Cooper she has constant nightmares of death and wishes to leave Tripoli, but is no longer afraid.  (Jerome Delay/AP)
Libyan soldiers