Hard-Fought Optimism

You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.~ Maya Angelou from Still I RiseAs a child, Maya Angelou was the victim of a brutal assault. After she testified against her abuser, an angry mob hunted him down and beat him to death. Too young to make sense of what had happened, Angelou blamed herself. “My 7-and-a-half-year-old logic deduced that my voice had killed him,” Angelou recalled, “so I stopped speakin...