wholepeace

Posts Tagged ‘culture’

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MOURNING IN AMERICA

In PeaceAble on December 11, 2025 at 7:31 am

It’s been more than 50 years since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described the five stages of grief.  I have been wondering how to apply those stages to what is happening in America under Donald Trump, because make no mistake about it, America under this administration is grieving. And I have come to the conclusion that it’s impossible.  The normal processes do not apply.

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America is grieving.

We are grieving those we have lost to extreme weather events, fires, and other climate-related disasters.  We are grieving those we continue to lose to gun violence.  We are grieving those we are losing to preventable diseases because they weren’t vaccinated.  We are grieving the loss of those who have been snatched off the streets and sent to foreign prisons and domestic concentration camps.  We are grieving the banning of books, the suppression of dissenting voices, the attacks on the arts.  We are grieving the loss of rights we thought we had protected forever.  We are grieving the wanton destruction of our democracy by those who should be responsible for its preservation. We are grieving the loss of some certainty, some control, some confidence that our lives will provide us with at least the minimum we need for not just happiness, but survival.

We are grieving so many things.  Too many to list.

And the list keeps growing.  The grief keeps compounding day-by-day, hour-by-hour.

The grief is simply too profound, too overwhelming, and too unrelenting.

How do we grieve, how do we process our grief, how do we heal?  Grief takes time.  Grief takes effort.  We cannot simply move on, and we cannot deal with either our grief or the causes.

And it seems that this overwhelming onslaught of grief is deliberate.  It’s intentional.

A political class that rose to power by feeding the grief, and the grievances of millions, have now institutionalized, legislated, and militarized grief as their primary strategy to keep the power other people’s grief has given them.

And the mourning will continue, and the traumas compound.  We hear the threats to take over cities, to turn the military loose on US citizens, to defund universities, to slam on the brakes on alternative fuels, to destroy decades of progress on human rights, minority rights, on access to vital resources for people other than white, nominally-Christian men, to flout both law and morality at home and abroad.  And the threats are made manifest by men with hidden faces and flaunted weaponry, by politicians who steal from the most vulnerable to give to the most powerful, by politicians and bureaucrats who lead by lies and conspiracies.

Suddenly, those three brass monkeys with their hands on their eyes, ears and mouths seem as though they have the right idea.  Shut it all out.  Stop the noise, stop the pictures, don’t say anything that might cause argument or worse.  But we can’t shut it all out.  Even those monkeys can only do one thing at a time.  Cover your eyes, and you can still hear the cacophony.  Cover your ears, and you can still see the chaos.  Cover your mouth, and you are left with no way to say what everything you can see and hear is eating you up with grief.

And so, our grief is manifested in fear and anger.  We hide away or we strike out.  We cling too tightly to the people and things we love, or we push them away because our grief makes love too painful.  We shout rather than talk.  How can we empathize with others’ pain when we are paralyzed by our own? 

This is the real, comprehensive, most dangerous consequence of Donald Trump and those who surround him, prop him up, hide behind him as they destroy our democracy to build a white nationalist fascist state around a theocratic rhetoric they don’t even really believe or practice.

We need to accept that the process of grief – that long, delicate, exhausting path toward acceptance and healing – is, for now, a luxury we can’t afford.  We cannot allow our grief to keep us from acting. 

The window of opportunity for turning things around is both too short and too long.

There is speculation that Donald Trump may be about to succumb to failing health or failing politics, or he may be around for a long while yet.  But the damage is already done.  When he is gone, the grief will remain, and we cannot let it keep us from doing the necessary work.  Recovery will be long and difficult, and we cannot wait until the next election or the one after that, the next administration, the next generation of leaders. 

The work has to start now.  It has to start with all of us, individually and in our families and in our communities.  The public work, the protests and the resistance are important, but we also have to make it close and make it personal.  We must not let our mourning isolate and weaken us.  We need each other, our collective and shared empathy and support, our common will and our common strength.  Talk together, grieve together, cry together, shout together. 

There is every reason to hope that the country will survive this and have a chance to rise anew from whatever is left of us.  Until then, let us try to turn our grief into positive action, into empathy, into helping each other.

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Maybe Don’t Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself – Do Better Than That

In A God of Infinite Possibility, PeaceAble on February 2, 2024 at 9:56 am

“When you are told both to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love your enemy, it is important not to conflate the two, lest you and your neighbor become your enemy and you treat each other accordingly.”

I just saw a meme that repeated the adage “Love they neighbor as thyself.”  So simple.  So profound.

Except.

The saying assumes (even requires) that you first love thyself.  And there-in lies the problem.  Far too many people don’t love themselves; or love themselves too little to make that love manifest in their treatment of others.  Or love themselves in toxic ways, which they think are love.  Neither humility nor narcissism is necessarily love.

We might even say that many of the problems of the world are caused by the fact that few of us genuinely love ourselves sufficiently to be able to consistently treat others as we wish we could treat ourselves.

See what I did there?  Slipped the old golden rule in.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

That’s because the two ideas – loving others as yourself, and treating others as you would like to be treated – are related.  And they are linked by the concept of “deserving.”  If I do not love myself, I cannot see that I deserve to be treated better, and if I project this on others, then I cannot love them enough to believe that they deserve better treatment from me.  To put it another way, we may do unto others as we believe we deserve to be treated, which is not necessarily how we wish we could be treated – if only we had earned it.

Our culture assaults us daily with messages of inadequacy, scarcity, and fear.  There is a new product being advertised, which tells us that underarm deodorant is no longer enough.  We’re told that we really need to deodorize our entire body. Pleasant, clean-looking young people sniff their elbows and legs, and react with disgust.  It’s not just our underarms that stink, we’re told.  Everything does.  How do we, the stinking mass of humanity, dare to go out into the world like this?  How could we not have noticed that everyone is offended, repulsed even, by our stink?  No wonder we aren’t more successful, more fulfilled, more popular, more loved.  We don’t deserve it.

(As an aside of sorts, the ad shows two young women.  Women in our culture are already bombarded with negative messages about their bodies.  Our culture tends to treat women’s bodies as fundamentally disgusting unless they are properly shaved, perfumed, deodorized, especially in intimate areas, covered in cosmetics to hide all the “flaws,” and covered in clothing except for the purpose of titillating men with their shaved, perfumed, cosmeticized bodies.)

Loving oneself – truly loving – means beginning with a baseline understanding of our fundamental humanness.  But human beings decided a long time ago that our fundamental natures need to be altered.  We decided that we are not enough just as we are.

Basic hygiene, of course, is not really about inadequacy or disgust at the fact that we are, first and foremost, animals.  Hygiene is also about humans having come to better understand disease.  Whether cleanliness is next to godliness may be debated, it is certainly next to healthiness.

A full-body deodorant is only one small example.  The basic message of oppression is that the oppressed are undeserving even of the little that their superior oppressors magnanimously allow them to have. 

And the mass of humanity is made into both the oppressed and the oppressors.  We are pitted against each other and ourselves.  We are told to ask why others should have more, rather than why we all have so little.  We are told, by explanation, that we are competing not only for resources, but also for our level of deserving.  We are competing for love: the love of our oppressors, the love of those we oppress.  We are even asked to compete for the love of whatever god we believe in.  How special can Heaven be, if everyone gets in by default?  If everyone deserves god’s love, then why do we have to try so hard to be deserving of it?

Consider the concept of human rights.  Our important social documents lay out our “inalienable, god-given” rights.  We know, of course, that none of those rights actually come from god, but are enumerated by governments of flawed humans.  None of them are, in fact, inalienable or absolute.  All our rights will regularly come into conflict with someone else’s rights.  But if we truly loved ourselves, and loved others equally, there would be no problem with that.  We could love each other enough to find a way to meet our needs, rather than assert the supremacy of one right over another.  But that would require us to love each other enough to see what is needed rather than what we think is deserved.

The world is changing rapidly around us.  If we are to survive – as individuals, as a community, as a nation, as a planet – we will need to relearn how to love each other, and ourselves.

Life takes us down paths of our own making, but the paths available to us are not all the same.  Regardless of how we are traveling our own path, or where it might lead us, we can learn to love it; and we can learn to love the paths of others, to see where we going in the same direction, or to honor the different direction each of us is taking.  We can look for where our paths might intersect or run parallel or diverge in interesting ways.

We can and must learn to love ourselves, then love others as ourselves; and learn how to do unto others as we all ought to be done, because that is the least we all deserve.

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WHAT SIDE ARE YOU ON? – AND WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE WRONG ONE?

In PeaceAble on January 16, 2024 at 1:53 pm

“A door is something my cat is aways on the wrong side of; and these days I think I know exactly how she feels.”

You have to choose.  You have no choice.  And you have to choose *this* way.  Or else.

This is where we are now.

On virtually every issue facing us, this is where we are now.

We’re told that we must choose a side.  And must do it right away.  Taking time to think about the issues or events, to consider how to choose, or even whether to choose is considered weakness, at least; or even worse, cowardice; or at the worst, complicity.  And then, having chosen, we are condemned by one side or the other.  Every choice now carries significant risk.  We may find ourselves threatened, attacked, vilified.  We find our lives, our professions, our families, everything we love, value, and need, being threatened, being destroyed.

Do you support Israel or Palestine?  Quickly!  Choose!  What’s that?  You support Israel?  So, you have no compassion for the suffering of the Palestinians, then!  You support the Palestinians?  So, you’re antisemitic, then!  What’s that?  You’re not taking sides?  Then the Zionists win!  Then Hamas wins!

Do you support Donald Trump, or Joe Biden?  Quick!  Choose!  Right now!  Today!  We’re taking a poll and we want to know who’s ahead, who’s winning.  Right now!  At this very moment!  Are you for Democracy or for fascism?  These are your only choices.  Ten months away from the election, these are your only choices.  What do you mean you’re studying the issues, trying to decide if there are any other possibilities?  What do you mean you don’t know yet how you’ll vote in the election?  Why do you hate democracy?

You say you don’t have enough information?  Why can’t you see that the answer is obvious; that there’s only one right answer, one right choice?  The situation is still developing?  Don’t you see that’s why you have to choose now?  If you wait for developments, you might choose differently, choose wrongly.  If you wait for things to change, then you’ll be to blame if they don’t change the way we want them to.  If they do change the way we want, then you’ll be left out, left behind.

We no longer have any patience for patience; we deliberately eschew deliberation; consideration has become inconsiderate; careful thought is recklessly unthinkable.

The world has become too complex for simple answers.  And simultaneously expectant of exactly those answers. 

There does come a point in most issues where a decision needs to be made, of course.  Life is always about choices.  Most of them are simple, mundane, spontaneous.  And the consequences of the choices are fairly immediate, not life-threatening, and clearly connected to the immediate choice.  Do you want chicken or fish for dinner?  Choose now or take what you get.  Should I wear the blue shirt, or the plaid?  Choose and discover whether you feel awkward or attractive. 

All our choices then lead inevitably to more choices.  Buy the new sofa and you realize the chair no longer matches.  You’ll have to get a cover for that.  Love that new pattern, but the rug doesn’t really fit any more.  Maybe you should paint the walls, get new curtains.  The living room looks great, but now the kitchen is looking like it needs some TLC.

But there are choices we need to make that can have literal life-and-death consequences for us, our community, our nation, our world.  Some are directly in our control, of course.  If I drive carelessly or dangerously, I may risk anything from a ticket and a fine to an accident that results in injury or death.  Such consequences are foreseeable and require us to take personal responsibility. 

The choices we make about larger issues and events, however, often have consequences that are just as serious, but which may seem somewhat distant from us, don’t affect us directly or immediately, don’t create any sense of individual responsibility.  Such choices, like who we support in an election, require us to understand our actions as part of the group, rather than just ourselves.  These decisions should be made with deliberation and thoughtfulness, based on the best information and evidence available to us.  Quick, emotion-driven choices can create the kinds of consequences that can take decades to unravel.

Choices of great import and vast consequence also have a moral component.  We need to consider the choices in light of what we believe, what our priorities are, what compromises we’re willing to make, how we wish to be seen in all our humanness by those whose opinions and esteem we most value.  These are the choices that are often presented to us with the loudest, most insistent, most passionate voices, by people with agendas we may or may not share.  These decisions should be approached, even if they need to be made quickly, with clarity of mind and conscience, lest we find ourselves in serious conflict with our deepest, most personal selves.

How much of the divisiveness and polarization of our society could be lessened if we allowed ourselves and others to make our own choices in our own way, without judgment, without blame, without categorization and without the simplistic reductiveness of either/or?  If we really want to find effective, comprehensive solutions to the problems we face, we need to learn to engage the fullness of our choices and choose as effectively as possible.  We need to find, each of us and the collective whole, the best answers we can, not just the quickest or most immediate or the most convenient.  And certainly not the ones promoted by the loudest voices or the most passionate.

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What the F**k?:  The Decline of Words

In PeaceAble on January 5, 2024 at 1:15 pm

In the beginning, we were told, was the word; but I contend that there was never a word that ever existed that was not preceded by the existence of whatever it was the word was trying to express.  Eliminate the word, and what it was expressing will still exist, but we will be unable to know it or express it.

I’m going to assume that everyone reading this knows exactly what the third word in the title is.  If any of you would have been offended or disturbed in some way if I had written the word out without the asterisks, then does the altered version also offend?  If not, why not.  You recognize the word, you find it offensive or disturbing, so why does it not offend you?  And if you are offended, then what difference does it make whether I have used the alteration?

Popular social media has become not just prudish, but actually frightened by the use of certain words. They have created censorship and punishment algorithms that weed out those words in order to eliminate their use online.  As a result, many social media users have begun to do two things: self-censor their language, and seek inventive workarounds to evade the algorithms.

In addition to using asterisks or other symbols to substitute for specific letters, or even whole words, as in the title, users are employing a range of tactics.  They’re rearranging letters, creating nonsense words: fcuk.  They’re putting dots between the letters of the words:  f.u.c.k.  They’re blacking out or otherwise simply removing letters: f__k.  Sometimes, they are simply blacking out or leaving spaces for entire words, leaving imagination and context to, they hope, let the reader know what was intended.

And it isn’t just obscene language that is being elided.  They are altering or censoring any word or idea that they anticipate might cause any offense or disturbance whatsoever and alert the algorithmic overlords.  Words such as die, death, murder, rape, racism, homosexual references, racial or ethnic slurs, even words like hurt, are being routinely disguised.  Badly disguised, but disguised.

The censorship of obscenities has been a part of all kinds of public discourse and entertainment for a long time, but it has not always been the same.  Many of you may remember that, in 1939, the three-hour film, “Gone With the Wind,” was released with a degree of both scandal and titillation.  The film decency board had allowed it to be released despite some disturbing and objectionable content.  I’m not, of course, referring to the fairly graphic scenes of war and violence, including a long gruesome scene of the civil war dead, dying, and butchered soldiers laid out in a railyard.  I’m also not talking about the prominence of respectfully portrayed characters such as prostitutes and their customers, gun-runners, or libertines.  And, of course, the film retains the inherently racist stereotypes and thematic elements associated with the civil war era and the cultural norms of the first half of the twentieth century.

The scandalous content that the censors nonetheless allowed was one word, spoken by the principle male character in his very last line, almost at the very end of the movie, at the end of the three hours, when Rhett Butler says, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”  Guess which word.

Now ask yourself, are you offended by that word?  If it is spoken in a major film, or written in a novel, said in a podcast, or public broadcast of some kind, are you shocked, disturbed.  Do you blush or titter?  Do you write an angry letter to someone?  If you knew that word was buried somewhere in the text of a book your high-schooler has been assigned to read, or might just have available in the school library, do you storm into a school board meeting demanding the book’s removal?

We are becoming pre-emptively afraid of our own language.  And we are consequently doing to ourselves what George Orwell predicted would be done to us.  We are reducing the number of words we have available to us to express what we wish to express; and through that self-censorship, limiting our ability to think, to reason, and to try to resolve some very serious social, cultural, and personal issues.

Now, before I continue, I want to acknowledge that there are people who have suffered trauma, or injury, or prejudice of all kinds.  I know that some of those people find certain trigger words or difficult images and representations and depictions to be terribly disturbing.  And even the prohibitions enacted by the censors in 1939 used those things to justify their actions.  Warning labels, ratings symbols, and other public recognition of those words and images have become common.  But alerting those who might be harmed by those things is not the same as trying to hide them away, pretend we don’t see them, or that they don’t actually exist.

Acknowledging another’s pain is not the same as taking responsibility for it or assuming that we must protect them from it.  And the censoring of individual words or ideas does neither of those things, anyway.

Moreover, there is great danger for us as individuals, communities, societies, nations, and the world in the prohibition of words and ideas.  The simple fact is that what we cannot adequately express, we cannot ever resolve.

And substituting other words – or pretending that we aren’t actually using those words – means expressing our ideas and feelings less accurately and less effectively.  The words exist for good reasons.  Even our most disturbing vulgarities exist because they were necessary to express what we really mean.  And when we can no longer use those words, or they have lost their power, we must find new words for them.  If we don’t do that, then our most powerful thoughts and emotions will have no place to be expressed except through the power, often turned into violence, of our actions.

We used to talk about the marketplace of ideas, where everyone would be free to express themselves, so that their ideas could be tested, discussed, challenged, argued.  The end result would be, we were told, a natural evolution of thought, reasoning, knowledge, arts. Even faith, belief, and opinion would have a chance to be expressed and subjected to the forces of the marketplace.  But a healthy market, a vibrant, functioning market, requires more than just a limited number of choices, more than just either/or.

A healthy, vibrant market also requires that everyone have access to the market, and currency to spend.  Language is the currency of ideas.  Words are the tender by which we buy and sell our ideas, our knowledge, our beliefs.  When control of that currency is taken out of the market place, when the powerful have access to all the words they need to get what they want, but the rest of us are told we must be frugal, we must sacrifice, we must learn to live with less, then the market collapses and takes us all down with it.

If we are to save our democracy, if we are to make progress on the issues that challenge us, we need to have the words.  If we cannot talk honestly and truthfully, using the appropriate words, then we cannot solve the problems we face.

Now, we know that there are forces within the culture who want exactly that.  They want to keep us from talking about racism, about abortion, about homosexuality, about science, about the broad spectrum and diversity of faith and belief, about human rights, about the environment, about all those things (and this is nowhere near to a comprehensive list) that must be dealt with if we are to survive as a society as a people, as a world.

We must learn not to be afraid of our words.  The words themselves are not the problem.  The problem lies in what we need the words to express.  Sometimes, the words will seem be hurtful, they will be difficult to hear, we will struggle to understand them, we will be made uncomfortable by them; but it is the ideas, not the words, that are hurtful, difficult, misunderstood, uncomfortable, challenging.

So, let us reclaim the words.  Use them.  All of them.  The beautiful and the ugly ones; for as long as both beauty and ugliness exist in the world, they will need to be expressed.

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Just Do Something, Anything — except solve the problem.

In No Particular Path on February 27, 2022 at 10:28 am

The climate crisis is worsening, so we debate whether to pass a carbon tax or just keep recycling.  Should we go with wind power, solar, or thermal?  Maybe we should go back to building big dams.  Nah, let’s just call fossil fuels like natural gas “transitional,” and discuss the possibilities of “clean coal.”

Overt racism and misogyny are reenergized.  Let’s make a mixed-race woman Vice-President.  We’ll appoint an African American woman to the Supreme Court.  Nah, how about we just stop our kids from reading or talking about these things.  Also, let’s make sure they don’t see any of it on television.

Our LGBTQ+ youth are committing suicide at an alarming rate.  Let’s set up a hotline.  Or we could just make being trans illegal.

The country’s wealth gap is widening and the middle class is disappearing.  Let’s raise the minimum wage inadequately, let’s increase taxes tentatively on the super wealthy.  Or let’s just promote exciting stories about billionaires doing exciting things with their obscene wealth; like trying to end a disease somewhere or grow food somewhere else.  Or something really exciting, like building their own space ships and making even more money charging other super-rich people millions of dollars for space-tourism adventures.

Pick a problem. Any problem.  Now slip it back into the deck.  And is this your card?  The one that says, “All right.  Let’s . . . do . . . well . . . something.  Surely there’s a law we can pass, someone we can give an honor to, or a day or a week or a month we can spend talking about good stuff peripherally related to it.  Is there someone we can bomb?”  Or is it this one, with the picture of the ostrich looking for a hole to put its head in?  And the holes are labelled things like “ban it,” “oppress it,” “deny its existence,” and “call it socialist.”

We are most certainly a more polarized citizenry than I can remember our being in my lifetime.  Far too many of us are living at the extremes, and the things we want to do, believe we need to do, defy compromise.  But the fundamental problem isn’t our divided society, it’s something we all seem to agree on, though we may not realize it.

We prefer actions over solutions.

Solutions are hard.  Actions are easy.  Solutions can be expensive.  Actions can be cheap.  Solutions take time and patience.  Actions are quick and we can say we did something right away.  Solutions require all, or nearly all, of us to be part of them.  Actions can be done by those few people we elect to do those things so we don’t have to worry about them, or by those who want to do them.

So, we eschew solutions to our problems in favor of an action here, an action there; like taking one lick every few years at a lollipop, thinking we’ll eventually get to the special treat in the center.  Or our kids will.   Or their kids.  As long as we, and they, can keep licking.

And we think it’s a virtue.  Compromise and patience are always good things.  Better to do something than nothing.  And there is some truth in that.  Each extreme sees their actions as doing something good.  And the things we may do aren’t necessarily bad things to do.  Some of them make a real positive difference in people’s lives.  Maybe other people’s lives, or maybe just our own.  But they make a difference.

Allow me to interject here, that I am a progressive, and I have some very strong opinions about which actions are doing good and which are causing unconscionable harm.  I have debated these things elsewhere, and will continue to do so.  For the moment, though, I want to focus specifically on solutions versus actions.

Within the political divisions currently playing out, the differences in our actions have, themselves, become destructive, even deadly.  Now, more than ever, we need a larger plan.  We need to be working more comprehensively on solutions, not just chipping away at our problems on one side and trying to bury them on the other.

I have said before that there are no isolated incidents.  There are no problems that exist without context.  Like our natural world, our personal, social, economic, and political realities are an ecological system in which everything is connected.  The wealth gap, for example, is not simply a problem of our capitalist economic system.  It exists within a context of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, sexual and gender bias, religious intolerance and self-righteousness, white male privilege, and the destructive exploitation of the natural environment.  That isn’t even close to an exhaustive list.

And the effects are reciprocal.  Racism isn’t a separate problem that can be solved separately.  The climate crisis cannot be resolved in isolation from the economic imbalances or racial prejudices.  You see abortion as a problem?  You cannot ignore poverty, ignorance, racism, or misogyny.

This is what has been behind ideas such as the Green New Deal.  This is what we can learn from critical race theory (the real thing, not the bastardized versions being promoted on the right).  This is why we need science and the arts and history and philosophy, all of these, as part of the discussion.

We do need to prioritize, to triage, of course.  We do need to see that this will take time.  But we need to start seeing everything we do as part of a larger plan, a comprehensive solution that looks beyond the current actions and imagines a better world.  And our actions need to be larger, bolder.  We need persistence as well as patience.  We need courage to tackle the hard work, commitment to spend the necessary resources, the wisdom to see that the solutions will never be just about us, about what we will gain individually or group by group.  Patience isn’t license to procrastinate, it’s being willing to take the time to do it right.  Compromise, properly employed, isn’t about finding some imaginary middle between two extremes, it’s about being willing to see that there can be no solution that will not require something of us that we do not yet want to give.

It is way past time to stop taking actions, and start finding solutions.

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COULD WE END RACISM IF WE STOPPED BEING WHITE?

In PeaceAble on June 12, 2020 at 4:44 pm

If any of my fair-skinned friends wants to begin to understand racism as a systemic problem in American culture, a good place to start is with Tanehisi Coates’ book “Between the World and Me.”  You will barely get started in the first section of the book before you will be confronted with two revelatory ideas.

The first of these is that “race is the child of racism, not the father.”

Think about that for a moment.  We know that race is a social construct, that there is no biological basis for separating humans into races based on external physical features.  Claiming that a dark skin is evidence of a separate race is no more based in fact than claiming that detached earlobes are.  But the implications of the statement are more profound than that.

The statement tells us that humans did not see color, decide that races existed, and then became racist.  Rather, we needed a reason to justify de-humanizing those we would dominate, and the invention of race gave us that reason.  And by “we” I mean white people, for who else has benefitted more than we have from the invention of race?  We have used it to justify conquering and subjugation, colonialism, genocide, rape, and more – a very long list of atrocities that were easier to commit as long as the victims were not as human as we were.

Which then brings Coates, and his readers, to the second idea.  Being “white” is a myth, an illusion, what Coates refers to throughout the book as a “dream.”

We aren’t, after all, actually white.  We’re varying shades of a sort of pink beige, turning more brown or red with exposure to the summer sun, and more pale and yellow in the winter.  But being white has become such an immutable part of our identity; so fundamental to how we see not just ourselves, but the whole world and our place in it, that it is the beginning of how we relate to everything else.  The whole structure of the canon of western civilization, its art, literature, science, history, religion, philosophy depend on it.  We measure human progress by its relationship to our own whiteness.

If we weren’t white, what would we then use to determine who the “others” are?  What other characteristics of humankind have the breadth, the scope of race?  If “white” did not exist, would black, brown, yellow, or red also disappear?  After all, those colors are as inaccurate in describing other races as white is in describing us.

We might still divide up humankind by ethnicity, by nationality, by language, by culture; but wouldn’t those things first require us to recognize the fundamental humanity at the heart of those differences?  Once we have identified race as the controlling factor, once we have determined the inherent inferiority of the other on the basis of race, then we can judge their accomplishments, their civilizations as inferior by default.  But if we had to start by dealing with all those things that humans create, it would be more difficult to dismiss their creators as less than human.

Calling our whiteness a dream has other implications as well. 

Dreams are more than just fantasies or illusions.  They are, first of all, associated with sleep.  If the core of our racial identity is a dream, then we are asleep in our reality.  And what happens to our dreams when we awaken?  To be “woke” is to have roused ourselves from the dream; to have left it behind in the darkness.

A dream is also either an aspiration or a fear.  When our dreams become nightmares, they express those things we most fear.  We may wake from them sweating, our hearts pounding, confused and terrified.  Leaving them behind is difficult, the fear remains.  When our dreams are desires, they give us goals, and light our way.  But if we dream too big, the aspirations can become traps.  If we cannot become all that we dream we are or could be, how do we reconcile that, if the dream is of our innate superiority?

We find that we need the dream, because without it, all our fears and aspirations are merely the consequence of being no more or less human than those the dream does not include.

So, I think that I need to try to stop being white.

But how does one, especially in one’s seventies, shed one’s race?  I’m certainly not going to dye my skin, get plastic surgery, alter my birth.  And those things would be lies, anyway.  If I am to be something other than white, it has to be real.  And it has to come to terms with all those decades of whiteness that already live inside my skin.

Baby steps.

If whiteness is an illusion, how do I step outside of it?  If it is a dream, how do I wake up?

Another point that Coates makes, one that I already knew but the context is important, is that naming is an act of power.  I would also call it an act of creation.  We cannot name a thing until we have knowledge of its existence.  And when we name it, we say how it is to be perceived, judged, related to.  We define it.  We say what its fundamental characteristics are, and what connotations we are to draw from it.  We say what is our power over it, or its power over us.

To define something is to limit it, to enclose it in our perceptions; and to try to imprison it there.  Our words for things are the first steps in creating and controlling our reality.

So, the first step in changing our reality is to change the names we use for it.  This is an idea that has long existed in therapy.  Reframe the experience, name the feeling.  We do not need to be the victims of our lexicons, we can take control.

I am becoming more aware every day now of how much of my perceptions of the world and my place in it have been founded in my whiteness.  Many of my successes have been made easier because I am white, have been expected because I am white, assumed because I am white.  And my failures, my fears, my shortcomings have been amplified by those same privileges, expectations and assumptions.

So, what happens if I reframe my whiteness.

I have, for most of my adult life, played with the idea of the mongrel.  I have often joked that we are all mongrels.  I have bemoaned, in my humor, the lack of cultural or group identifiers for mongrels.  We have no traditions, no flag, no songs, no creed, no signs of belonging or loyalty, no natural gathering places.

But it turns out that it’s not really a joke.  None of us has a singular ancestry beyond a few generations, insignificant in the span of human existence.  We’re all mutts.

I’ll start small on my way to mongrelization.  From now on, when faced with some official form that asks me to say my race, I will respond not white, but other.  If required to explain, I will say that I am mongrel, or perhaps “mixed-blood.”  Didn’t we create laws that claimed a single drop of black blood made one black?  So, I will embrace all the drops within me.  I will be them all.

I think we should start a movement – an awakening, if you will – toward the end of the white race; and the rise of the mongrel. 

Anyone can join.  Anyone who wishes to shed the skin that whiteness has trapped them in can become a mongrel.  But it is most important that white people go first, because as long as there are white people, there will also be the others.  And as long as we continue to dream our own whiteness, we will never awaken to the full possibility of being simply human.

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Thugs with Grievances and Very Fine People With Guns

In PeaceAble on May 29, 2020 at 12:16 pm

The question being asked by a lot of white people on social media this morning:

Why do these rioters destroy their own neighborhoods, loot and burn, and risk a violent, perhaps deadly response from the police?  Don’t they know that just makes them look bad and hurts their cause?

Now, let’s set aside for the moment the fact that these people were not asking a similar question of armed white people storming state capitols and threatening violence, talking about lynching and assassination and so forth.  Don’t they know that just makes then look bad and hurts their cause?

Although the answers to these questions are related in two ways.

I’ll start with the question that is being asked, then show how that question and the other non-question are related.

And I’ll begin by asking another question.

Why do prisoners, when they riot, destroy their prison: looting and burning, risking a violent response from the guards?

Because they don’t have much to lose.

And don’t try to say, “Oh, but that’s different,” because it is only different in degree, not in kind.

We used to call them ghettos, but they were always prisons.

We now call it the inner city, but it’s a prison just the same.

We call them the projects, or the neighborhoods, but they’re still prisons.

And the chances for a kid growing up in the inner city ever escaping from the systemic poverty, the institutionalized racism, the disastrously inadequate education, the oppressive living conditions, and the constant threats of violence from within and without are just about as few and far between as the chances of escape or release from prison.

And the chance that people living under those conditions have always been and will always be treated by major segments of society as less-than-human, even if they try to follow all the rules, do the “right” things, and manage to get out are pretty substantial.

So why not burn it down?  Why not burn down the physical manifestation of your imprisonment?  And why not, while you’re at it, take whatever you can get away with?  You’re unlikely to get it any other way.  And it’s going to burn, anyway, if you don’t take it.  And it’s a way of saying to those outside that the longer you deny us not just the basic, but even the least more than that which would make life more than just survival, that would liberate us even a little bit from the prisons you have put us in; the more our anger, our fear, our grief and our need will fester and grow until it again explodes into what makes you ask the question and not see the answer, just as you don’t see us.

And why should we risk violence, even death, at the hands of the police?  Hell, we do that every day, sometimes without even getting out of bed!

And how is that related to the second question?  I mean aside from fairly obvious racial and other issues of prejudice?

They both have to do with fear.  There is reasonable fear and unreasonable fear; and as a society we have routinely, historically, gotten them confused.

The people asking the question are afraid of the people doing the rioting.  They are afraid of them even if they are merely demonstrating.  They are afraid of them even if they are doing nothing.  They are afraid of them because our culture, our society has spent hundreds of years and enormous amount of resources convincing them, teaching them, to fear those other people.  Not to fear them because of what they have done, but because of what we have done to them.  To fear them because of who they simply are, which is the other.

After centuries during which white people took whatever they wanted, by whatever means they could, from other people, they are afraid that the others will take what they have – or take back what was taken.

And the culture has also spent those centuries teaching us all, convincing us all that when you are afraid, the appropriate response is to arm yourself, and the people with the most dangerous weaponry are to be admired and respected.  Corollary to that, we have been taught that those with the most destructive power have the right to use that power to do whatever they want, because if you don’t let them then they will use that power against us – and it will be our own fault for not properly respecting the people with the power.

We have, in other words, been told that the people without power are to be feared, and the people with power are to be respected.  Until the moment when the others realize that they, too, have power; at which point they are to be put down because that realization is all the evidence needed to prove that fear of them was warranted.

We have also been taught that when groups of white people take up arms against the authorities, and people are injured or killed as a result, it is the authorities who are to blame, not the groups of armed white people.  But when the others do it, the authorities are praised, not blamed. 

You do see how backwards all that is, right?  And how obviously true?  Because if you don’t see it, then you will never find the truth you claim to be seeking when you ask the question.

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Gallivan’s Travels: The Choices We Make in the World We Live In

In Gallivan's Travels on January 18, 2020 at 7:36 pm

Sometimes you have a destination and you want to get there as quickly as possible. Other times you just want to travel, so you can take it slow and enjoy the scenery. And sometimes you want to reach as perfect as possible a compromise between the two.
And then there are the times you think you you know what you want, but life steps in and changes your plans.
I am not a big fan of the interstates. Most of the time I prefer to travel the secondary highways and less travelled roads. So, before we left Lums Pond State park, near St. Georges Delaware, I consulted my road atlas (much more useful for this kind of planning than a GPS app) and plotted a route south on US 301. We had a destination – a state park just outside of Richmond, VA. We wanted to get there at a reasonable hour, but didn’t want to rush. Also, we knew that we were likely to encounter some messy weather along the way.
US 301 is nice road to take south if you want to avoid the interstates. From St. Georges almost to the Maryland line it’s a well-maintained 4-lane with a wide, grassy media separating the north and south lanes, and relatively little civilization along the edges. I imagine the trees and fields must be gorgeous in the spring and summer. There was one toll just before the state line (I generally like to avoid tolls).
The scenery began to change a bit in Maryland, but the road still moved along well with little traffic. As son as we began to see signs for the Bay Bridge, however, the road expanded to 6 0r 8 lanes, and it got a little crowded. All in all, though, it was till preferable to the stress and pace of I95. Things stayed that way until we got within spitting distance of D.C., when we turned south again, and the road quieted down.
And the weather turned colder and wetter.
But we had our destination, we were still making good time, and we were looking forward to a relaxing evening in the campground and perhaps a short tour of Richmond tomorrow.
Then we got a phone call from someone back home in RI.
Be careful in Richmond, she said, the governor has declared a state of emergency ahead of the big gun rights rally planned next week. The FBI just arrested four men who were planning on bringing military-style rifles to the capitol. There have been weeks of online threats of violence, including white-supremacist sites calling for a “bugaloo,” the precursor to a race war.
Now, quite apart from the political and constitutional issues involved here, we are not the sort of people who feel comfortable driving deliberately into a place where there may be people with large guns thinking about actually shooting people.
Suddenly, Richmond was out as a tourist stop this week. And our campsite just outside the city seemed too close to the action, too. Who knew whether it might be filling up already with people plotting violence.
Now, before anyone starts talking about good guys with guns and police presence and “paranoia,” think about this. How many people might choose differently about going to a rally, or a concert, or a theater, or a church or a school if they knew that there might be even one person there, never mind possibly dozens, who was threatening violence and would bee heavily armed? The original planners of the Richmond event claim to have wanted peaceful protest, said they represent responsible gun ownership; but somewhere along the line, they lost control of the situation. It is (to put it mildly) ironic that a rally to protect the rights of responsible gun owners could turn so quickly into a display of the most dangerously irresponsible use of them.
But that is the world we live in now – not just around gun rights, but around a lot of issues. We have to make what used to be simple decisions about where we go and what precautions we take based on the unpredictable behavior of people who want us to be afraid.
Now, our original plan was to hurry up to Richmond tonight, take a stroll through the city tomorrow, then make a leisurely drive to visit family in Greenville, NC. We would arrive early enough for conversation, games, and a special dinner. We’d have time to adore and exclaim over our obviously talented and brilliant grandson, and then sleep in a real bed one night before going on our way.
Then the texts started coming and going. There were scheduling conflicts. Complicated family dynamics meant juggling different sets of parents and step-parents on the same day. How many nights did we want to stay, could we arrive this time rather than that time, and, oh yeah, there’s this other thing happening if you wanted to come that night instead of this one. So the leisurely trip became a destination, and the desire to avoid the interstates ringing Richmond meant going the long way around.
And that also is the way of the world right now. It’s harder to be spontaneous, even with family. We live far apart, and we have blended families and broken families and too many permutations of our relationships. We can’t just call up and say, hey, we’re ten minutes away, just passing through, and how about we bring you dinner or dessert, or a nice bottle of wine, and we hang out for a while.
Now everything has been sorted out, of course. One of the advantages of traveling in a small motor home and not having to get back to jobs or other responsibilities is that we can be flexible. We can adjust. Richmond will, I hope, still be there on our way back north in a few weeks. Family can be visited again when we might hope for a smoother connection. There will almost always be a way to choose the roads less travelled if we want to, or take the highway when we need to.
The complicated can usually be simplified.
And that, to, is the world we live in.

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Notre Dame is Burning — Long Live Notre Dame

In No Particular Path on April 15, 2019 at 4:48 pm

Notre Dame de Paris is burning.

The date is April 15, 2019. The great cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is burning. As I write this, the roof is destroyed, the great spire has collapsed. I do not yet know if the rose window remains, or the fate of the great works of art that lived inside the cathedral walls. Most are likely gone forever. The building itself may be rebuilt, the parts that survive the fire, the great stone works, may be restored. Yet what remains or what comes next will never be what was.
This is the way of the works of men.
An irony in the tragedy is that it seems likely that the fire struck as restoration on the cathedral was beginning. Notre Dame was dying, crumbling under the weight of more than seven centuries. And a decision had been made to restore it, to give it new life, to keep it a while longer.
I think we may suppose that, like so much else that humans have put upon the Earth, it was inevitable that humans would destroy it, or the Earth would bring it down and cover it over. But this was not supposed to be the time. This was not supposed to be the way. Surely, those who wanted to restore it must have believed they could give it at least some greater measure of immortality, of permanence, however illusionary they might prove in some distant end.
I have often wondered at this idea of the immortality of the works of humans. What is it that drives us to preserve certain select pieces of the past, with the expectation that the future will value them as we do?
There have, at times, been movements in the arts which have celebrated impermanence. The “Happenings” of the 20th century, the works of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude are high profile examples. But how many of us have built sand castles, drawn on sidewalks with chalk, marveled at ice sculptures, or gasped at fireworks displays. Some arts are by their very nature impermanent. Any live performance is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Every time an actor or a dancer or a musician goes before an audience, the event is new, fleeting, impermanent. Even as long as there are humans to remember it, the memories themselves are shadows of the original.
We can, of course, record these things, just as we will continue to have photographs and paintings and literary descriptions of Notre Dame to helps us remember its grandeur. But our records and our recordings are not the thing itself, and neither will be what goes up where the fire has brought it down.
The truth is, I think, that our attempts at permanence, our striving for immortality for the things we create is a measure of the value we place on things precisely because they are not immortal.
We do not really value immortality for its own sake. Those things we make of plastic, which are virtually indestructible, are mostly utile, cheap, meant for ordinary consumption, meant to be discarded – how ironic to create indestructible objects for impermanent uses. And ironic, too, I suppose. To create impermanent objects for the ages.
It is our mortality, our vulnerability that makes our lives so precious, and that is also true of the things we create.
In Shelley’s “Ozymndias” we are asked to look at the arrogance and futility of our attempts at immortality. In Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” the titular character forestalls his decline and demise through artistic sorcery, but in the end is, as are we all, reduced to dust. The Egyptians mummified the dead, but what remained was no more than a preserved shell of its human occupant, and if exposed to the air for too long, it too would go the way of Dorian Gray. We surround ourselves in art and literature and architecture and all the other arts with reminders of the impossibility of immortality. But we try, anyway.
Cathedrals are especially reflective of the struggle between death and eternal life. This is the central theme of all major religions, that it is possible for us both to die and to live forever.
There will be mourning for Notre Dame, as there is with any great loss. There will be also be discussions of how it might be raised from the dead, what measure of eternal life might still be possible for it. The faithful will not lose their faith, for if Notre Dame can find a way to live forever, then there is hope for us all.
For these are the ways of humans, as it is of all our works.

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“I’ve Changed!”: Why expecting forgiveness for past bigotry is just another form of privilege.

In PeaceAble, Politics on February 11, 2019 at 12:50 pm

If you are a white person over the age of 30 in America (I’m trying to be generous here.) you need to accept, understand, acknowledge and learn to deal with the fact that you were raised in a culture that supported, even promoted, racism and white superiority as normal. It was normal for real estate agents to direct people of color away from white communities. It was normal for businesses to reject black job applicants. It was normal for advertising and film to make their heroes and heroines white; their servants, their inferiors, their attackers, their enemies non-white; it was normal to see things like blackface as harmless remnants of minstrel shows and the memory of performers like Al Jolson, and Amos and Andy. It was normal to see native Americans portrayed as either villainous or noble savages. It was normal to assume that non-whites were less intelligent, more violent, poorer, and generally less civilized than whites.
If you are a male of the same age you need to also accept, understand, acknowledge and learn to deal with the fact that you were raised in a culture that supported, even promoted, misogyny and male superiority as normal. It was normal to assume that a man would get paid for his work and a woman would not. It was normal to assume that when a woman was paid, she would be paid less than a man. “The weaker sex” was a normal thing to say about women. It was normal to expect that strong, virile men would be sexually active and non-monogamous, but that only immoral, wicked women would be. It was normal to believe that women were less intelligent, less mechanically inclined, less interested or credible in matters of politics or the world in general, and more suited to domestic duties than men. It was normal to believe that women were intended to serve men, not compete with them.
Because of these things, if you have always been a normal, ordinary white person, it is quite possible that you have, sometime in your life behaved in ways that reflected what that culture was teaching you. Perhaps you went to a Halloween party dressed in blackface, saying “yesiree, boss” as you shuffled along in too-big clothes with patches. Perhaps you went as an “Indian,” with leather fringed clothing and a feather in a head band, saying “kemo sabe” or using “me” instead of “I,” giving out “war whoops” as you did a “war dance” around the room. Perhaps you found it funny to dress up as Charlie Chan and pronounce your Rs like Ls. Perhaps you thought you were not affected by racism because you had some non-white friends or co-workers that you liked. Perhaps you told yourself that it wasn’t Malcolm X’s, or Muhammed Ali’s, or Martin Luther King’s race that was the problem, but their politics.
Because of what the culture had been teaching you since your birth, as a normal, ordinary male, it is quite possible that have, sometime in your life, behaved in ways that reflect the culture’s misogyny and chauvinism. Perhaps you found it disturbing that a woman was put in a position of authority over you. Perhaps you thought that putting a woman on a pedestal was the same as respecting her. Perhaps you thought that being able to seduce a lot of women into sex meant that you “love women.” Perhaps you thought that getting a woman drunk and having sex with her was consensual. Perhaps you thought that a woman you met in a bar should have expected to have sex with you. But you wanted your wife to be a virgin the first time you took her to bed, and you vowed to “kill” any boy who tried anything with your daughter.
If any of this is true, perhaps you don’t see that it should be a big deal now. It’s unfair that there should be consequences now for how things were then. You’ve changed. Times have changed. All that was a long time ago. You apologize, explain, seek redemption and forgiveness, what else can you do?
The argument has always been that human beings are products of their time and their culture, so we should excuse their past behaviors and only judge them on who they are now. The problem with that is that who we are now are products of our own past, and that includes our past prejudices, our past behaviors, and our past privileges. And the people who were subjected to who we were then are also products of that past. Expecting forgiveness is just another expression of the normative privilege we have always enjoyed.
And here’s another thing. The normative rules haven’t really changed all that much. Racism persists. Misogyny persists. Religious bigotry persists. Xenophobia persists. Homophobia persists. Fascism persists. The class system persists. And we are still raising generations of white men who believe that they are the normative measure of all things, who are being taught that cultural change is an assault against them, not just culturally, but individually. They are being taught to fear the change, to see themselves as the victims.
So, what can we do?
We can embrace our own past and learn from it. We can learn to empathize with the other, to see our past in the context of the other’s experience of it, not just our own. We need to become who we say we are now not in spite of our past, but because of it. We need to take personal responsibility for cultural privilege.
We need to shift our focus from proclaiming that we support progressive change in spite of our past to understanding how and why we can support progressive change because of our past. It’s not enough to apologize for past sins and promise that you are a different person today. You need to be able to explain how those sins changed you then, are changing you still, and how they inform your actions today. And if you can’t do that, then expect neither forgiveness nor redemption.
The truth is, it will be difficult for white men to present themselves as the champions of changing cultural norms that have benefitted them for a very, very long time.
Is that unfair? Is it more unfair than the historic injustices suffered by people of color and women?