Misogyny

Thank you to Elizabeth Renzetti for her article "misogyny often behind the acts we deem senseless."  I write to reflect on misogyny - to question what it is and how if reveals itself through social crises. Or, at least how I see it play out in our world today.

First of all misogyny is not just about the hatred and fear of women. It is about how society organizes its values and how that influences future generations.

The most important part of misogyny is how men are raised to be "not a woman".  If men believe they must never cry, must possess a woman, be willing to go to war for their country, how can they build relationships with other men, or talk about how they feel? When can they identify the “rules” of masculinity that is deeper than proving they are not women.

The feminine aspect of life is not just sex. Most men experience nurture with those they love yet the domain of masculinity (business, sports and politics) ridicules this. Men are expected to control, win, battle, compete, and though most of us recognize this as a warrior stereotype, there are men who cannot identify their pain because it's too feminine (soft) to reflect on feelings. 

This is what makes our world so dangerous. The few who must prove themselves through hyper-masculinity like Hitler, Stalin, mass murderers and dictators are in the extreme minority, yet they destroy the fabric of hope for a preferred future.

What Makes a Mass Killer

I guess it would be neat and tidy if every mammal was the same and behaviours could be tracked to one reason. Good thing our brains are so complex that we don't all behave in the same way in response to triggers or trauma.

In the New York Times' article published in 2019, it says "many would-be mass killers see themselves as part of a brotherhood of like-minded, isolated and resentful boys and men" and previous murderers perceived as idols.

Is there a link between violent video games and the desire to shoot real people in public places? Video games are very popular in Asian countries where mass killings are rare. 

Only a small fraction of those with a mental illness commit violent acts and they are more likely to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia characterized by delusional thinking, frightening voices identifying threats where none exist. Most of the people I have met who have a diagnosis are in pain themselves and more insightful to their problems than those who are thought to be normal and healthy.

Another New York Times article on mass murderers and mental illness states they tend to belong "to a rogue’s gallery of the disgruntled and aggrieved, whose anger and intentions wax and wane over time, eventually curdling into violence in the wake of some perceived humiliation." 

Dr. Stone "has concluded" this article reports "that about 65 percent of mass killers exhibited no evidence of a severe mental disorder; 22 percent likely had psychosis, the delusional thinking and hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia, or sometimes accompany mania and severe depression."

A special forum of the American Sociological Association held in Montreal in 2006 asked several experts to discuss various forms of mass murder, their causes, and possible means of prevention. Panelists Katherine S. Newman, Michael Mann, Randall Collins, and James Ron, were invited to express their knowledge in Contexts, Summer 2006. Yet nothing conclusive was found.

A recent column in the Globe and Mail by Elizabeth Renzetti draws connections between these senseless crimes to misogyny; "despite the mounting carnage, we fail to draw any connections between these crimes, preferring to see them as unfathomable, unpredictable and random. They’re none of those things. Violence perpetrated against women is widespread, exists in a spectrum, and comes with a whole series of red flags that we continue to ignore at our peril – until the next tragedy has officials scratching their heads again, wondering how such a horrible event could occur."

But drawing conclusions on what happens inside a mass shooter's head are not facts.  We can't find facts on the why of things but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have conversations about them. The denial in the comments section tells me all I need to know about the problem. Carl Jung had a vision where he saw masses of people drowning in blood when he learned his patients projected what they didn't want to see in themselves onto others.

I witness today statements about women, men, blacks and the ruling elite that blame, as if that is the cure and not the bandaid. In this way, our refusal to deal with difficult conversations means we are signing the warrant to our own deaths.

Let's be kind.

The Call to Earth Community by Frances Deverell

The Call To Earth Community

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Nanaimo, April 19th, 2020

Thank you so much for welcoming me to your service today.  It is a privilege to be here with the First Unitarian Fellowship of Nanaimo.

First I want to acknowledge how disruptive this is for all of us, and how many people are afraid and hurting.  My heart goes out to all those who are suffering in these days of crisis that appear to be stretching out into a new normal.  

I don’t know how you are reacting after a month of isolation.  My fridge is full, yet still, I feel the disorientation.  I can’t find my focus.  I’m not sure what I should be doing.  I seem to need time to think.

So I go walking every day (a new routine for me) and tree bathing when I can.  Everyone I talk to is deriving spiritual inspiration from trees and water, from nature.  It is as if you breathe in spirit along with the wonderful oxygen the trees produce.  Breathe in spirit, breathe out peace. (Thank you Leah, for these words.) 

As I sift through the good and the bad in social media right now this is what I see:

• We know that our relationship with the earth is broken.
• We know the signs and we know many of the causes:
  • Our failure to value the basic necessities of life – the earth, the air, and the water.  We don’t include their value in the economic equations and we don’t hesitate to pollute them.
  • 250 years of burning fossil fuels
  • The huge scale of economic activity that destroys whole ecosystems in the name of efficiency.
  • The crisis of mass species extinction.
  • An economic system based on growth on a finite planet; one that concentrates wealth in a few private hands, leaving as much as 40% of people in North America one paycheck away from homelessness.
• We know that things have to change, but we don’t know how to change them.

Maybe just stopping is a good thing.Maybe that’s just what we need.

It seems that our current leadership is too invested in the system as it is to initiate fundamental change.It may be that the leadership will have to come from the ground up.You and me.

We used to talk about thinking globally and acting locally.  What the Covid-19 virus is teaching us is that to act locally, for example, by staying at home, is to act globally.  It takes billions of people following the protocols all around the world to beat a little virus like this.

Will we learn the lessons of this crisis?  Can we lay down our arms and  learn to cooperate toward a common vision of a healthy planet for future generations?

In the 1970’s, The women’s movement was fond of saying   “It’ll be a great day when daycare gets a billion dollars and the generals have to hold a bake sale to buy a bomb.”

Our study group on Thinking Resilience, facilitated by Deborah Goodman, pointed out how incredibly complicated it is to make change.  We talked about systems thinking and I learned a new word – Panarchy.  Not a simple hierarchy.  Panarchy.  A word to describe the many different interconnected systems all operating at once and each one influencing what is happening all around us in different ways, at different speeds:

The first system:  Animals, insects, plants, minerals all dependent on the rays of the sun and clean water, the good earth, and the rich, clean air.  Ecosystems.

Second system:  The timeline of memory, reality, and imagination --past present future.  Trees growing ring by ring, standing in one place, and providing benefits to birds, insects, animals and humans for hundreds of years.  Rocks watching the eons go by.  Humans measuring time in lifetimes, the stories and events of one generation impacting the ones to follow.  An insect realizing its whole life span in a few minutes, hours or days.

Third system:  Human systems – Political and economic, social systems for caring for each other, and moral, ethical, and legal systems.  All interconnected and interwoven with each other yet each operating on their own set of rules and their own agenda and trying to influence human consciousness.

Fourth system: Human cultures, religions, mythic stories, each with a slightly different take on what is right and wrong, good and bad, and how we should interpret the meaning of this precious existence and consciousness, on this lonely planet spinning in a mysterious, still mostly unexplored universe.

Richard Heinberg, of the Post Carbon Institute, was inviting us to find the place in the panarchy where your action could make the biggest difference.  When you look at the complexity, it seems impossible.  How can one person ever see enough perspectives to make that choice? 

Can I use my mind to see where we are in these systems and choose a starting point that will take us where we want to go?  All my life I always thought I was supposed to be able to consciously choose the right path and go there.  That was personal success: to make and achieve goals.   Success would give me belonging and a place in society.  I’ve struggled to learn to work in teams, let go of personal recognition, and watch a sense of belonging emerge through camaraderie and partnership.  But surely that is what we need.  We have to find the place in the panarchy together as a people.  As a nation.  As a world.

Can we learn to cooperate toward a common vision of a healthy planet for future generations?  Breathe in spirit.  Breathe out peace.  Live in hope.

These are exciting times.  It is a time when the world is entertaining new ways of thought.  People are writing blogs, communicating across continents and oceans on every media looking for the point in the panarchy where change is most possible.  I am glued to my computer, scanning the exchange of ideas.  A consensus is forming among activists everywhere: 

• We have to rebuild our local economies and communities.  The place for personal action is local.  We have to grow more of our own food in a sustainable way.  We have to build and support our own local businesses.
• We have to protect our air and our water, and the natural ecosystems all around us, habitat for our siblings in the animal and plant world, and develop reverence for life.
• First Nations and Indigenous people around the world will lead.  This is their time.
• We have to stop basing our lives on fossil fuels.  We need a fast, planned transition to renewable energy that will create many new kinds of jobs.  Renewable energy will be more distributed, and more locally controlled.  It will be different.  It will change us.
• We won’t be able to have so much stuff.  We’ll have to conserve more.  Reduce, repair, reuse, repurpose, recycle.  We’ll have to share more.  To do that we have to know each other.  We need trust, and shared values.
• The survival strategy is cooperation, not competition. 

Guy Dauncey, a local futurist, ecologist and author, puts it this way:

“What we need now is far more than reformed capitalism. We need to move beyond the Enlightenment, beyond the Industrial Age, beyond capitalism, and build for ourselves a New Ecological Civilization, premised on the centrality not of money, but of Nature, based on the assumption that most people are not greedy, but rather loving and kind.  It is time to move beyond Capitalism to the era of World Cooperation, where nobody will be left behind.”

I have been walking this week in downtown Nanaimo.  The only people on the streets are the homeless.  It breaks my heart to see so many of them trying to keep their social distance and protect themselves, and that this is now a normal part of the system, homelessness.  Nanaimo’s response is to put in more sanitation stations downtown so that they can wash their hands.  A good gesture, but not a solution.  To change this would require a change of attitude.  A change of heart.   Covid-19 is showing us how many more people could be in that situation.  People who will lose their livelihoods because of floods or fires or pandemics or technological change.  We are entering a major shift and there will be displacement.  It won’t be anybody’s fault.  What will be the values behind the systems we build to take care of people?

Rev. Debra has called this a liminal moment.  A space in time between one era and another when we don’t know where we are going and can’t see ahead.  I personally have never lived in such a time when the whole world is living in the liminal moment at the same time.  What an opportunity for real change!

Our governments have stepped in to do things we thought governments couldn’t do any more.  The private sector, based on greed and hoarding, is not structured to solve problems like this at all.  George Monbiot, a columnist for the Guardian, has declared neoliberalism dead. (It reminds me of many years ago when Time Magazine declared “God is Dead!”) If we hold our shaken and battered society up to the light we can see the cracks.  We can see the holes in our economic approach, in our industrial and cultural and social and ecological systems. 

Covid-19 is giving us a warning.It is giving us a chance to stop, as a whole world, and reflect on what changes we need to make to build in more resilience.Resilience is the capacity to bounce back, to recover from any particular catastrophe.My husband, Ron Wilson, will tell you.He learned resilience when as a boy he watched his home burn down as he sat in his pyjamas on a snow bank during a Northern Ontario winter.His parents demonstrated resilience by starting again from scratch. But they didn’t do it alone.They had supports. They went back to family.Our human world is stretched to the limit.We are not prepared for the changes to come.

We are moving quickly toward the Ecological Revolution.  A new healthier relationship (I hope) between humans and nature designed for both to thrive.  A new era requires a new vision based on new values that the whole world agrees on. 

Nature builds resilience through biodiversity.  Life evolves to take advantage of the features of a particular time and place.  The plants and animals are interdependent.  The more diversity the more the ecosystem as a whole thrives.  Our new world requires a relationship based on reverence for life.  In the Village workshop I took this year Kathi Camilleri taught us:

Everything happens in ceremony.Everything is done with respect.Ask permission to borrow someone’s work.Get to know who someone really is.Learn to work together.Have each other’s back.Everything is about relationship with each other and our mother earth.

The work before us is to build community resilience.  That is our job.  We want to get to know our neighbours and to help one another.  We need to educate our politicians on the changes we want and expect them to lead.  We should engage with business and industry leaders and those we disagree with.  Listen for understanding.  We can encourage study and learning as we face situations we didn’t expect and are unprepared for.  To influence this change we will work together, promoting our positive vision for a sustainable community on a sustainable planet, in wider and wider networks.

Because, as Milton Freedman - one of the architects of the neoliberal economy - once said, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change.  When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. . . .  Our basic function is to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available, until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

And, Naomi Klein added,   “The future will be determined by whoever is willing to fight harder, for the ideas they have lying around.”  (She, of course, is talking about the Green new Deal)

Can we learn to cooperate toward a common vision of a healthy planet for future generations?  Breathe in spirit.  Breathe out peace.  Live in hope.  Act in Faith that your thoughts and actions will make a difference.

All Our Relations

The Power of Poetry

There is so much information flying around it is difficult to focus on one thing at a time. What is real, what is fake, what is conspiracy, what is true? What is really useful to us? What do we need to know?

Poetry is a form of thinking about what comes through our biological receptors including our body's senses.

There is a great deal of poetry to be found on Poets.ca and publishers that print poetry books.

Write your own poetry and see how you feel. Let your mood, your heart and your way of seeing the world affect you.

The Cost of a Moral Life

There are no rewards for choosing the moral option other than to benefit the many.  There are no awards that match the gift of a truly honourable life because awards are few and the good is not always seen. 

Strangers and loved ones cannot know what you have been through and usually cannot feel all that you feel.

While the racists and terrorists of the world get a lot of attention after they blow apart other lives they are probably still suffering from the traumas that caused their destructive behaviours.  And the Assanges and Mandelas have been tortured for acts of bravery —  it is up to each one of us to decide, after much questioning,  who benefits and for what purpose. 

It is up to us, the readers and the anonymous to reject or accept what is true and what is false, even though our judgements cannot be proven.

Every day we live with the consequences of decisions we have made and what others have made for us.

All I know is I am thankful for those who expressed visions of a just world where life is revered and those who defended them.

To live where I am not allowed to speak or think, for a whole lifetime would be a life of extraordinary torture.

Evolution is Deeper than Fundraising and Wider than Peace

For our recovery to be successful we need to smell it like fresh cut grass and hear it like birdsong.

Our frowns must touch what we know and what we have yet to understand. 

The ego must lay itself down for the dawn tomorrow and begin again, questioning our beliefs and actions, our fears and our reaching out.

All we have learned might have protected us in the past but now we are all targets. The scapegoats have already died, the poor silenced and the rich vilified.

Cruelty is the march toward the cave of death where nothing can be seen and the captivated cannot be rescued.

Superiority doesn't exist anymore. Self-congratulation is a clown who can't get off the toilet.

The meaning of things

I propose that we question, not just the individuals who support policies that harm the planet, but the meaning of the acts themselves.

Rather than say Trump is to blame for the spread of the virus or that voters are to blame for voting for Trump in 2016, we could view these events as the combined energy of all living things. What did they choose? What did they support in all the events that led up to the event? What was the unacknowledged rage burning inside our minds that led to the division and violence every day between that election and the previous ones? What do we refuse to admit to ourselves that leads to our silence or inaction when community requires good judgement?

What have we, the articulate species failed to organize together?

Forget blame. Life is complex. We are imperfect. We have some power but what is beyond our power?

We are facing the earth's response to what we have done or failed to do in the time we have been conscious.

Is the pandemic the voice of nature saying to us - you are not in control, or is it saying you are needed  now to learn how to heal the planet?

There is no-one who knows everything or has all the skills and knowledge to fix everything.

I need to be part of a society where diversity is appreciated and valued. People who have the skills to understand history, who know how to heal people, who understand law, who can fight fires, who can write agendas and policies, who can make moving speeches, who can sing and dance, who can hear the silent screams of the suffering and who can support people in their daily struggle — add to the true commonwealth. They have saved my life without knowing me personally.

I need nature, grass, trees, clean air, birds, fish, mice and rats and all that I haven't mentioned.