The Sustaining Fires of Standing Rock: A Movement Grows

Posted on March 17, 2017 by kathiemm

by Roy J. Eidelson

Over the past year, a remote area of North Dakota has been the improbable and prophetic site of a struggle with profound ramifications for us all. The confrontation has pitted the Water Protectors — the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their allies — against the oil profiteers of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. The source of conflict is completion of the $3.8 billion, thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline — the Black Snake — that Energy Transfer Partners has built to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

The current planned route for the pipeline takes it beneath the Missouri River treacherously close to the Standing Rock and other Sioux reservations. A serious leak will threaten the water supply of these tribes and millions of people who live further downstream. Meanwhile, pipeline construction has already caused irreparable harm to Native American ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites.

The Water Protectors

Beginning last April, Water Protectors from across the country — indigenous and non-indigenous alike — began to gather in the thousands at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, established just north of the Standing Rock reservation. Around the camp’s sacred fires, they shared and honored the rituals, stories, and principles of community fundamental to the traditional values of the Lakota tribes: prayer, respect, compassion, honesty, generosity, humility, and wisdom.

At the same time, the Water Protectors sought to block construction of the final section of pipeline. Their non-violent acts of civil resistance were met with attack dogs, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, water cannons, aerial surveillance, and hundreds of arrests by militarized law-enforcement personnel. The standoff ended a few weeks ago when the Governor of North Dakota, citing safety concerns, issued an emergency evacuation order. Shortly thereafter, authorities forcibly shut down and razed the camp.

Assaults like those that took place at Standing Rock are really nothing new for our nation’s Native peoples. Their history of removal, dispossession, degradation, attempted forced assimilation, and betrayal at the hands of White America runs as long and as deep as the Missouri River itself. Spanning centuries, these experiences form a chronicle of unresolved grief and historical trauma, which Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart has described as “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land, and vital aspects of culture.”

The consequences of these brutal colonization practices are visible too in a range of cold, hard statistics. Today Native Americans have a median household income barely two-thirds that of the general population, and their poverty rate is nearly twice as large. They’re half as likely to have a college degree, and their life expectancy is six years shorter. They also suffer from higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, incarceration, depression, and PTSD, as well as suicide among their youth.

The survival of Native Americans, their diverse communities, and their rich cultures — despite hardship and oppression, and against such long odds — is a powerful testament to their extraordinary resilience. This abiding strength deserves greater recognition than it receives; like historical trauma, it too is transmitted across lives and generations. Shared narratives, traditional practices, spiritual teachings, the prayerful appreciation of time and place, and respect for the interconnectness of all things serve as crucial protective factors for indigenous tribes and their members.

The Oil Profiteers

Compared to the Water Protectors who converged at Standing Rock, corporate oil profiteers are a very different breed. But they too have their sacred places: anywhere fossil fuels can be extracted from the ground at a handsome profit. They have rituals too: board meetings where successful ventures are celebrated and forays for new plunder are devised. And, of course, they have their own cherished stories: about the day they first struck it rich; or the time they duped a community into believing that fracking is risk-free; or the shrewd business deal that bankrupted their competition.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this contrast in cultural values. After all, consider the company profile for Energy Transfer Partners. Among its top institutional owners is Goldman Sachs, once famously described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Donald Trump — “I don’t believe in climate change” — was himself a high-profile investor until conflict-of-interest controversies during his presidential campaign reportedly forced him to sell his holdings. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was on the company’s board of directors until earlier this year. Perry’s response to the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — ruled “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” by a federal judge — is memorable in its own right: “There are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.”

And above all there’s Kelcy Warren, the multi-billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer Partners. His business philosophy is dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest, as he once explained this way: “Like Mother Nature, the energy industry purges itself now and then. …I don’t wish any negatives on my friends, but the most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.” So where was Warren while the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies were braving “dark times” during a bitter North Dakota winter in makeshift huts and tipis? He was probably more than comfortable in his 23,000 square-foot home on ten acres in Texas, with six bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and “a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit, a four-lane bowling alley, and a 200-seat theater.”

A Movement Grows

Energy Transfer Partners boasts that the nearly completed pipeline utilizes state-of-the-art safety measures. But comparable pledges have preceded other environmental disasters in the past. The Water Protectors also recognize that these assurances are essentially meaningless for another reason: any construction that encourages continued reliance on fossil fuels is inherently dangerous and potentially calamitous for the Earth and future generations. The world’s leading scientists long ago reached an overwhelming consensus that climate change and global warming are the result of human activity — especially the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — and that among the adverse consequences are more destructive floods, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires.

The oil profiteers know this too, but they have hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits at stake, and large shareholders who vigilantly watch the bottom-line. So greed overwhelms conscience and they resort to false-alarm mind games as part of a massive misinformation campaign, insisting that warnings of planetary peril are vastly overblown. Favorite appeals in their propaganda arsenal include disingenuous denials that climate change exists; bogus claims that scientists disagree about the facts; unfounded assertions that there’s no crisis because we’re capable of adapting to change; and deceitful efforts to portray environmentalists as radical extremists.

Three days after last November’s election, CEO Kelcy Warren was confident about the prospects for the Dakota Access Pipeline: “They will not stop our project. That’s naïve. They’re not stopping our project.” Such arrogance seems to come naturally to someone who’s grown accustomed to relying on friends in high places and his personal wealth — he gave over $100,000 to Trump’s campaign — to achieve self-aggrandizing goals. The words of Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, communicate humility instead: “We have no power…the only thing that we have is support from around the world.”

But this support and solidarity shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of the pipeline’s final disposition in the federal courts, Energy Transfer Partners and its cronies have unleashed a counterforce that may well exceed their comprehension and control. While digging for dollars they’ve awakened a movement that combines a long-overdue commitment to addressing the trampled rights of Native Americans with a reinvigorated call for climate justice and environmental action. Today the ranks of the Water Protectors present at Standing Rock have been thinned. But as spring soon arrives on the North Dakota plains, countless more of us are embracing their powerful message of reverence and resistance.

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Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.

The Predator President

Posted on March 15, 2017 by kathiemm

Published on Monday, February 27, 2017, by Common Dreams

The Predatory Presidency

Recent executive orders reveal the Trump White House as a ruthless predator set to prey upon the most vulnerable among us.

by Roy Eidelson

In the Galapagos Islands, the racer snakes get ready to launch. (Photo: BBC)

The season premiere of BBC America’s Planet Earth II includes remarkable footage from the desolate Galapagos Islands. In one striking scene, baby marine iguanas race across the sand, desperately trying to elude dozens of snakes eager for their next meal. Although such stark life-or-death struggles are difficult to watch, it helps to remember that they reflect nature’s dynamic balance.

Far more disturbing—and unnatural—are the Trump Administration’s similarly ruthless predator-like attacks on whatever groups it chooses as its prey. Adding to their repugnance, several of these assaults over the past month—through a series of executive orders—are inherently racist, seemingly propelled by the ugly 14-word credo of white nationalists everywhere: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

Three White House orders stand out. First, there’s the determined pursuit of a Muslim travel ban, one that will prevent thousands of tempest-tossed and despairing refugees from entering the country. Second, there’s the heartless stalking of undocumented Hispanic immigrants, including the near indiscriminate roundup, detention, and deportation of law-abiding men, women, and children. And third, there’s the early blueprint for a “tough on crime” law enforcement crackdown, an onslaught that will inevitably and predominantly disrupt and besiege Black communities and activists.

These three groups, all non-white, have been selected as the initial targets for aggressive and oppressive government action (there will undoubtedly be others). To be sure, this isn’t entirely new. As Langston Hughes wrote 80 years ago, “America never was America to me.” But along with Trump himself, influential White House strategists Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller of the “alt-right” and new Attorney General Jeff Sessions have especially troubling histories of outright hostility and scornful indifference toward those who don’t share their skin color.

We’ve also seen that predators in the wild aren’t the only ones to use trickery, deception, and stealth as complements to brute force. Disguising the real impetus behind these executive orders, the Trump White House turns to sky-is-falling psychological mind games, warning us that these steps are necessary to protect the public from dire threats. The Islamophobia-nurturing Muslim travel ban is deceitfully presented as an essential counter-terrorism measure. ICE raids are defended with the fiction that millions of Hispanic immigrants are “bad hombres” and the rest are a drain on limited public resources. And repressive steps against African Americans are justified through bogus tales of a nationwide crime wave and “carnage in our inner cities.”

The purpose of these appeals is simple: to short-circuit the public’s critical reasoning; overwhelm us with emotions of fear and dread; and thereby garner either our active support or acquiescence. Once a crisis environment is created, once we begin to catastrophize and imagine the worst possible outcomes, then even the most extreme measures can begin to seem prudent. This is proven snake oil that’s stood the test of time. Recall that Nazi propagandist Herman Goering acknowledged as much when, during the Nuremberg trials after World War II, he explained:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

But once we recognize these manipulative psychological ploys for what they are, the path forward becomes increasingly clear. First, whenever possible, we must expose and condemn the racist falsehoods of the President and his cronies. Second, we should counter and undermine the constant fearmongering they use to advance their agenda of intolerance. And third, we need to do whatever we can to help protect the individuals, families, and communities most immediately at risk of ambush and assault.

This may sound like a daunting challenge. Fortunately, however, the mass protests and daily acts of civil resistance throughout the country over the past several weeks have already demonstrated our resolve. They’ve also revealed our capacity to expand our “circle of moral concern,” so that it extends well beyond those we hold most dear or consider most similar to us.

In nature, potential prey instinctually use a wide range of strategies to ward off attacks—from camouflage to traveling in groups to alarm signals to communal defense based on strength in numbers—and they rarely succumb without a fight. With the merciless predators from the White House now on the prowl, surely we must be prepared to do the same.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Roy Eidelson

Roy Eidelson is a psychologist and an associate director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He can be contacted at reidelson [ at] eidelsonconsulting [dot] com.

‘Ides of Trump’ Action Aims to Send More Mail Than White House Can Ignore

Posted on March 13, 2017 by kathiemm

Published on Monday, March 13, 2017 by Common Dreams

We “will overwhelm Washington…and we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the president that he’s fired!”

Nadia Prupis, staff writer

“So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and write from the heart,” the organizers say. (Photo: Ides of Trump)

A new movement is aiming to mail at least 1 million postcards to President Donald Trump on Wednesday, March 15—historically dubbed “the Ides of March” and known as the day Julius Caesar was assassinated—to show “the man, the media, and the politicians how vast our numbers are…to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”

“He may draw a big crowd with empty promises, but the crowd of those that oppose his agenda is exponentially larger. And we will show up to protest, to vote, and to be heard. Again and again and again,” the group, which calls itself the Ides of Trump, explained on its website and Facebook page.

The group outlines five steps to participate:

Write one postcard. Write a dozen! Create your own cards, buy them, share them, it doesn’t matter as long as you write #TheIdes or #TheIdesOfTrump on them somewhere.
Take a picture of your cards and post them on social media (tagged with #TheIdesOfTrump or #TheIdes, please). This will help us verify our numbers.
Spread the word! Everyone on Earth can let Washington know their opinion of the President. They can’t build a wall high enough to stop the mail.
Then, on March 15th, mail your cards to:
The President (for now)
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
NW Washington, DC 20500
Get ready for the NEXT postcard campaign, and the next, and the next—because we’re not going away. We will make ourselves heard by joining together. And together, we will wield the kind of political clout that can’t be ignored.

As Leslie Evans, an artist and printmaker who produced about 900 postcards for the event last week in Watertown, Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe on Monday, “Obviously, numbers matter a lot to [Trump.]” Her postcards feature slogans that paraphrase chants commonly heard at anti-Trump protests, such as “Compassion, not fear, immigrants are welcome here,” and “Hear our voice, you are not the majority choice.”

The Ides of Trump also makes clear that while the basis is comical, the impetus is not.

“So sharpen your wit, unsheathe your writing implements, and write from the heart,” they write. “All of our issues—DAPL [the Dakota Access Pipeline], women’s rights, racial discrimination, religious freedom, immigration, economic security, education, the environment, conflicts of interest, the existence of facts—can and should find common cause. That cause is to make it irrefutable that the president’s claim of wide support is a farce.”

“[W]e, in vast numbers, from all corners of the world, will overwhelm Washington,” the organizers write, “and we will bury the White House post office in pink slips, all informing the president that he’s fired!”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Media and Gun Violence: Allies or Combatants?

Posted on March 13, 2017March 9, 2017 by kathiemm

by Sarah Mensch

The Columbine High School Massacre in 1999 resulted in the deaths of twelve students, a teacher, and two shooters. Most recall that April day and feel sorrow, grief, fear. Such is not the case for the 74 people who planned their own shootings inspired by the Columbine massacre in 30 different states since the 1999 shooting . Twenty-one of those planners were successful in their plots, killing 89 more people, and injuring 16 others; nine of the perpetrators themselves died in the attacks.

These post-Colombine attacks reflect a phenomenon dubbed “copycat crimes,” in which prospective perpetrators are so in awe of a homicidal crime (usually a shooting) that they aim to honor it or out-do it by carrying out their own attack on the anniversary of the event that inspired them or planning to kill more victims than the attackers they mimic.

The media appear to play an enormous role in supplying the details and perhaps enhancing the motivations for copycat crimes.

Movies, TV shows, and social media platforms provide stories that contribute to glamorizing the criminals. After a shooting, the perpetrator’s face is plastered all over cyberspace and the news. His tactics are revealed in detail, and speculations are made about what kind of person the shooter was, what drove him to act as he did. Debates proliferate and are rehashed.

The shooter is generally portrayed as a loner, and this makes him an antihero. The antihero image and bombardment of information and imagery may provide a fertile seedbed for copycat crimes to take root.

What we have learned about copycat crimes should serve as a powerful impetus for a change in media rhetoric. News media have an obligation to report truthful news, but how about shifting the focus of the shooting stories from the perpetrators to the victims?

Why not emphasize the victims’ stories, the grief to their families and friends? How about information on the role of the media in the impact that gun crimes have on various audiences? Giving media power to victims of shootings might counteract the glamorized antihero status that often seems to be given to the shooter.

Isn’t it time to share widely the research on the media role in supporting gun violence and stimulate public efforts to curb the role of the media in copycat crimes?

Sarah Mensch is a psychology major at Boston University. She is thrilled to be working on a Directed Study focusing on the effect of the media on gun violence under the supervision of Dr. Malley Morrison. When Sarah graduates, she aims to go on to graduate school to earn an MSW and become a therapist. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys pursuing her minor in Deaf Studies, photography, and exploring Boston.