Tag: war

Make America Masculine Again?

Posted on by kathiemm
Protesters fill in along Independence Avenue hours before the Women’s March on Washington kicks off. 21 January, 2017.In the public domain. Author: Voice of America.

By Gordon Fellman

It is interesting that the main word in “Make America Great Again”—the crucial adjective—remains not only murky but completely undefined. We must guess, but Mr. Trump’s public remarks may offer indirect clues.

Does “great” suggest reinstituting slavery? Renewing colonialism? Returning to the least comprehensive and most inadequate health care system in the entire industrial world, the one that preceded the Affordable Health Care Act? Going back before the New Deal to life without social security, without government support for those suffering from economic injustice and collapse?

Many people assume that defining that word does not matter, understanding it simply as code for “white,” as in Make American White Again. The race interpretation makes sense, of course: 1) The Republican Party imploded in 2008 when faced with the first Black US president, a reality dealt with as intolerable and to be ignored, defined, reviled, and undermined at all costs. 2) Demographics make it clear that whites will be outnumbered by nonwhites in this country within a generation or two. And then there is Donald Trump’s bizarre birther obsession, slimily born and slimily renounced.

Changes in this country since the Civil Rights, antiwar, Women’s and LGBTQ movements have understandably rattled people who felt themselves, by their own self-definition, bypassed by those vast changes in our society.

Little attention has been paid during this election year to what it might feel like to have one’s confidence in the assumed superiority of whiteness, war, men, and straight sexuality attacked head-on by forces not easy to understand if you cannot see yourselves as part of them.

People guiding the victories of those movements ignore where they leave people who feel bypassed by them. That anger was part of the reaction is puzzling only to those who wish not to face the emotional realities, including many forms of felt loss, that social change necessarily brings in its wake.

Why do some people welcome change and others meet it with fear and dread? One group finds something added to their lives (dignity for all), the other focuses on what appears to be taken away (white privilege, male privilege, etc.)  Both the celebrations and the fears and dreads make sense to me.

Those striking movements of the last sixty years can usefully be seen, at least from the point of view of many white men (and some white heterosexual women), as bound together by their massive rejection of normative, or traditional, white masculinity. It is, after all, white men who have played the dominant and dominating roles in interlocking systems of racism, sexism and patriarchy, war, and heterosexism.

The movements in question all threaten the masculinity that had been taken for granted among white men for centuries.

Trump is reasserting normative white masculinity, evoking such forms as the frontiersman, business tycoon, white prizefighter, and football memes of masculinity. Trump walks with a certain swagger that characterizes this normative masculinity. His unrelieved rudeness, sarcasm, and bullying fit iconic playground, football, and college fraternity strivings to be seen as acceptably masculine.

Consider the normative male pride in showing off what male peers consider the trophy wife. We don’t know what Melania feels about this, but plenty of women respect and likely long for the reassertion of the normative male. (Not all women are feminists and may be bewildered by its claims.)

Trump’s scorn for the rich (a group in which he boasts membership), women, the Pope, immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, the poor, disabled people, et al is a style associated with calculating, cruel, hard men from time immemorial. What I see in Trump’s swagger and in his eyes is coldness, insecurity, and emptiness.

Beneath all the bluster and boasting in that kind of man (and his female accomplices) has got to be unfaced, unrecognized, undealt with pain. That pain surely matches the pain beneath the surface in his wildly cheering audiences.

As Trump skims over all policy and other political issues, what is left is style. It is the style of a man who wants, pathetically, to be recognized as a man’s man and to welcome aboard only those who will share in that aspiration and self-delusion. The people so frantically trying to share this macho pretense join him in denying that it is on life support at best. It will give way eventually, or we are doomed, to empathy and compassion. That frame of mind must trump this sad, overblown toughness and bullying if we are to survive.

The old masculinity is Trump’s. The new masculinity will rejoice in preserving dignity, humility, life, and the integrity of our fragile planet.

Gordon Fellman teaches sociology at Brandeis University and chairs its Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies program. Having earlier written on the possible shift from adversary relations to those of mutuality, in his book Rambo and the Dalai Lama: the Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival, he is now writing The Coming End of War, which offers a three part deconstruction of war and several suggestions for how to memorialize what war has been and how to move past it.

Fellman is a long time activist joining with those who have worked for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather than arguing right and wrong, he brings a sociologist’s tools and sensibilities to making sense of this conflict and how it might eventually be resolved. He has also been a community and campus activist during Civil Rights day, the Vietnam War resistance days, and since.

WHOSE CHILD IS THIS?

Posted on by kathiemm

By Anthony J. Marsella

Photo: Courtesy of Dr. Amer Hosin

Whose Child is This?  Whose child is this?  Is this child an Iraqi . . . an Israeli . . .  a Chechnyan . . . an Afghani . . . a Kurd . . . a Nigerian?   Is she or he English, Indonesian, Spanish, Lebanese, Turkish, Congolese, Bosnian, Persian?   Does it matter?  Is this child not a daughter or son to each of us?

Is this child not a human being born of a union of a man and woman whose intimacy, whose passion, whose very breathe yielded a life that sought only to live . . . to enjoy some moments of laughter and delight, some moments of comfort and calm . . . to make yet another life.

Now this child rests amidst the dust and debris of war . . . lifeless . . . torn and shattered . . . killed by someone whom she or he never knew, and would likely never meet.  Death from a distance. . . a bomb from a plane, a shell from a mortar, a strap of explosives . . .  intentional and willing, calculated and planned, a measured effort to destroy.

The Source:  an agent of death and destruction, a pilot or soldier, an insurgent or terrorist . . . does it matter? They have killed their own child . . . they have killed our child.  And in doing so, they have diminished each of us as human beings, each of us as creatures of consciousness and conscience, each of us as reflections and carriers of life.  Words cannot console her or his parents, if they, indeed, survived this horror. They are left with only endless pain . . . memories of a child eating, sleeping, playing . . . a reminder of a tragic moment inscribed in mortar and blood.

Enough!  Enough!  Stand, speak, write, act against those who advocate violence and hate no matter the source — be they presidents, prime ministers, generals, terrorists, mullahs, rabbis, dictators, ministers, true believers . . .  tell them that we do not share their quest for power and greed.   Tell them we do not share their hate, nor their blindness and indifference to suffering.  Tell them we do not share their empty post-tragedy rhetoric designed to keep us mired in the fulfillment of their selfish needs. We are not pacified and contented by their explanations and assurances. We challenge and contest their motives!  We resent and resist their excuses. How shallow their words in the face of dying or dead child.

THIS IS OUR CHILD!  Today, we claim this child as our own, too late to keep her or him alive, too late to know her or his hopes and dreams, too late to know the promise and possibilities of their life had it been given the chance to be lived free of oppression, abuse, and indignity.

But we are not too late to affirm to all living children that we will try to protect you, to guard you, and to shelter you from the terror of war and violence, and from an untimely, painful, and meaningless death, by choosing peace over war, compassion over violence, voice over silence, and conscience over comfort.

Note:  I first wrote this brief appeal in July, 2005, following a conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which Dr. Amer Hosin shared photos of death and suffering in the Middle East.  I emailed this appeal in the December holiday season, when the poignant holiday carol, “What child is this?” is played endlessly on radio and television, testimony to Christian faith, but indirectly testimony to the consequences of violence against children, and the reality our hope for recovery and redemption reside in children – all children!

Today, as I viewed the now iconic photo of the stalwart Syrian boy, covered in dust, his mind and body shattered by bombs he could never fathom, and I recalled the iconic photo of the naked Vietnamese girl escaping napalm.  I decided I must share this appeal today.  It is upon all of us. What can we do to stop the destruction of life? What can we do end the reflexive response of violence and hate toward those we deem enemies.

I say to you, I plead with you now: “Hate begets violence, and violence begets hate, and always innocents become the victims.” We use the word “hate” daily, casually expressing our so often disgust or revulsion with something as benign as broccoli, or an athletic team.  “I hate __________!

The powerful emotion of “hate” has escaped our conscious awareness! We “hate” too much, too often, too easily; the consequences of the word and the behaviors it implies are lost to us.  Ask: Do I have a right to “hate?” Is “hate” a choice? What do I mean when I say I “hate”!  Stare at the image of a dead Iraqi child? Embed the image of the struggling shocked Syrian boy in your mind. Make room for it!  It is more important than so many other images you hold.

Ask: Whose child is this? He or she is your child! If you deny this reality, then await the day the face returns to remind you of your failure, to haunt your minds as you look at your child.

Anthony J. Marsella, August 19, 2016

 

 

There’s Blood on Their Hands—Lots of It

Posted on by kathiemm
Anti-colonialism demonstrators before the 1945 Sétif and Guelma massacre of Algerians by the French
Image by Vikoula5 and in the public domain.

The recent massacre of civilians in Paris was horrific, unconscionable, and despicable—as has been the response in Paris, the US, and elsewhere in the West. Revenge, revenge, revenge is the resonating cry. The innocent victims of the terrorist attacks did not deserve their fate; nor did the innocent victims of centuries of French—and other Western, including American–colonialism.

The ethic of reciprocity, that “do unto others” Golden Rule, is a life- and fairness-promoting mantra; too often, we hear instead an “eye for an eye” refrain. Here we go again, with violence begetting violence and  it is fool-hardy to think further violence will put an end to the discontent, the rage, the enmity associated in part with centuries of Western exploitation, repression, and violence in other parts of the world.

Let’s take the case of France. During the 1600s, France began establishing colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and India—although “establish” is a euphemism. What France did was aggressively seize control of areas far from its own borders, and rule them until control was seized by someone else, generally Great Britain (another model of ruthless imperialism).

In the mid-nineteenth century, France extended its strong arm into Africa, Indochina, and the South Pacific. When people whose skin is black, brown, or yellow—“people of color”—are ruled over by white people, history has shown us that the rulers do not grasp the hands of the indigenous people in brotherhood, whatever their national mottos might be. The bloody wars in Algeria and Vietnam were in my lifetime. Hard for me to believe that there are nations in these “modern” and “civilized” times whose leaders view it as okay to take over land long occupied by other people, or leaders who do not think of “colonization” as a dirty word.

Historical memory tends to be very long. For many decades after the last rebellious Native American Indian went to his reward, American children played “Cowboys and Indians,” and all those children, like you, knew who the “bad guys” were–at least according to the stories told to them.

Let’s start working on better ways of dealing with violence then engaging in yet more acts of revenge that can only perpetuate the cycle.

P.S. The attacks on Beirut and the Russian plane were just as unconscionable as the one in Paris and should not be brushed aside just because we are better able to see the French as like us.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology