We Are All Responsible for Newtown

If a civilization willingly rejects the constraints that prevent its individuals from killing each other, does it still qualify as a civilization?   What separates it from the barbarians of pre-history, in which extreme individualism took precedence over any form of civilized societal cooperation intended to preserve life and stability?

For those of us who believe that America is the greatest land in the world, it is no surprise that the events of Newtown have triggered a disturbing realization that our country is running off the rails.  Still, we have had exponentially higher gun-related death rates than other developed countries for many years. so what is it about Newtown that may have finally changed the conversation?

For the many who have long opposed gun control, there is a plethora of strained arguments and obfuscations that have both altered the political calculus and numbed those of us at the other end of the debate.  Fear creates its own empathy-free logic, in which no rational acknowledgement of statistics and their causal relationship is possible.  In the face of pointless arguments dripping with emotion, there is usually no point in continuing the discussion.

A common tactic is the “If they had a gun” argument, which deftly shifts the blame onto those who support gun control while citing some now-debunked research.  This argument also points a faint arrow of responsibility for one’s death to those who have died, because “if they had a gun” they might still be alive.  It is a comforting worldview for the gun lobby because it implies that our gun culture has no responsibility for the consequences of guns.  All responsibility resides with the individual (or the gun control laws that presumably allowed this to happen).

What Newtown did was lay bare the absurdity of this argument.  The now conceivable contentions that elementary schools must arm our teachers and equip 6 and 7 year olds with body-armor backpacks call into question not only our state of civilization, but whether it still even exists.  It compels us to ask ourselves, what are we? Who are we, if we have now reached a point in our history in which these “precautions” must be taken in America while being completely unnecessary in every other civilized country in the world?

Our shared pain from Newtown is so searing because it involves such innocence.  While the NRA might have managed to deflect guilt and diminish the innocence of massacred adults – because all of them could have supposedly had their own gun – they can’t do that with children.  They also can’t divert blame entirely to our mental health system; all countries have mental health issues and all of them have individuals who want to do harm to themselves and others.  The difference is that America puts the most devastating means to carry out that harm within their relatively easy reach.

This leads us to the real reason that Newtown has so affected us with sadness and outrage.  It is because we know, with varying levels of acceptance and awareness, that we are all responsible. 

We are all responsible for the state of our civilization and the standards of our society, and we have – for whatever reason you choose – let the unique parameters under which we have chosen to live take the lives of the most innocent among us.  No one is completely free of guilt and that is our starting point.  We must embrace this collective responsibility rather than point fingers at any one individual or entity (including the NRA) because it is the only way forward, and our only path back toward what might be universally defined as a civilization.

 

The Rise of Misogyno-fascism

A troubling pattern of offensive behavior has captured headlines on our side of the world, a behavior we recognize as misogyny - the actions and beliefs characterized by the hatred of females.  Why, we must ask, is this state of mind still so prevalent in a so-called civilization as advanced as ours? 

Before treading deeper into the basis of our current misogynistic state, it is instructive to first understand one of the fundamental reasons for hatred.  We are, undoubtedly, the only species that “hates”, and there are a set of characteristics that we commonly attribute to the objects of our hatred.  One of the most indelible is the propensity to hate that which we don’t understand.  This generic “unknown” is a deeply threatening adversary for those among us who are deficient in self-esteem, emotional security or some other basic benchmark of human mental health.  Among the necessary defense mechanisms to combat this threat, two have historically stood out:  Control, and Destruction.   When we are so deeply threatened by something because we don’t understand it, these are the actions to which we as a species will often resort.

There is significant overlap between control and destruction, and in many cases, the target of our hatred is effectively destroyed through the more socially acceptable and often legal exercising of control.   But the goal is always the same:  eliminate the threat.

Which brings us back to misogyny.  Although it is defined as hatred of women, it is more useful to consider it based on the behaviors it elicits than the emotion that is at its source.  Put simply, Misogyny is the reaction by those (men) who are threatened by those “others” (women) simply because they don’t fully understand them and are therefore completely ill-equipped to appropriately empathize with their circumstances.  The reactive behaviors are consistent and clear:  control and destruction.

Historically and presently, misogynistic customs and behaviors have been embedded in hundreds of cultures.  The control behaviors often deal with ways to cut off the mobility of women, whether it be yesterday’s foot-bound Chinese women or today’s Saudi Arabians who are prohibited from driving.  Men control the social mobility of women by forced marriage when they are children, or by preventing access to education, by keeping them from voting or holding a job, or even participating in sports.  Some societies require that their women be continually covered in public from head to toe, while others “circumcise” their women, perhaps believing that this will eliminate the sexual desire that could lead their (human) possessions astray.  Various rituals and assertions are used to give these abusive practices the illusion of social acceptability, some of which include the claim that these practices are a way of “honoring” or “protecting” women.

And then there is destruction, in which women are beheaded, stoned, tortured, burned, flogged, raped, disfigured, doused with acid, and victimized by numerous other unspeakable but astonishingly legal acts.  These are acts of gender hatred that are acculturated responses to the mystery that is “woman”.  The threat of that otherness is so viscerally intolerable all by itself that it must be destroyed.

Sadly, the threat of the unknown is a broad human condition and when the legal or societal constraints on certain behaviors are lifted or loosened, the acts of misogynistic control and destruction can bubble to the surface.  There is no difficulty identifying the telltale ignorance - the assertion that aspirin between the legs is a form of birth control (or if not, that the joke could be funny), the belief that contraception leads to abortions, the presumption that loving one’s country too much is a logical basis for extramarital affairs, that a panel dedicated to determining women’s reproductive rights should not include a woman – it is all indicative of the tightly bound relationships between ignorance, threat and denigration.

The full expression of denigration is control and destruction, leading ultimately to a form of fascism that, like any fascism, targets a threatening segment of society by imposing repressive control.  There is a clear continuum that stretches from the most destructive acts on one end to mild denigration on the other, but all fascists can trace their roots to the same feeble, frightened behavior of people whose underlying goal is to eliminate the threat of something that they just don’t understand.

And so when Rush Limbaugh throws the full weight of his destructive hatred behind a vulgar rant against a young woman who uses birth control, or laws are put in place to reverse the reproductive rights of women, or when a supposedly conservative governor promotes a bill that requires government to “intervene” into a woman’s vagina in a way that we could never have imagined, these are acts of control and destruction that are indicative of a society moving towards a state of Misogyno-fascism. 

Misogyno-fascists are weak and unenlightened men; men determined to exercise every control they can to destroy that which threatens them, men who can’t possibly empathize with women to the extent that they could recognize the absurdity, if not futility, of their behavior. 

They, of course, would vehemently disagree, pointing to their wives and mothers as proof of their love of women and their commitment to protect them.  But there are limits to their tolerance that mirror their ignorance and can be traced to their genuine (if unspoken) disbelief in the collective standing of women as their equal. 

In this respect, and as it relates to them in particular, perhaps they are right.  They are not the equal of women.