Social values

The riots in Great Britain speak to me on a visceral level.  They are the voiceless and unheard poor and disenfranchised finally rising up and fairly screaming to be heard.  They have had enough of a set of social values that basically say that if you are without money you are to blame and are somehow inferior to anyone who has been "blessed" with money.   If you re poor, you have no value as a human being;  this is the overriding message of capitalism and religion in the West.  Helping the poor is seen as a weakness; we applaud it with our mouths while we kick the homeless out of their homes for lack of a job or money.  We downgrade an individual's credit score for being unable to pay her bills on time even when that was caused by a greedy corporation laying her off.  Why doesn't the corporation, the shareholder,  have their credit score downgraded for causing the worker to lose their ability to pay?  We punish the innocent and glorify the villain.  We claim to follow a man we call The Christ while doing the opposite of his purported teachings.  


No one is willing to really SEE that these things are the symptom of a disease called capitalism; which is an ideology of every-man-for-himself but white men get everything.  
Let's blame the victim for his or her calamity.  The average human being has allowed those who own everything and who control everything to incite us into fighting amongst ourselves for the crumbs they leave us (begrudgingly as best) in order to divide and conquer and keep us so busy scrabbling about gay marriage or abortion so as to miss their thievery.  They have us brainwashed into believing that if we work hard enough, we can be like them, rich and powerful.  So people actually argue to preserve the rich and their way of life because secretly, they hope to be just as nasty, rich, and powerful as their masters are.  They in essence have allowed the wealthy controlling class to dictate their values and what values they are:  money over humanity, profits over people,  power over  compassion.  In essence, people want to BE the very thing they say despise:  rich, greedy, powerful, and ruthless.  What is it in humanity that makes us so?    


Somewhere in our genetic code there are genes programmed for survival.  Yet on those genes I would guess there are markers which cause us to be greedy, grasping, and ruthless toward our fellow human beings.  We have learned to temper those urges because we found through the ages that we all survive better in a group than living solo but the urges are still there.  These urges rear their ugly heads  and we seem unable to stop them.  We are even our own undoing because so many of us never learn compassion when we experience harm;  instead we lash out first and never develop empathy.


The very thing several historical avatars (Christ, and others) promoted; compassion and caring for one another, has been perverted in the name of feel-good, prosperity religions who enjoy excluding anyone they feel is unacceptable.  How is this Western concept of Christianity any different from the banned but still practiced caste system in India?  Generations of people are born into the belief system and propagate it with high birth rates and fervor.   Yet they scream that they are persecuted.  


When will humanity figure out that we share the same DNA, have the same desires and needs, and need each other more than we need to be rich and powerful? 


I have seen in my own family the results of someone placing money above all else.  My sibling makes about $20,000 a month.  He has made making money his prime goal in life and now he is realizing that his kids are not doing well.  His oldest was on drugs and got pregnant; her baby was born addicted to methadone.  His second child collects shoes and never thinks of the less fortunate.  His third child had OCD and bi-polar from the time he was a child; he is on medications and still has issues in school and at home.  His fourth child is ok for now but his foster child was running away and having oral sex at 15 years old.  He sent her back to her family where she is probably on the streets as an under age prostitute.  None of his kids value education, the environment, charity, or helping others.  He was raised to value education and charity but he placed money first and as such his kids think of nothing else because they have everything, every new gadget that comes on the market.  He suffers because the first born was in and out of jail and has psychiatric problems and behavior issues.  Now he is almost 40 and regretting things but he still doesn't see that his focus on money os not the best way to be.  


My other sibling also focused on money and he had a terrible accident which left him with a lot of money but physically unable to enjoy it.  He died of an overdose of pain killers at age 50.  


Money is ok but we as a society need to stop valuing it and start valuing each other.  We need to value caring, compassion, the environment and each other, no matter what color, religion, nationality, or class status. But we must not be fool enough to think we have to be all nice and sweet;  those who have power over us are like pigs wallowing in their own muddy values. Sometimes the only way to get a pig to understand you is to get down and dirty where he is at and speak in his language.  Doing so doesn't make you "as bad as he is" because you will not remain there; you only do it to get his attention.  That's what the rioters are doing; their ruthlessness is speaking the same language as the heartless wealthy puppeteers who wantonly destroy lives in pursuit of their own agenda.  We all must speak their language to get their attention and once we have it, we must send the message clear and home that we will no longer live by those misplaced values.  And we will no longer allow them to live that way either. 

On Women, sex and domination

It would seem that women can never get it right, no matter what they do. In so many societies they have to become men to be marginally accepted; being female and doing typically female things is devalued and denigrated. Starhawk, the witch, had a lot to say about that and how women themselves must stop valuing the male/competitive model as though it is the default model.

The female model of power is not as competitive; it is more community-building, immanent, generative, and facilitative. Yet societies fear our abilities. Starhawk posited that this came from the fact that we always know who our children are but men can never be totally sure without a paternity test. As simplistic as this sounds, it is a thing that underscores a lot of the male domination of female power in the world. Or as my husband once put it, every hetero man fears the hold pussy has over him; every man fears squandering his resources for another man’s genes. Women are pickier than men about their sexual partners (due to the huge physical consequences of pregnancy that women may have when they DO have sex) and as such, men must compete.

Though it seems silly to pin all this on reproduction, sex is so tied to that in subconscious ways and sex is the biggest drive we have. In my women’s studies class we learned how in every society, women’s reproductive abilities are regulated, bound, and restricted to be in favor of male desires to further their genes. Girls are fine until puberty, and then all the societal restrictions set in. After menopause, women become free again. This was true even in antiquity and is still true in modern societies as well as primitive ones.

Sacrifice rituals in antiquity are tied to males seeing that women could bleed and not die and women gave life in blood so shedding blood = life became a reason for blood sacrifice. The whole Christian religion is based on that blood sacrifice = life ideology as are many other religious practices in the past. That power women have is so dangerous that societies now and in the past have made women’s blood either sacred or taboo, something to be feared and women to be reviled. In short, we are hated for our ability to give life and for the certainty that that life carries OUR genetic material. Every aspect of female subjugation can be traced back to these things.

How can humanity change things when the very physical differences between the sexes are what drive the male dominance issue? The uncertainty of paternity will always be there; what can people do to stop regulating women and also allow men some certainty in their support of their own genetic offspring?

The Iroquois had a great way of living that dealt with this issue. Men and women had sex but the men lived in their mother’s longhouses. They could visit their female sexual partners, but it was the uncles that acted as fathers to any offspring. These arrangements meant that the resources from men were not directly tied to supporting their own genetic offspring. Instead, they supported their sister’s offspring or their mother’s younger offspring. That way Iroquois males supported those that had genetic ties to them but not their direct genetic offspring. This gave all parties a lot better life and women had freedoms during their reproductive years without having to deal with male domination. Women always knew any pregnancy would result in a child that was well fed, housed, and cared for by her brothers and the mother-clan of the long house so they were less choosy about who they had sex with (partners didn’t have to be the strongest or wealthiest). This gave the men more available women to have sex with and sexual frustration and competition were not as much of an issue. Iroquois women also owned all the land and the food sources so males could not go to war without female approval or they would starve during the war. This gave women the power to prevent the unnecessary loss of their children’s lives in wars they disagreed with. This shared power model of the Iroquois worked and had a part in the shared powers ideology we see in our current Constitution.