violence & responsibility

Last night we learned that a friend of ours got attacked by some gay men who had heard a rumor that he had transitioned. Our friend is healing well, which we're grateful for.

Obviously this made me feel disturbed and angry. I'm still mulling over my thoughts and responses - but I have a few things to say about it already.

What is it with men that we need to do violence against each other anyway? I struggle to understand how this rumor could lead someone to violence anyway. It reminds me how much violence is related to fear of the unknown and a need to prove oneself by dominating or denying someone else. We teach this as a culture, from our foreign policy down to our voting, and even sometimes our "sex" lives. I use sex in quotation marks because the intimate, vulnerable act of sex is the opposite of an act of violation. I'm reminded that men sometimes say women are "emotional" or "too carried away by emotion," but what do you call it when a man lets his emotions of anger or fear lead him to violence? And what possible gain is it, to commit violence like this, when it simply leads to more fear and anger? Where does this cycle stop?

What makes me even more livid is that it was gay men who did it. Gay men, who know that even in the Bay Area we are at risk for violence against us for not fitting the dominant mold of masculinity. Over and over, James Baldwin's analysis rings in my head: there are two categories of response to oppression. The first is to strive to get back into the norm, and the second is to find common cause with others who are oppressed. Too often, I think gay people, especially those of us who can "fit in" pretty well, take the first option. If we can just widen the circle a little bit, we think, we'll be okay - safe, happy, and smiled upon. The underbelly of this is that it continues to stand on the same principles of exclusion and violence. I learned early in my feminist education, and in my own life experience, that this simply doesn't work.

Gay men who seek to be included back into the fold of normative masculinity are cutting their nose off to spite their face. If we strive only to "be just like you [hetero men]" we lose. We sacrifice, if not a part of ourselves, then a part of who "we" are in a larger sense.

Even more, I have criticism for the gay men who buy into the norm of masculinity. These are the guys who idolize big muscles, big penises and overt, even violence, masculinity. I use idolize very consciously - meaning those who make a god or a savior of these things. It's not the attraction to these traits that I see as the problem, but the unconscious results. The implication is that a man who doesn't have a specific size and shape of anatomy is somehow not "really" a man. That kind of thinking is just a breath away from the implication that a man who has sex with a man is not "really" a man. That kind of violence is a violence against oneself as well as against other people. We have to create a culture where this isn't the kneejerk response to someone who doesn't fit our idea of what someone is "supposed" to be.

I don't know what happened in that attack - who these gay men were, or what their motivations were. But I do know that I am implicated here. When I reinforce the idea that some men are more "men" that others, based on arbitrary traits like that, I do violence against myself and others. When I try to be just like the norm, or try to stretch the norm just enough so I can fit in again, I commit violence against myself and other people. It has to stop somewhere. So let's make it stop here.

Food, Inc., Foreign Policy, and Kansas

Last week my partner and I went to see the documentary Food, Inc., about the industrialized food system and how it's hurting people, the planet, the poor, and the economy itself.

Much of the film was revealing for him, who had seen it a few days earlier at a childhood obesity prevention conference. Hardly any of it was new information for me, having grown up in an agricultural small town in Kansas, with a father who managed an agricultural coop and a mother who worked in a nursing home kitchen. We were not hippie people, but we had a big garden and raised & butchered chickens every year - along with the occasional lambs and pigs, which we drove (in our '54 Chevy pickup) to the slaughterhouse. My mom refused to buy supermarket meats because they just didn't taste good. I was too young to remember the Farm Crisis of the 80s, but financial ruin always hovered on the edge of most people's vision. Talking about the weather wasn't small talk because the economy depended on the weather system that provided good crops or bad. I remember my dad shaking his head over the idea of farm subsidies that paid us per acre NOT to plant. I remember when I realized that good crops didn't necessarily mean good money because more crops flooding the market translated into lower price per bushel. I remember countless times when my mom worried about the overspray from the fields drifting into our garden. We learned to read labels because my dad was allergic to corn - and almost everything had corn syrup in it.

Living in California, I hear more and more from my mom about this or that person with cancer. Young people with brain tumors. Mothers with pancreatic cancer. Breast Cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer. When my Grammy died, I angrily asked why no one draws the connection between pesticides and cancer that disfigured her face so her glasses didn't sit right when she was lying there in the casket. No on has an answer because we all depend on those chemicals.

Frankly, the industrial food system is much worse now than then. Visiting my dad in Iowa, I asked why farmers used genetically modified crops and a pesticide that killed EVERYTHING but the seed containing a certain gene. Didn't that scare them? He drove me past fields of even, perfectly green rows, and then fields that were uneven (signaling less yield when harvesting) and weeds here and there. That's all the argument you need, he said, even in Central and South American countries that outlaw GMOs - because the farmers see neighboring countries with perfect fields, and the illegal market grows.

Growing up, I didn't make the connections between that and foreign policy, or with the e.coli outbreaks at fast food restaurants (where we rarely ate anyway, because it was unhealthy, and not really that tasty compared to home cooking).

I learned more about this in college. I saw the commodities market in the Midwest (and, for example, among coffee farmers in Ethiopia) where equality among producers meant exploitation on the part of the buyers.

I'm also reading a book about the violence of a belief system that sees one's own nation as "God's chosen people" over all others. I read about false capitalism based on large corporations that can leverage their assets to put small ones out of business (remember, the free market depends on equality or small distinctions between companies). I read about structural adjustment programs in industrializing countries, in which aid money is tied to "helpful" economic policies that put the countries further into debt (ie, forcing farmers to grow commodity crops like corn, tobacco, and coffee, instead of food crops that feed the region). In the film, they talked about how farmers in Mexico, encouraged to grow corn for the international market, went out of business because small farmers everywhere tried to sell their corn, ensuring lots of corn for low prices. These farmers then come north to work at industrial food factories, where they are picked off and deported by immigration enforcement. Attention: these farmers are punished, but the corporations that hire them run smoothly, neither threatened by the immigration enforcement officers nor by work stoppage due to worker deportation. Odd.

And by the way: cheap food, usually manufactured with nutrient-low ingredients, adjusts people's palates to salt and fat instead of flavor. There's also a piece about economic markets in low-income areas (West Oakland, for example) where there are plenty of liquor stores and fast food joints - but astonishingly few grocery stores that sell fresh produce. Thus people with less income (often due to economic policies that exploit their labor and pay low wages) get diabetes, obesity, and poor health. Considering that, don't forget the racist dynamics of how that happens.

Anyway, this film is worth seeing - and worth weighing your values around the environment, fair worker policies, and the food system. It's not always possible to live perfectly, but it's always possible to live better and make better choices. In college, one of my best friends Sam and I used to talk about the knee-jerk anti-corporate mentality. He points out that corporations have the money to pay good wages, set labor standards, pay good health benefits, and a host of other really helpful things. The key is not to dismantle them, but to reinforce human values in their actions. I like the cooperative system where small entities can organize to leverage their power and negotiate on a slightly better playing field with multinational buyers. But it's complicated.

I think I've written enough here for today. Check out the movie and learn a little more from places like The People's Grocery in West Oakland.

the exchange of ideas: a cactus and a jellyfish walk into a bar...

So this afternoon I happened to run into my friend EJoye, and we both had a little time on our hands. The universe moves, and creation laughs when this kind of stuff happens.

Part of what we talked about was the notion that worldview is based on the life we live. I see the world in a certain way because that's how I experienced and interpreted it. Different visions (theologies, political systems, etc) make sense if you look at how the person has lived and interpreted life. This is a basic part of systemic thinking. This issue becomes a pimple when we have to make a decision that will affect other people's lives (ie voting on same-sex marriage, or acting within global realities after the Soviet Union dissolves). Then ideas or worldviews come to "compete" in the decisionmaking process. I come to my worldview partly because of the happenstance of my experience and partly because of systems that help me sort and assign value to my experience. Just because someone else has a different worldview doesn't mean we're both wrong. One of us should not dominate (though I might argue that the marginalized worldviews - like those who experience racist oppression, for example - deserve special listening and attention). And one of us is not automatically "wrong" because our experience is different. As humans, we do (especially those of us who have power and benefit from the privilege of non-marginalization) have a responsibility to take in and consider deeply the experiences of others - but it's not a matter of finding the "right" or "true" one, because all of them are true in the system of meaning they occur in. That doesn't mean they must be followed slavishly, or they are not subject to change. But truth and reality exist in multiplicity: people do things for a reason (even if it's not our reasoning!). But then...

EJoye & I both take it for granted that the free market and militarism are not successfully working metaphors when it comes to human relationships. In other words, I didn't meet my partner and then do battle against other options in my life in order to stay in a relationship with him. I didn't quantify my aptitude and ability to trust, measured against the competing demands of time, labor, and productivity in order to make a rational economic decision to exchange trust and friendship with EJoye.

And this part of our conversation came down, for me, into the failure of metaphors for an exchange of ideas. We can talk about "competing" or "battling" political ideologies. That's at the heart of the two-party political system of governing this country. The two "sides" battle for the hearts and minds of voters and then it's assumed that the democratically elected side that "wins" is the best one. Differently (but equally wrong as a metaphor), when it comes to worldviews, we don't trade and make decisions based on rational value and competing "supply" and "demand" of ideas, desires, needs, wants, and solutions. Yet these are both ways that administration (national, state, local, business, nonprofit, family, etc) often assign value and make decisions.

It's about time for a new metaphor for the exchange of ideas. And frankly I don't know what it is. Any thoughts?

I often turn to the ecosystem for metaphors of spirituality, but I don't find anything helpful there. Except perhaps biodiversity. Reality for a saguaro cactus in the desert is significantly different than reality for a giant jellyfish off the coast of Japan. Their ways of survival are rather different. But this metaphor breaks down when it comes to the moment when the jellyfish and the saguaro meet up. Hm...

return

so in all the busy-ness of graduating and recovery, I took off the month of May.

I've actually got a lot to say (and this morning, shoveling granola in my mouth after going to the gym, not so much time to say it all).

Here's a list of the things I want to write about as I try to take up my practice of weekly writing again. It's a reminder for me as much as anything else.

- Rosemary Radford Ruether's book "America, Amerikka" about how the ancient Israelite notion of chosenness affected European and American history - Manifest Destiny, the annexation of Mexico (aka Texas, California, and the American Southwest) and Puerto Rico, the annihilation of Native Americans, the Cold War fight against communism, etc. My friend Emily gave it to me for graduation, and I'm about halfway through. I also just finished "Down at the Cross," an essay by James Baldwin about race relations in the 1960s where he picks up on a lot of the same themes from a very different angle.

- finding a space where I don't have to defend myself or certain relatives as we struggle to maintain a relationship in the middle of theological disagreement.

- planet God.

- and was it really a mistake to send an image of myself in the mail - what's gossip really about, anyway?

that's it. I hope to write more later - I've been carrying this stuff around for a while.