Tag: violence

Dad, and corporal punishment

I wrote my father a very angry letter, expressing great disdain for his use of corporal punishment. As a result of my letter, dad stopped talking to me for about six months.

spankingOne of the issues the National Football League has been dealing with this month involves Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson [being] indicted for allegedly hitting his son with a switch [small tree branch] until he left open wounds and welts. Interesting to me that Charles Barkley, former National Basketball Association star defended the behavior as of the culture. But Cris Carter, Hall of Fame wide receiver who played primarily with the Vikings, passionately decried as something better left to an earlier time.

When we did something wrong, or perceived to be so, my father used this brown leather strap Continue reading “Dad, and corporal punishment”

White people need to talk about white privilege

Black people talking about systemic injustice towards them is far stronger when yoked with white voices joining in.

America.doing1)AAI’ve studiously avoided writing about the shooting death in Ferguson, MO of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black and apparently unarmed, by a white policeman, mostly out of a desire not just to repeat, or refute, what others have said. What’s indisputable, however, is that Americans are divided racially on the shooting.

Some (seriously) blame President Obama because he hasn’t brought that “post-racial” country they were expecting, which they believe he promised. In fact, almost every time he’s attempted to talk about racial issues, it has not gone well with a good chunk of the American public.

So I don’t want to discuss the particulars of Brown’s shooting (six times, including twice to the head), because this merely instigates the scapegoating phenomenon; Michael Brown was not the perfect victim, so we’ll attack Michael Brown, or Trayvon Martin, or whatever dead black kid is currently in the news. (Want to find an innocent, dead, black kid? See, e.g., John Crawford III, who on August 5, 2014, “was gunned down in an Ohio Walmart after customers saw him walking around with a ‘weapon’, which turned out to be an air rifle he picked up in the store.”)

I might want to mention the way police procedures have changed in the past couple of decades. For instance: New Report Exposes Growing Militarization of American Policing; also, 4 Reasons the Police Are Suddenly Terrifying and Rise of the Warrior Cop Plus It’s Perfectly Legal To Film The Cops. As usual, John Oliver has a solution to the problem.

And even white kids can get killed by cops in America: 20 Year Old Executed by Police, Allegedly for Wearing Headphones, Unable to Hear Orders. Whereas Iceland grieved after the police killed a man for the first time in its history last year.

What finally crystallized things for me was a comment a friend of mine made recently. She has three friends, all white women, married to men of color. They are finding themselves in that position of having to participate in “having the talk” with their mixed-raced children. And they are, to a woman, feeling ill-equipped to discuss it, because the narrative is not based on their own experience.

Listen to How Do You Have ‘The Talk’ with Your Black Child If You’re not Black Yourself? It’s about seven and a half minutes long.

To the broader issue, read Different Rules Apply and I Finally “Get” White Privilege and I’m Sorry. Because sometimes it takes a white dude to talk about racism. Or a white woman to do so.

Assuming, of course, they can. The Atlantic suggests that self-segregation – white people mostly talking to white people – makes it so hard for them to understand Ferguson and other issues on the racial divide.

Still, black people talking about systemic injustice towards them is far stronger when yoked with white voices joining in. It has always been thus, at least in America. Just, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, men supporting women’s equality, and straight people promoting gay rights frankly provide the sense that it’s not just “their” issue”, “their” problem”, it’s OURS.

It becomes your issue when it becomes your issue

And it is BECAUSE of the tragedy that survivors or relatives of some senseless act, are more likely to be heard, sad to say.

It really does not matter what the topic is. Inevitably, when someone speaks out on an issue, usually after a terrible human-made event, some trolls will come out and complain that those people ought to have spoken out on the issue sooner. This is absurd.

People often, indeed usually, become aware of an issue and eventually speak out when it affects them personally. It’s human nature. Think of the founder of MADD:

Candice (Candy) Lightner is the organizer and was the founding president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.lightner On May 3, 1980 Lightner’s 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a drunken hit-and-run driver at Sunset and New York Avenues in Fair Oaks, California. The 46-year-old driver, who had recently been arrested for another DUI hit-and-run, left her body at the scene.

Should Candy Lightner have been campaigning against drunk driving BEFORE her daughter was killed?

The trolls would say yes.

Ditto the parents of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting. To suggest they should have spoken out before is a straw man argument. These are parents of now dead six-year-olds who probably didn’t see themselves as activists.

My particular irritation was most recently generated by the criticism of Richard Martinez, father of one of the six young adults killed around the University of California at Santa Barbara in May 2014. He may not have been a crusader before his son Chris died, but he is now. And it is BECAUSE of the tragedy that he, and people like him, survivors or relatives of some senseless act, are more likely to be heard, sad to say. Richard Martinez now has a pulpit that he just didn’t have the month before. Perhaps it’s the CONTENT of his criticism, against the National Rifle Association, among others, that have some suggesting that he ought not to be heard at all.

But, as I’m trying to note, this isn’t specifically about Martinez. It’s about the nattering nabobs of negativism who would stifle the involvement of concerned citizens by criticizing their timing.

Civil War cards

At least a plurality of the cards had someone dying by being impaled by something, and the pained eyes of the soon-to-be deceased I always found haunting.


In a discussion on the website of SamuraiFrog, I wrote: “Yeah, just the frickin’ trailer of [the Quentin Tarantino film] Kill Bill 1 put me on edge; I can only imagine how it actually plays out.” To which, somewhere, Mr. Frog asked if it was because of the violence. Well, yeah, but it’s more specific than that.

Of all the forms of fictionalized violence in movies, the type I hate the most involves people getting stabbed or, worse, run through with a bayonet or sword. And I know why.

There were these Civil War Trading Cards that came out in 1962 from Topps, the folks that made the baseball cards. I bought them because they were history, and I was interested in that, but I don’t know why – except for some bizarre sense of completeness – I KEPT buying them.

While there were soldiers shot and run over on some cards, I swear that at least a plurality of them had someone dying by being impaled by something, and the pained eyes of the soon-to-be deceased I always found haunting. The card above is a good, not great, example of this.

So even in PG-13 movie violence, I often instinctively turn away when swordplay is involved.

You know what comic book I found yucky? It was a Daredevil, somewhere in the #160s, I think, drawn and written by Frank Miller, in which Elektra stabs some guy through a seat in a movie theater; that guy, and the terrified guy next to him, had THAT look, too.

In my dorm in college, two guys were sword fighting once; I left right away because I was afraid that someone would accidentally spill blood.

Equality, rape culture, and the war on women

So, is there a “war on women” when women at war are being raped?

I’ve been thinking about the rights of women a LOT lately. There are so many examples of what’s wrong – and to be sure a couple that are right – that it’s overwhelmed me. (And it’s taken at least a couple of weeks to write this piece.)

In New York State, “The Women’s Equality Agenda will safeguard women’s health, extend protections against sexual harassment in the workplace, help to achieve pay equity, and increase protections against discrimination in employment, housing, credit, and lending.” Sounds wonderful, of course. The big hangup for some is over abortion rights, a huge issue.

But I think the conversation about whether there is a “war on women” had been framed too much on abortion and birth control – sometimes reframed by the talking heads, to be sure.

Though there does seem to be a sexual component in all of this. In his review about Fiona Apple’s song Criminal, MDS writes: “Let’s just admit something upfront right now: as a society, we are all pretty much terrified of girls and young women having sex. Terrified. Been that way since the beginning of time, I guess. Which is why for a while there we bottled up virginity in exchange for land before the wedding ceremony. Chastity belts and dowries are mostly archaic things that no society really trades in anymore, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t figured out new ways of badly dealing with girls and young women and their sex-having. We slut-shame. A lot.”

You’ll find gender issues in comics and other entertainment, including the suggestion that the woman of a married couple in the comic business got where she was because of him when she in fact had several credits before they even dated. Someone complains about the lack of female protagonists in video games is savaged on Twitter.

So, is there a “war on women” when women at war are being raped? Recently, and I’m quoting Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) here: “The Senate Armed Services Committee held its first full hearing on sexual assault in the military in a decade. Of the twenty witnesses, only two were there as victim advocates. The other 18 were representing the top ranks of the military and uniformly opposed our efforts to reform the military justice system.”

Meanwhile, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) suggested that the “hormone level created by nature” was to blame for rapes in the military and that all pregnant servicewomen should be investigated to make sure their condition was the result of consensual sex.

Former baseball star Jose Canseco’s defense of a rape allegation against him is that he doesn’t HAVE to rape to get women to bed, showing his sheer ignorance. Then he makes his situation worse by going on Twitter and attacks his accuser by name.

What caught my attention more recently was comedian Patton Oswalt’s reversal about rape as a source of humor. “I was secure in thinking my point of view was right. That ‘rape culture’ was an illusion, that the examples of comedians telling ‘rape jokes’ in which the victim was the punchline were exceptions that proved the rule. I’ve never wanted to rape anyone. No one I know has ever expressed a desire to rape anyone. My viewpoint must be right. Right?” It’s long (addresses two other topics) and rambling, but makes an interesting point.

A report on working moms came out. It showed that 40% of the households have moms that are either sole breadwinners or making more than their husbands; BTW, that latter category would include MY household. The men at FOX News were so histrionic: “Society dissolv[ing] around us,” said Lou Dobbs. A sign of “something going terribly wrong in American society,” said Juan Williams. Erick Erickson chimed in and said having moms as breadwinners were against “biology” and said people who defend moms are “anti-science.”

Happily, they got slammed by their female colleagues on FOX, including Megan Kelly. This particular article also disses some of the MSNBC women for not calling to task the men on their network, notably Chris Matthews, over the stupid, hateful things THEY have said. Don’t know if it’s Rachel Maddow’s job to do so, but I agree that Matthews, for one, has made vile, sexist comments, especially about Hillary Clinton.

I haven’t even scratched the surface: e.g., Texas governor Rick Perry recently vetoed an equal pay bill. Instead, I’ll hang on my great hope from the words of Jean Luc Picard himself, Patrick Stewart, which you should just watch. He speaks, among other things, about the role men must play in curbing violence against women.

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