Doomsday begins at home...

...Especially when the household involves child abuse, or, worse, child sexual abuse.

Sick stories involving the creatures who do such things have been popping up in the media with greater frequency in the past couple weeks than I've seen in quite some time. I've seen at least six such stories. A few are: Here in MA, 11 guys got nabbed in "Operation Trenchcoat" for using the Web to solicit sex from minors. Another couple recently got convicted for molesting their own kids... and encouraging them to have sex with each other -- the husband got 5 life terms, the wife, 40 years. And now, a Cleveland guy purporting to be promoting the arts -- and self-proclaimed pedophile -- is being held for molesting autistic children.

In part of the last article the Herald didn't print, AP added:
"Not all pedophilia is bad, and sex with boys can be healthy,"
Distasio said. "It's an argument I'm willing to make, but my attorney is not."

No shit. That's because the attorney's not a twisted fuck. These kinds of self-justifying arguments are common for pedophiles, who typically have little ability to see things from another's point of view (esp. their victims'). Detective Mark Gado has several common traits of pedophiles here.

The first website a Google search for Distasio's group turned up said, "Arcadian Fields is a ministry of the Universal Life Church. The goal of the ministry is to provide free food and shelter for artists and musicians in order to promote education and health through interactive entertainment."

Since this pervert is apparently AF's FOUNDER, I can guess what kind of "interactive entertainment" he had in mind. Even more twisted details of "Brother Patheticus" can be found here.

The ULC has zero qualifications for ministers. They will literally ordain anybody, and that points to a serious problem. Groups like ULC, while they might be well-intended, provide cover for those who see authority of any kind as a ticket to express their own whims. Those can be good; I believe the group aims to give Pagans a chance to practice their faith with legal protections other ministers get, including the right to marry others. But for some (obviously including this creature), the authority is solely being used to benefit themselves.

As a step-brother to two people who are developmentally-disabled & someone who worked with autistics and others for several years, I can't really put into words how disgusted people like this make me. But I can summarize it this way: Child sexual abusers are among the VERY few criminal types I have no problems executing.

But that doesn't prevent the problem from recurring. As someone I interviewed once said, child abuse "grows like mold in darkness." The only way to prevent it is to blow open the doors of secrecy, to stop treating children as if they're the property of adults and acting as if their ideas and their reality mean nothing. I think a big part of that means standing up to our society's acceptance of religion as an excuse for people's behavior. While the vast majority of religious folks are NOT child abusers/molesters, all too often, molesters justify their abuses with religion or use religious threats as a weapon against their victims.

Child abuse, with or without molestation, just continues the cycle of violence we see writ large in society's drug abuse, gang and international wars, and less obvious manipulations of people for the benefit of a few. If we want real peace, it literally has to start at home, by ending child abuse.

A few good sites on this issue:

The National Assoc. to Protect Children
Andrew Vachss's website
RAINN
David Baldwin's Trauma Pages
Men's Resource Center for Change

Thanks to Dispatches from the Culture Wars for the tip.

Back in the game...

Hi, all,
(If anyone's still visiting this blog...)

I know it's been months since I last posted here. Some you have seen comments on your blogs, so you know I'm still alive; and I've seen a few blogs I used to visit vanish. (Tara? Tonya? Where'd you go? Hope you're still OK.) My day job has pretty much coopted much of my writing inspiration, but I'll try to get back to posting here at least weekly or so...
Anyway, that said, on with the show...

Today, I got a post from a list I'm on that included the following line:

"Reduction to a mere physical survival will reduce our
existence to pure boredom. And what do we do with our souls then? We
have to live and, if necessary, to die for what we believe in."

I basically agree, but think the issue we need to isn't so much personal survival as collective survival. If we as a species don't correct the problems that are now fueling ecological destruction, religious apocalypticism, and the ever-present risk of nuclear war, the whole concept of revolution will be meaningless. Of course, making those changes is itself revolution.

The key as I see it is showing how such changes will increase the well-being of future generations. People need to learn that surviving this year, while important, is less so than ensuring our grandchildren & beyond have a world they can live in, be a part of, and, more crucially, have a role in, rather than separate from & superior to, as our culture not-so-subtly teaches. We need to be able to frame the changes, which will be very culture-shaking and to many people demoralizing, as positive and growth-allowing (not in the overpopulation, economic or material senses, but in the long-term, intellectual, spiritual, health, and other senses).

For that to work, people need to see a wider goal, have an outlet for pent-up frustrations that Taker society breeds. I believe that outlet is space: We need to change our attitude regarding Earth to one of nurturance AND to tap the adventurous elements of human ability.

Some people may say such expansion just exports Taker attitudes, but I disagree -- LIFE itself expands whenever it has the chance, and there are VAST spaces out there with little or no life that may be perfectly suited for colonization without any need to invade and impose a rapacious culture on them. In Earth's history, life has done this without our help, but for Earthlife to survive long-term, our help is necessary, because eventually Earth will become uninhabitable by any lifeform. Homo sapiens will certainly be long gone by then, but whatever species are our intellectual descendents deserve an opportunity to live. Maybe they'll thank us, maybe not.

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee #, and others, suggest that Earth's overall capacity for harboring life has already peaked and is in its long, slow slide toward death, just as an individual person eventually gets old and dies as body systems shut down. I believe that's one reason intelligence, language, and tool-using capabilities evolved when they did, as the only long-term hope for life to continue, and human adoption of that kind of responsibility would certainly be a far more uplifting philosophy than the object-centered, self-centered, or imaginary-being-centered philosophies/religions/political systems that have dominated human civilization.

Some see a Leaver philosophy as being diametrically opposed to civilization (see, for example, most of the writing here), but I don't. It's just opposed to a certain KIND of civilization, and for change to be successful, people need to see that they aren't losing the benefits of civilization, but gaining benefits of another kind that will make up for some of the challenges the transition period will inevitably bring. The change ahead needs to be a conscious effort to change, to select what we keep and what we discard of Taker society.

We CANNOT let that transition be a "collapse" on a global scale in which most of humanity that survives returns to medieval, neolithic or hunter-gatherer lifestyle; doing so would be a denial of the gift of intelligence evolution has bestowed upon us and our responsibility toward other lifeforms long-term. Given how much of Earth's fossil fuels we've used, it might also make it impossible for a future species to do what we haven't yet done, since fossil fuels are reasonably a crucial stepping stone to space travel. (It might not; Ward and Brownlee suggest Earth has maybe 500 million years in which animal life can continue to flourish. That might enable the fossil fuel supply to replenish itself, but wouldn't our doing it right when there's room for error be better than forcing a future species to do it out of desperation, or, worse, to evolve the intelligence to realize Earth's dying and can do nothing about it?)

BTW: Taker and Leaver are references to Daniel Quinn's Ishmael & related books. In brief, "Taker" refers to a society that believes its way is the only way to live and that humanity has the right (even the duty) to dominate other lifeforms for our own benefit. In other words, our mainstream society. "Leaver" by contrast is an attitude of "live and let live" in which the fact of their existence gives other cultures and species their own value and right to survive independent of whatever usefulness they might have to us. For more info, visit Quinn's main site or one of many forums, such as IshCon.

#-- I'm almost done with this book and will be reviewing it here soon.

ALSO: Having glanced over the old posts, I see a LOT of spam, so I think it's time to enable that word-verification-thingy (of course, they aren't real words, but *shrug*)... Hope it's not too much of a hassle.

Political mess is a family crisis

The following was inspired by a post at Distance, where a version of it is also posted. It's admittedly speculative, but I think it suggests things that could in fact be scientifically tested...

Today's sociopolitical situation in the US is a lot like having a very weak parent (the Dems & moderate Repubs) to turn to when a strong parent (the right-wingers & corporate cronies) is brutalizing you.

In the past, such conditions would've sparked the growth of third parties, but corrupt electoral laws and widespread self-absorption today make such parties very difficult things to get off the ground. It doesn't help that the courts and government watchdog agencies have largely been corrupted, social services are underfunded, and the wingnuts are constantly screaming that liberals are "traitors" (or worse). That kind of atmosphere is much like that found when an abused child tries to run to an outside adult, only to have the door slammed in his face because the parent has already passed around word that the child is "a troublemaker" or just "making it up."

The right wingers often decry the common focus on self-improvement, therapy, psychological exploration, and the like, but they seem to be benefiting from it at least in the short-term. I'm sure, if such a study could be done, we'd find that those who are most likely to seek therapy & otherwise try to deal with their past are also most likely to be of a progressive bent culturally. In effect, such self-exploration takes progressives out of the loop ... but only temporarily. Often, they return with a vengeance to use the knowledge thus gained to help others, b/c it almost invariably results in finding common ground with lots of other people struggling with the effects of this dysfunctional society.

Our best hope is that we can forestall the right-wing agenda long enough to give a new generation of self-aware and socially/ecologically connected people a chance to act.

The right-wingers don't care about facing their demons -- in fact, they tend to deny they exist internally, thereby projecting them onto everyone else. They, however, are probably more likely than progressively-raised folks to have actually experienced serious trauma during childhood, not b/c conservatives are by nature more vicious than progressives (they're not), but b/c conservatives have a much greater tendency to keep other people out of "family business" and are more likely to see children as being subordinate to their parents. That attitude sometimes approaches paranoia the farther toward the right fringe you go, especially when it gets wrapped up in supposedly literal religious proscriptions, social isolation, and lack of education.

When abuse does exist in such an environment, it's much more likely to be hidden for longer -- and thereby have more severe impact -- than when children are raised "by a village" and seen as having rights separate from but dependent on their parents. In the latter case, openness gives the kids and stressed parents somewhere to turn and tends to minimize (although not entirely prevent) abuse.

Today's politics represent these two attitudes writ large: A "go it alone" view that cloaks itself in morality while projecting its pain onto other countries and segments of society and a "reach out" view that seeks to engage the outside and learn from it while accepting the real cost of our history to ourselves and others.

Trauma & apocalyptic thinking

In response to my last post, T wrote in part:
We are living in an age of lost humanity. We no longer know the definition of reaching out and seeing a friend in the eyes of a stranger

I think there are still many people who can reach out that way, but there are certainly forces in society that are pushing people apart, forces that need to be confronted. Some of them have been around since civilization began and gain force periodically due to civilization's unfortunate tendency to create a relative handful of people who believe (wrongly) that they can most benefit by taking as much as possible from others.

This handful of people isn't the same every time -- no "Illuminati" or other wacky conspiracy theory here. But they are often of a similar personality type, namely, sociopathic.

Often, the perpetrators are authoritarian fundamentalists of various stripes, sometimes religious, sometimes political, sometimes both (not that there's much difference in practice; generally, only the names differ). Personally, I believe that most fundies react the way they do because they have themselves been traumatized in some major fashion but refuse to acknowledge that and instead have absorbed the victim/abuser ideology. The two cannot exist separately and are often seen in the same person depending on the current situation. Such folks do not really trust or care about others b/c they do not trust themselves (if they did, they wouldn't ID themselves and everyone else as "sinners," for example.)

While those folks DO most clearly demonstrate the problem, they are actually symptoms of it more than the causes. (That doesn't excuse their actions when they manipulate and/or brutalize others, however. We are not responsible for what happens to us, but we are responsible for what we do because of it.)

Unfortunately, since trauma afflicts a large number of people, it has large-scale social effects. especially when unacknowledged. Nobody is entirely free of trauma in some form, but only a relatively small percentage of people are actively trying to see how it might be affecting them and each other. Many have internalized the belief that they are "bad" for the horrors that befell them, that such horrors are "human nature", but feel/have been taught they cannot do anything about it. That can make it easy to turn a blind eye to hypocrisy, to promote violent "solutions," to react without enough thought, and to accept as "normal" situations of long-term fear, secrecy, and oppression (such as the world's possession of enough nuclear weapons to kill us several times over).

I believe the traumas people inflict on each other aren't due to some flaw in humanity, but to the fact that we have been trying to live in crowded, hierarchal, sedentary, impersonal cultures that clash with the way humanity and human emotions evolved over most of our species' history. Emotionally, we're still (semi-)nomadic hunter-gatherers who react best in small groups and in circumstances where changes aren't happening too quickly. That doesn't mean we can't adapt to modern circumstances, just that it takes time to do so, and the kinds of changes today are overwhelming the adaptability of too many people.

For some of them, the feeling of being overwhelmed breeds individual mental and/or physical illness. For some, it breeds addiction to ideologies that promise "salvation" in religious, political, technological or other form, often including violent destruction of an extremely generalized abuser (personally, I see that as a collective mental illness). But for others, it serves as a wakeup call to take action ....

motivation & media portrayals

Liz wrote: I'm also very curious about how media portrayal of apocalyptic scenarios affects people. Are they moved to think differently or even act differently?

I'm curious about that, too; that's one of the things I hope we will come to understand a little about using this blog.

I think some people use it as a warning, a way to understand what we need to fight against (that's my motivation, in part); others probably accept the idea as inevitable and are trying to predict how it'll play out. (I know I said in "Intro..." that I don't think it's inevitable, but I think part of me does, and if it happens, I intend to try to survive it, although I'm not into the whole "survivalism" thing per se.) Many have been conditioned to hear such tales as "Chicken Little-ism" and ignore them.... possibly at their peril.

Denial is a very serious problem in our society, and by ignoring this particular subject, people are in effect ignoring some of the serious flaws our society has always had but tries to keep hidden, often through religion and/or political repression. We as a society are denying both our fear and our recognition that we are NOT indestructible, nor even all that special in the grand scheme of things.

In recent decades, though, it has become increasingly difficult to pull off the convoluted dance steps denial requires, in part because the problems themselves are reaching boiling point, but also because the amount of knowledge about the reality of our situation and our alternatives has grown exponentially. In most previous centuries (and this problem has been developing for centuries, at least) and in most societies even recently, information was rigidly controlled or simply not available. People did not have the access we now have, and that both terrifies some people and emboldens others to work for change. Ultimately, apocalyptic literature of any stripe is about gut-wrenching, traumatic change and how people and societies deal with it (or not).

Personally, I got interested in apoc-lit in high school and have since realized it's both a reaction to the real-world threat of nuclear war and an exploration of the darker side of my own psyche after family disintegration ("nuclear (family) war," the other side of my motivation).