Thursday, December 27, 2012

Male hissy fits...

Gosh, everywhere I go today, on my blog, in my email, on listserves, on wikis, on the phone, I run into males having their little hissy fits because females will not shut up and do their bidding... Here's some Youtube videos exploring the phenomena of male hissy fits, for whatever reasons, though some may be too young and hip for me to understand! And Rachel Maddow looks like she's the one having the hissy fit...
   
So that's how you keep the rug clean, keep the vacuum out and plugged in the whole time. Thanks to male hissy fitters I know that now. Every rainbow has a silver lining. Or whatever.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Merry and consciousness raising Solstice 2012

And yes that IS a Mayan Calendar in my window!
 
I can't put off commenting on the impending Solstice of December, 2012.  After all I've seen the movie "2012" at least five times!  Tonight I was watching a couple scary "documentaries" about the various apocalyptic theories. And there's nothing like a little fear to rock you consciousness, for better or worse. It will be interesting to see what happens.

It reminds me of the build up to Y2K, which scared me a lot more because of so many articles about how nuclear power plants might melt down or nuclear rockets somehow might be tricked into being launched. Here I am below flashing a peace sign with a bunch of peaceniks in front of the White House December 31, 1999. We were ticking off with the red ribbon in what longitude the year 2000 has just struck.  Luckily, there were no catastrophes that year.  
 
And despite the scare we had last week with TWO asteroids in two days coming really close - the closest one totally unexpected! - I assume we'll be lucky again this time around. Of course, between supervolcanos and asteroids and the occasional massive solar flare, nature will doom humanity, assuming it doesn't doom itself first. But don't worry, life will always return here or elsewhere.

Consciousness, the mind of the universe, cannot help but evolve again and again into intelligent life forms, some surely far more intelligent than testosterone and masculinity besotted humanity.  So Merry Solstice, which should be the beginning of our happy new year! (Enjoy my last year's Merry Solstice video - and my "Here comes the Sun video".)

12/27/12 News Flash! We survived - for now anyway. I did have fun watching the movie "2012" for the 5th or 6th time anyway on the 21st. Well, we'll see if someone somewhere did or said or thought or wrote or decided to write or say or do something that really will raise human consciousness and give us a few thousand years of bliss on the planet before some inevitable cosmic calamity befalls us!

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

"Violence to prove manhood" rides again

I've gotten to the point that my disgust with the media for exploiting 20 year old Adam Lanza's mass murder of 20 children and 7 adults, including is mother, as well as his own suicide, is becoming almost as disgusting as the act itself.  

That said, let's identify the REAL problem - PATRIARCHAL MINDSET. Unless we raise the consciousness of males worldwide so that they stop thinking that competition, aggression and violence are the primary way of proving manhood - or that manhood has to proved at all!! - we're just twirling our thumbs behind our backs.

As a female CNN guest said other day about the video game playing shooter Lanza, it's not the violence of the video games per se that gets them violent, it's the exaggerated image of manhood and maleness being obtained through violence that is the problem.

Jackson Katz wrote an excellent article Memo to Media: Manhood, Not Guns or Mental Illness, Should Be Central in Newtown Shooting In it he writes:

...We talk amongst ourselves about how so many boys and men in our society are conditioned to see violence as a solution to their problems, a resolution of their anxieties, or a means of exacting revenge against those they perceive as taking something from them. We share with each other news stories, websites and YouTube videos that demonstrate the connection between deeply ingrained cultural ideas about manhood and individual acts of violence that operationalize those ideas. 

And then in the wake of repeated tragedies like Newtown, we turn on the TV and watch the same predictable conversations about guns and mental illness, with only an occasional mention that the overwhelming majority of these types of crimes are committed by men -- usually white men. Even when some brave soul dares to mention this crucial fact, it rarely prompts further discussion, as if no one wants to be called a "male-basher" for uttering the simple truth that men commit the vast majority of violence, and thus efforts to "prevent violence" -- if they're going to be more than minimally effective -- need to explore why. 

Maybe the Newtown massacre will mark a turning point. Maybe the mass murder of young children will force the ideological gatekeepers in mainstream media to actually pry open the cupboards of conventional thinking for just long enough to have a thoughtful conversation about manhood in the context of our ongoing national tragedy of gun violence. 

He then lists a number of issues that need to be explored.  Check it out. (Update: another good article on the same subject by Megan Murphy: But what about the men? On masculinity and mass shootings.

And yet I'm getting emails from peace groups whose response is not much better than the mainstream media: BAN GUNS! Give the government MORE control!  BAN GUNS! 
 
Do they want SWAT teams shooting up tens of thousands of homes? Cause that's what they'll get if they get their way. Of course, another State Enforcers' trick is to make any misdemeanor or alleged felony an excuse to ban guns, pick people off one at a time on flimsy excuses, and then turn every gun owner into a criminal on some pretext or other.  That's real civil liberties for you....Not.
 
Banning guns just ensures most of them will be owned by some of the most violent and macho guys: police, state and federal agents, including those who as ex-military with a history of legalized killing. Who do you think all the right wing gun nuts are afraid of? Ralph Nader? Code Pink?

Police forces at all levels get the most and best weapons AND an excuse to go after anyone with the wrong gun or accused of having the wrong gun or who might have any gun or who lives in a house formerly occupied by someone who had a gun, or whose house number just happens to be typed out by mistake by some incompetent government clerk.

You thought the war on drugs was violent? Wait til the war on guns really gears us.  Waco redux

Saturday, December 15, 2012

In denial, giggling with the holiday goats...

Commentary on the violent craziness perpetrated by males against other human beings, and the planet, constantly flows from my mind and sometimes my fingers; sometimes even here! But it can be nice to be in denial, semi-ignoring the world. Especially when one can watch videos like this over and over again to fill the heart with joy instead of anger and sadness...