Women's Crossroads

Memorial Day is usually celebrated by veterans marching in parades down Main Street, USA, to remind us of their service to the country. It's a day to remember those who have given their lives to keep America "the land of the free and the home of the brave." It's supposed to be a sad day, a kind of collective mourning for those we've lost along the way.

Instead, most Americans take the opportunity of the long weekend afforded by Memorial Day to get some well-earned R&R with their families, to barbecue and celebrate the onset of summer. And can anyone really blame us for wanting a little relief from the grim realities of war?

According to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, 2, 465 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq since the start of hostilities there. Every day that number goes up. Included in this count are 60 U.S. servicewomen who have died in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan since 9/11/2001. "These 60 deaths," says Pamela Burke of Women's ENews, "outnumber female fatalities in Korea, Viet Nam, and the first Iraq War combined."

Also grim is the number of wounded soldiers returning home. Not even counting the tens of thousands with post-traumatic stress syndrome, there are 17,500 wounded vets walking our streets, just since the beginning of the occupation of Iraq in 2003. About 400 of these are amputees.

No, I don't think we can be blamed for wanting to just forget about this horror for a while and enjoy planting our gardens in the first warm weather of the season. And yet...our blessing and our curse as human beings is that we cannot be oblivious to the impact of the past and the present on the future. We cannot live totally in the moment, like the birds who are busily building their nests on these lovely May days.

I chose to celebrate Memorial Day by forgetting about the war for a while. But now the holiday is over, and it's time to resume the fight. The good fight! The fight against war.

I have been reading Scott Peck's book from almost 20 years ago, The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. He's writing during the late eighties, the Reagan era, which was nearly as dark a time as the present day--the Cold War not yet over, the Latin American civil wars hot and dirty, anti-Semitism rampant in the Middle East, on and on. Much of what Peck had to say then about the importance of building true community in order to attain true peace is still highly relevant today.

Peck's great insight is that most of us, especially in the U.S., live in what he calls "pseudo-community." "The essential dynamic of pseudo-community is conflict-avoidance....In pseudo-community it is as if every individual is operating according to the same book of ettiquette. The rules of this book are: Don't do or say anything that might offend someone else; if someone does something that offends, annoys, or irritates you, act as if nothing has happened and pretend you are not bothered in the least; and if some form of disagreement should show signs of appearing, change the subject as quickly and smoothly as possible....It is easy to see how these rules make for a smoothly functioning group. But they also crush individuality, intimacy, and honesty, and the longer it lasts the duller it gets."

In order to get beyond this stage and move towards true community, Peck says, groups must go through a period of unpleasant, uncomfortable chaos and conflict:

"'There are only two ways out of chaos,' I will explain to a group after it has spent a sufficient period of time squabbling and getting nowhere. 'One is into organization--but organization is never community. The only other way is through emptiness,'" Peck says. Emptiness "is the hard part. It is also the most crucial stage of community development. It is," he explains, when individuals within a group "empty themselves of barriers to communication," which include expectations and preconceptions, prejudices, ideology, theology and solutions, the need to heal, convert, fix or solve, and the need to control.

Peck describes this stage in the most dramatic terms possible. "During the stage of emptiness my own gut feeling is...the pain of witnessing a group in its death throes. The whole group seems to writhe and moan in its travail. Individuals will sometimes speak for the group. 'It's like we're dying. The group is in agony. Can't you help us? I didn't know we'd have to die to become a community.'"

If they hang in there and make it through this period of suffering, Peck says, they will finally enter true community. "It is like falling in love. When they enter community, people in a very real sense do fall in love with one another en masse. They not only feel like touching and hugging one another, they feel like hugging everyone all at once. During the highest moments the energy level is supernatural. It is ecstatic." And it "can be channeled to useful and creative purpose."

I know that I spend almost all my time in pseudo-community, and so do most of the people I know. I am afraid of conflict, and will, just as Peck says, do everything I can to smooth it over and avoid it when it threatens to crop up. As he says, this is rather dull, but functional. Even within my family, pseudo-community is the norm. The effort of getting down deep and dirty into our differences is just too much--it seems much easier to let those sleeping demons lie, and live in superficial harmony.

On a national and international scale, too, pseudo-community is actually all we're aiming for: respect for diversity, mutual tolerance, peace.

But Scott Peck has prompted me to imagine how truly powerful it would be if humanity actually made the effort to get past pseudo-community into a more authentic mode of communication and connectedness. If we were willing to talk through our conflicts, from the family level all the way up to the international level, and work through the chaos and anger, to empty ourselves of all the barriers to communication, to actually attain what we've always longed for: a brotherhood and sisterhood of mankind.

The United Nations was founded on this vision. Many religious groups aspire to it. But to actually get there, it requires more than just vision. It requires hard work, and as Peck says, conflict so intense that it feels like "the throes of dying," only to be reborn on the other side.

"When I am with a group of human beings committed to hanging in there through both the agony and the joy of community," Peck says, "I have a dim sense that I am participating in a phenomenon for which there is only one word. I almost hesitate to use it. The word is 'glory.'"

Human beings have always sensed the possibility of this kind of glory. The Bible tells us we once knew it, in the Garden of Eden; the New Testament and the Koran tell us we can go back to it, in Heaven after our earthly lives are done. The Buddhists call it nirvana. In all of these religious views, what we do in our communities here on earth determines whether or not we can attain glory after death.

Scott Peck tells us we don't have to wait until after death to achieve this kind of collective nirvana. I think he's on to something incredibly powerful. The question is, how many of us have the nerve and the stamina to walk the path of true community?

Here we go again. Sorry, but I can't help a snarl of furious bitterness at the news this morning from the Rose Garden of the White House:

Surrounded by Republican leaders and Vice President Dick Cheney, The New York Times informs us, President Bush endorsed a Republican Senate measure that "calls for increasing military spending by 7 percent, to nearly $558 billion in 2007, a figure that includes $50 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The package would essentially freeze or cut spending on most domestic discretionary programs, including education, energy and national parks, and it calls for trimming $6.8 billion over five years from entitlement programs like Medicaid and farm subsidies.

"The plan would raise the debt ceiling by $653 billion, to $9.6 trillion, and it assumes that the shortfall next year will be $348 billion, about what it is likely to be in 2006."

Meanwhile, the government is throwing yet another bone to the military-industrial complex, this time putting out to bid efforts to erect a "virtual fence" on our border with Mexico. The National Guard can't do it, they're already hemorrhaging too badly thanks to the occupation of Iraq. So let's leave it to the mercenaries. What's a few more hundred billion dollars of debt?

I have been reading Starhawk's book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery lately, and lingering over the passages where she talks about the power of vision to change reality. Many people have been saying this of late, in many different ways. We have to start telling another story. We can't leave it to "our" government representatives and their lapdogs, the media, to tell us how it is. We have to start telling them how it must be.

This is how Starhawk sees it:

"Politics is a form of magic, and we work magic by directing energy through a vision. We need to envision the society we want to create, so that we can embody aspects of it in each act we take to challenge domination.

"The edifice of war and domination is supported on three main pillars: our obedience, the construct of the enemy, and the enormous resources we devote to war. Each of these footings can be undermined. When our vision of what we want is clear, each act we take against an aspect of domination can become a positive act for the alternative we create. "

In the reality I want to envision, it's the military budget that will be cut and cut again, not the supposedly "discretionary" budgets of education, health care, the quest for renewable energy, and safeguarding our national parks. We won't waste money on patroling our borders with ever newer and more expensive gadgets! We won't spend billions on spying on our own citizens! If we were to focus on cooperation and collaboration with our neighbors (and in this global society, everyone is our neighbor), on making sure that everyone is able to live a decent life of dignity and self-respect, that no child is hungry, that health care is a basic right of global citizenship....if we were to send our energy in this direction, there would be no need to spend nearly $600 billion a year feeding the maw of the military. Let the military beast starve.

In a recent post on Alternet.org, Norman Solomon reminds us of a comment made by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, which is all the more pointed today:

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

According to Solomon's calculations, when all the ancillary programs are factored in, our nation spends something like $2 billion a day on the military. The official figure just for the war in Iraq is $10 billion a month. These are numbers it's hard to wrap our minds around. $10 billion? That's $100 million dollars times 10. Every month.

And our "programs of social uplift" are being chipped away at little by little, insidiously--witness the pathetic spectacle of Medicare Part D drug coverage, otherwise known as the harassment of the elderly poor.

Solomon reminds us of Dr. King's observation in a column about hunger: he quotes news stories that tell us that "Poor nutrition contributes to the deaths of some 5.6 million children every year," and that "one in four children under age 5, including 146 million children in the developing world, is underweight."

Millions of children are dying every year from starvation, diarrhea, and other perfectly preventable diseases that could be easily remedied if the developed world were focused on the well-being of the global community, rather than on maintaining its stranglehold on trade and commerce through the injudicious and very expensive use of force.

And no, this wouldn't have to lead to over-population that would hurt us all. As so many studies have shown, in a healthy, educated society, the birth rates go down. If people's first and second babies can be expected to survive into adulthood, the necessity of having that fourth and fifth child disappears. If women are able to work and participate in the political life of their communities, they are more likely to use contraception.

And no matter what conservatives say, preventing an unwanted pregnancy by using contraception is far better than letting children suffer and die needlessly by the millions, every year, as is currently the case.

Are we "approaching spiritual death" as a nation, as a global society? I'd have to say yes. But we're not there yet--if we were, it would be impossible for me to be writing this today. There is still plenty of room and plenty of time to turn this ship around, and there are many people working very hard to do so.

This weekend there will be a huge spiritual activism conference in Washington D.C. organized by Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and many other spiritual progressives. Rabbi Lerner's "Spiritual Covenant with America" will be presented to the U.S. Congress. This remarkable document should be read--indeed, studied--by everyone who is serious about reviving the suffering patient that is our country.

The principles laid out in the covenant are not new, but they are radical and profound. "Institutions, corporations, legislation, social practices, our health care system, our education system, our legal system, our social policies" should be judged "not only by how much money or power they generate, but also by how much love and compassion, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and by how much they nurture within us our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and to respond to the universe with gratitude, awe and wonder at the grandeur of all that is."

The covenant lays out specific ways to begin to approach these lofty goals, with "talking points" for discussing the issues with liberals, conservatives, Congresspeople, journalists, friends and family.

The scope of the conference this weekend gives me hope that we can turn this ship around, and bring our country's actions back into alignment with spiritual values that make sense. Millions of children today, and millions of those as yet unborn, are counting on us to create a human society that they can join with pride. We can't let them down!

I did get off my butt this morning and sent off a letter to Laura Bush for Mother's Day. Here it is:

May 13, 2006

Dear Laura,

A couple of weeks ago you came to visit my neck of the woods in Lenox, Mass., to celebrate the acquisition by the Edith Wharton museum of a major collection of books formerly belonging to Wharton. I was not among the crowds that turned out to catch a glimpse of you, Laura, and here’s why: I am too angry at you for the callous way you have continued to enjoy your own privilege while ignoring all the grief and desperation that your husband’s mismanagement of our country has wrought.

Can I assume that you, a former librarian and educator, do read the newspapers, even if your husband does not? So you know that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in recent history, right up there with Richard Nixon, right? You know that the city of New Orleans is still reeling from the Katrina disaster, for which our newly minted Department of Homeland Security was woefully unprepared? You know that many of the displaced children in New Orleans are still not attending school regularly, not receiving regular health care, and do not have decent housing?

You know, of course, that your husband has not even had the decency to meet with Cindy Sheehan, the warrior-mother who has turned her mourning for her son Casey, killed in Iraq thanks to the lying and manipulation practiced by his Commander in Chief, into a powerful antiwar rallying cry. You know that as of today 2,432 American soldiers have been killed by the cabal of which your husband is the leader, and nearly 18,000 shipped home to their mothers grievously wounded.

You know that the Administration presided over by your husband has raised taxes for the wealthy while cutting back on health care and education for the masses. You know that under this Administration, the largest government surplus in American history has been turned into a multi-trillion-dollar national debt.

I could go on, Laura, but it’s just too depressing. Knowing all this, how could you stand by with that grim smile on your face, and NOT SAY A WORD??? What kind of model are you setting for us as First Lady? Hillary Clinton showed us how to grin and bear it while your husband is, on a personal level, sleazy and unfaithful. But you? You are going her one much better, showing us how to smile and continue playing the oblivious hostess while all of Rome crashes and burns around you and your people!

I yearn for an American First Lady, or perhaps a first American woman president, who will show us American women how to live ethically and responsibly in this incredibly complex world of ours, how to think for ourselves and not be afraid to speak up when we witness wrong-doing—even when that wrong-doing is conducted by our husbands, or our sons, brothers and fathers.

Laura, now is your chance to be the courageous leader you were born to be. Don’t let your loyalty to George blind, fetter and gag you. Step outside this Mother’s Day and speak to the mothers who will be standing in vigil outside your front door. Give them the respect and acknowledgement they deserve. You will be surprised at how good it feels to stand on the side of peace and justice. You might even decide to stay.

In hope,

Jennifer

I received the saddest email this morning from Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey died in Iraq three years ago. Sent under the auspices of CODEPINK, Cindy's letter is an invitation to join her and other mothers in a 24-hour protest vigil in front of the White House this Mother's Day, to demand an end to the US occupation of Iraq, and to protest US government plans to invade Iran.

Cindy writes:

"This Sunday will be the third Mother's Day that I have spent without my oldest child in my life. Casey was killed in Iraq exactly five weeks before Mother's Day in 2004.

"Everyday is an incredible experience of pain and longing: for Casey and for his future and for his here and now. Special days like holidays and birthdays always seem to be harder. Casey will never call me again to wish me Happy Mother's Day. I will never get another funny card from him. I will never have a daughter-in-law or grandchild from Casey.

"George and Laura Bush will probably celebrate Mother's Day with their daughters, secure and happy in the fact that they are together. Jenna and Barbara will never be put in harm's way for the avaricious and destructive policies of their father, policies that have sent too many of the world's mothers into a tailspin of grief and emptiness."

Cindy Sheehan is pulling on our heart-strings for a reason--to pull us out of our apathy, to get us moving to demand that the Bush Administration change its destructive course and start focusing on peace, rather than warmongering.

There is no time to lose! According to the grim but excellent website Iraq Casualty Count Coalition, 2.432 American soldiers have died in Iraq as of today. Nearly 18,000 have been shipped home to their mothers grievously wounded, both physically and psychologically (see the excellent PBS Frontline report on post-traumatic stress syndrome for returning Iraq vets, reaching epidemic proportions).

And that's just the American casualties. Start counting all the Iraqis who have lost their lives, including women, children and the elderly, and you really begin to enter the nightmare.

Cindy Sheehan and CODEPINK are absolutely right. This Mother's Day, we mothers who are fortunate enough to be sitting pretty with our children safe and well should not be focused on whether they're going to bring us breakfast in bed, take us out for lunch, or send nice flowers. If we can't get down to Washington D.C. for the White House vigil, we can at least follow Cindy Sheehan's lead and send our letters of protest to Laura Bush, to let our First Lady know that we don't approve of her husband's conduct, and want her to stand with us rather than cling to him.

It's a dream as old as Lysistrata....if the mothers of the world were to unite and insist that our husbands, fathers, brothers and sons wage peace rather than war, just imagine what might be possible!

It may only be a dream, but I prefer to focus on forward-looking visions like this than to accept the current waking nightmare.

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, is "back in the saddle" again with her blog "Domestic Disturbances," published on Fridays in The New York Times. Now maybe it's true that I'm a wee bit jealous of all the attention Warner is getting with her chronicles of the trials and tribulations of motherhood--but that in itself is part of the problem I'm registering here.

Why is she getting so much attention? Why are New York Times readers so eager to read about how Warner nearly had a nervous breakdown while preparing the profiteroles for her nine-year-old daughter's French-themed birthday party?

Here's the scene Warner describes in her latest column:

"On Saturday, I found myself, midafternoon, standing in the kitchen, preparing to hurl a pan of unpuffed cream puffs through the window. The alleged “puffs” — really the size and color of underbaked digestive biscuits — were intended for the profiteroles I was making for Julia’s birthday party with friends that evening. The party was French-themed, at her impassioned request, and there were drinking cups in the shape of Eiffel Towers and an Eiffel Tower centerpiece. There were quiche and two kinds of goat cheese and Trader Joe’s sparkling French lemonade. There were supposed to be profiteroles — cream puffs stuffed with vanilla ice cream, topped with homemade chocolate sauce and fresh whipped cream, piled together into a pièce montée topped with a candle in the shape of the number nine.

"Now the mere commingling of the concepts “profiteroles” and “nine-year-old” may signal, to some of you, the presence of a problem. But it hadn’t to me, at least, not until that point. Before then, I’d been too busy figuring out how to get quiche, salad, melon and pâtes au beurre onto the dining table while supervising “tween” makeovers and making warm but not burnt chocolate sauce. I was too worried about how to get my mother and mother-in-law out of the kitchen without alienating them even more.

"(To give you a sense of the atmosphere: I turned on the electric beater. The dog began to howl. I opened the back door and shouted at him, “Get out!” My mother replied, “Let me just get my things.”)"

It makes for an entertaining column, no question about it. But I find the unabashed description of privilege to be startling and kind of eerie. This frantic baking is going on while Warner's journalist husband is "out at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner" (wasn't his wife invited too?). Really I just feel like shouting at her some very old, cliched lines: "Don't you realize kids are starving in Sudan?" and "Why don't you get a life??"

Here is Judith Warner, a talented, well-educated woman living an incredibly privileged life in the heart of the capital city of the Empire, Washington D.C., and she can think of nothing better to do with her time and talents than make profiteroles for her nine-year-old daughter? Aren't there more interesting, less navel-centered ways of celebrating a ninth birthday, come to think of it, than having your mother and both grandmothers in the house frantically preparing to slavishly serve you and your friends?

This is how blind privilege--that super-confident sense of entitlement, which we see on display every day in its adult form in the person of our own George W. Bush--gets perpetuated. Mother to daughter, mother to son, on and on. And obviously New York Times readers are part of that charmed circle, because they're just lapping it up in Warner's columns and best-selling book.

I'd like to suggest that Judith Warner and her fans do something different for Mother's Day this year: go out and join the CODE PINK women who will be standing a 24-hour vigil in front of the White House to "honor all the mothers -- US and Iraqi -- who have lost sons and daughters in the conflict in Iraq." These women--many of them mothers and grandmothers, all of them daughters--will be calling "for our troops to come home so that no more mothers will suffer the unbearable grief of losing a child to Bush's war," and also sending "a message of sorrow, friendship and peace directly to the women of Iraq and their families."

There is simply too much at stake, Judith, to waste your energy and talent on such frivolities as perfect profiteroles! Do you really want to go down as another Marie Antoinette, focused on cake while the palace burns down around you? Our children need us more than ever now, but the battles we must fight for the sake of their futures, and the futures of all living beings on this planet, aren't going to take place in our ultra-stylish kitchens.

Brazilian women are the latest to join women in Mexico City, Tokyo, and Cairo, all places that grant women the special privilege of...a subway car of their very own. As Suzy Khimm reports today on Alternet.org, Brazilian women demanded this privilege in response to unrelenting sexual harassment (otherwise known as groping) in the packed commuter trains taking them to work.

"Men think it's extremely normal to do this. They don't feel guilty at all," says Monica Aranjo Neves, 34, an administrative assistant who has been groped on several occasions. "We have to go to work, then take care of everything at home, and we shouldn't have to deal with this on the train."

That's right, women who enter the public sphere, the working world, should not be subject to harassment from men who continue to see them as no more than sexual objects. Unfortunately this macho attitude is perpetuated in many cultures, including our own, via the very unequal dress code for working men and women: squared-off pants suits and flat shoes for men, tight shirts, curve-hugging skirts and heels for women. I still wonder how women can expect men NOT to see them as sexual objects when they are so clearly dressing the part.

It's no surprise that some Brazilian men are responding to the new law granting women their own subway cars with cries of reverse discrimination. Others quoted by Khimm complain that the law unfairly demonizes all men. More serious are charges by Brazilian women's rights organizers that the law "will do little to change the behavior of errant men, other than keep them at train car's distance"; Brazilian authorities, they say, must do more to educate the entire population about the illegality of sexual harassment of women.

Clearly simply segregating men and women is no more than a stopgap measure. Male attitudes towards women in the public sphere reflect male attitudes towards women in the private sphere, and in both realms, inequality is the rule. Why should men feel free to grope women anywhere, whether on the dance floor or in a crowded subway? Why is our society so comfortable with women earning only 77 cents on the male dollar? Why are housework and child care still almost exclusively women's work, the world over? Why are only 14% of U.S. Senators women? These are the deeper questions that must be addressed before the temporary protection afforded women by a subway car of their own will be rendered unnecessary.