Women's Crossroads

After a week of Israel pounding Lebanon and killing hundreds of civilians in an attempt to rout the Hezbollah fighters, the world is taking notice. Lots of voices are chiding Israel for using “disproportionate force”—except of course for our illustrious President, who admonishes the Hezbollah folks to “stop that shit.”

The humanitarian agencies are all scrambling to get aid to the displaced Lebanese—the Israeli jets were leafleting neighborhoods in Beirut yesterday, warning the people to leave their homes, and thousands are doing just that, but they have no where to go, and nothing to eat when they get there.

Those of us who can spare a few minutes from our sweet summer plans to ponder all this are left wringing our hands on the sidelines, and eventually shrugging our shoulders and going on with our barbecues and trips to the beach.

What can be done? Those Israelis and Palestinians have been going at it for decades, and things have only gone from bad to worse. Thank heaven it’s happening over there, far, far away from our green and peaceful safe haven.

I confess to having indulged in this train of thought several times during this past week. Ordinary Americans like me just don’t seem to be able to affect world events—we can’t even manage to elect a decent President of our own country, or end the corruption in our Congress. Every time I’ve tuned into the news this week it’s just sunk me further in depression, and who needs that?

I was thinking how, in the old days, there was just as much fighting and conflict in the world, but ordinary people were less in contact with it than we are now. Without computers and satellites, it might take weeks for your average person living on a farm in the Midwest, let’s say, to learn that a battle was raging in Armenia or Egypt. One might never learn of it. And what one didn’t know couldn’t hurt one.

I do believe that what Kaethe Weingarten has identified as “common shock” is a real problem for us 21^st century folks. We know far too much about what’s going on on our planet, and so much of what we learn about faraway places is negative. This gloomy awareness settles over us like a pall, and for those of us who are sensitive to the suffering of others, it can cast a shadow over every hour of every day, however happily we may be engaged in enjoying the fruits of empire.

Weingarten, a psychologist, urges us to work through our common shock, our distress and even trauma over the violence we see around us, by channeling our fear, pain and anger into action that will bring about a more positive world.

But that’s the problem lately: I feel, and I am sure I’m not alone, totally stymied in my desire to act. Protests have gotten us nowhere. Voting has gotten us nowhere. Writing has gotten us nowhere. The violence just seems to be escalating, and with it the problems of the environment, climate, and suffering of all the beings on our planet.

Right now I am falling back on the very small, very local sphere, the only place where I can truly have an impact and make a difference. My family, my community, my friends, my workplace. I am trying to root myself in the present moment, which is in fact a peaceful summertime in the beautiful Berkshire hills, where I am nestled in a loving web of family, friends and friendly acquaintances. I am planting flowers and flowering shrubs, tending my vegetable garden, caring for my children, my husband and my cats.

It’s tempting to just retreat into this cocoon and try my best to forget about the mayhem going on in the outside world. Many people in my position are doing just that.

I can’t really shut it out entirely. The shadow of war, fear, pain and grief stays with me at all times. But the only satisfying way I can think of to push it back right now is through the small offerings of love I am able to give to the world immediately around me.

I’m treading water, waiting for a movement that can offer real change.

What’s up with New York Times columnist John Tierney? Clearly, things are really bad in the Republican / conservative world, because instead of his usual cheerleading for Bush Administration policies, he’s feinting with unwarranted attacks on women and girls.

First a column last week arguing that Title IX is no longer necessary, since girls are succeeding so well at school now—let the boys rule the one place they excel, he whines, on the playing field!

And the very next column goes on in the same vein. After dismissing the outraged outcries of respondents to his Title IX column, he goes on to argues that “the gender-equity programs established in the 1990’s, besides perpetuating a bogus crisis, mainly served the cause of girls who didn’t need it”—ie, middle-class white girls.

This is Rove-style bait-and-switch at its best. Let’s distract our (upper) middle-class white New York Times readers from the real news at hand—the disastrous unfolding of events in the Middle East this week, coupled with a steep plunge in the stock market—by getting them into a tizzy over the always-juicy sport of taunting the ladies. And don’t waste any more than a throwaway line over the fate of those even Tierney admits are being “shortchanged,” African American and Latino/as.

Last summer, Larry Summers of Harvard tried something similar, baiting women by tossing off a remark about how we don’t succeed in science because we lack scientific brains. Tierney is more subtle—he’s purporting to stroke women’s egos by telling us how well we’re doing in school, while actually making a case for restoring the playing field to the way it was in the good old days, when women were cheerleaders and men ruled the field.

Anyone who has taken a look at professional sports lately knows that women are still remarkably handicapped in sports. No women’s pro teams come anywhere near men’s pro teams in terms of sponsorship or popularity with the public. A few women make it in individual sports like tennis, swimming, gymnastics, and track—but by and large ours is a culture that still prefers its women on the sidelines cheering in ridiculously short skirts.

The fact that women are doing so well in school is something to be proud of, but we also have to ask why this success at the undergraduate level and below isn’t translating more readily into professional success once young women graduate. Remember that long, front-page Times article last spring interviewing women undergrads from Ivy League schools, all of whom claimed to have gone to college primarily to find a husband?

Our culture still insists that strong, successful women, like Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada,” are fearsome dragon ladies, objects of dread and something like scorn. Until that cultural attitude changes, young women are going to continue to sabotage themselves intellectually in order to please the men in their life, who, like Tierney, wish for a 2010 that looks like 1950, bobby socks and all.

There is an ode in Sophocles “Oedipus” cycle that keeps coming back to me lately. It goes on for many lines about all the wondrous things that human beings can accomplish with our intellect and our dexterity. And then the last couple of lines are brief but terrible: the chorus reminds us that we are also capable of destroying it all with our willfulness, anger and greed.

This ode comes to me when I read, juxtaposed in the newspaper, about how scientists have managed to implant an electrode in the human brain that enables a paralyzed man to move a cursor on a computer simply by thought—and about how the Israelis and Palestinians continue to pound each other, leaving as-yet untold civilian tragedies in their wake.

How can human beings be at once so magnificently intelligent, and so destructively cruel?

I do feel like a member of the Greek chorus lately, chanting by the sidelines, recounting what’s happening and offering some suggestions—but all the while the actors continue obliviously going through their motions, hellbent on tragedy.

I begin to understand the impetus behind the suicide bombers, the terrorists, and all the other frustrated human beings on this planet who feel strongly that we are collectively moving in the wrong direction, and need to DO SOMETHING to get the world to pay attention and change course.

Of course, that is not to say that I sympathize with Islamic fundamentalists, or believe that violence is ever going to be the right answer.

But I do understand why these individuals get to the point where they can see no other way.

Is there another way?

Ervin Lazlo is one visionary thinker who says yes, there is another way. Lazlo, a professor of philosophy, systems theory and future sciences, writes in Kosmos Journal that a planetary civilization based on interconnection and holism is already emerging, propelled by the work of “cultural creatives,” who, according to one recent study by the Fund for Global Awakening, make up a surprising 28% of Americans.

Not surprising is the finding that the majority of this 28% are women, a fact that is expanded upon by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson in their book The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. Lazlo writes:

“The common denominator of values and lifestyles among the cultural creatives is holism. This comes to the fore in their preference for natural whole foods, holistic health care, holistic inner experience, whole system information, and holistic balance between work and play and consumption and inner growth. They view themselves as synthesizers and healers, not just on the personal level but also on the community and the national levels, even on the planetary level.”

Lazlo is clear-eyed about the difficulties of channeling the energy and wisdom of the cultural creatives into true planetary change.

“Although the new culture at the margins of society is growing, its members are not well organized and the culture as a whole lacks cohesion,” he says. “The cultural creatives do not yet possess the political, social, and economic weight to make them into a significant agent of societal transformation. If transformation of the required kind is to get under way, mainstream society would have to enter the scene, with more adapted values and priorities.

“But for the present, most people in the mainstream are disoriented and disheartened. They find themselves in a rat-race for economic survival in a world where jobs become ever scarcer and finding employment beyond middle age is nearly impossible. Those who pose deeper questions find that they are surrounded by a spiritual , moral, and intellectual vacuum. There are no meaningful answers to questions such as “Who am I? And “What am I living for?” The consequences include a continuing rise in the popularity of mystical teachings, and an explosion of religious fundamentalism.”

Lazlo finds hope in the growing integration of the insights of science and spirituality. Nearly every branch of science is now discovering, at an ever-accelerating rate, the extent to which our planet, and ever bit of matter that composes it, “proves to be a harmonious structure where all things interact with all other things and together create a coherent whole. This is not a mechanical aggregate, for it is not readily decomposable to its parts. It is an integral whole, where to some extent and in some way all things interact with all other things. And the scope of this interaction appears to transcend the hitherto known limits of time and space.

“The findings that ground the new world picture of science,” Lazlo observes, “come from almost all of the empirical disciplines, from physics, cosmology, the life sciences, and even consciousness research. Although the specifics of the phenomena on which they focus differ in detail, they have a common thrust. They speak of interaction that creates interconnection and produces instant and multifaceted coherence. The hallmark of a system of such coherence is that its parts are correlated in such a way that what happens to one part also happens to the other parts — hence it happens to the system as a whole….

“The pertinent insight in this regard is that people wherever they live on the globe are just as connected to us as the birds in the sky, the trees in the forest and the fish in the sea. When moral people realize this they do not regard any person or culture as a stranger whose fate is a matter of indifference to them. They realize that they are part of a larger whole, and that either they co-evolve with all others within that whole or risk degradation and demise….We have sound reasons to seek wholeness both in us, and around us. Wholeness in us signifies the integral functioning of our organism: it means health. And wholeness around us means a healthy social community and an integral ecological milieu.”

I know a lot of people who would fit into the category of “cultural creatives,” those who, with varying degrees of conscious intention, practice holism in their own lives, and understand its importance in culture and ecology. It’s helpful to begin to understand this group as potential movers and shakers of the planet. What holds us back?

Lazlo observes that “the factor that identifies the cultural creatives is less what they preach than what they practice, for they seldom attempt to convert others, preferring to be concerned with their own personal growth.”

This seems to be the Achilles heel of the holistic movement, given the dimensions of the global tragedy we face today. We’ve got to stop focusing so much on our own personal growth, and understand the depth of our connections with the rest of the planet. If the planet goes down, how much will our mastery of yoga or our carefully cultivated organic lifestyles be worth?

Cultural creatives have a lot of energy, intelligence, curiosity and a willingness to buck the mainstream. All these resources must be put to the crucial matter at hand: getting our planet out of the hands of the warmongers, the chemical producers, and the destroyers of the environment. If that can happen, everything else will fall into place.

If you haven’t read Starhawk’s futuristic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing yet, go out and get a copy. It’s the best blueprint I’ve seen for what our world could be, if it were guided by the principles of peace, cooperation and a focus on physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing for all.

Change starts with vision. We’ve got to keep a hopeful, positive vision alive, even in the tempest of current world events. And we’ve got to try, however we can, to make that vision come alive for others, too.

Maybe because it’s early summer, a time when many new marriages are being consummated, that there seems to be so much buzz about marriage lately. Unbelievably, that Amy Sutherland article about “training your husband” remains Number One on The New York Times “most-emailed” list—possibly the longest a single story has ever retained that position to date.

Times columnist Maureen Dowd noticed this too, and wrote a response entitled “How to Train a Woman,” for which she interviewed Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist and the author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Fisher agreed with the Sutherland principle of rewarding pleasing behavior and ignoring irritating behavior, but with certain refinements depending on the gender of the spouse—women prefer their rewards face to face, while men “get intimacy by doing things side by side.”

Why this distinction? Fisher says women’s preference for face-to-face contact “comes from millions of years of holding your baby in front of your face,” while men prefer side by side contact “because for millions of years they faced their enemy but sat side by side with their friends.”

This is evolutionary biology / cultural anthropology at its worst, and I’m surprised to find Maureen Dowd falling for it. But she seems to be lost in the haze of sentimental summer marriage mode right now, since her very next column is also about marriage: this time addressing the important question of how men and women should change their names when they enter into marriage.

Maybe Maureen just wasn’t up to dealing with the real news this week on the marriage front: that the New York State appeals court ruled against gay marriage, sending the question over to the state legislature to be hashed out there. Or maybe she’d be more interested in finding an expert to discuss whether “training” a gay spouse would be more successful with face-to-face or side-by-side rewards?

The truth is that marriage is a very conservative institution, and I speak with the authority of someone in a longterm heterosexual marriage here. I often discuss with my women’s studies students whether women gain or lose from marriage—the answer always being “it depends”: it depends on whether the culture sanctioning the marriage conceives of marriage as an equal partnership, or is still operating within the traditional idea of the husband having more rights within marriage and society than the wife. These discussions sometimes lead to my suggesting that if a couple really wanted to be radical and free, they’d avoid marriage altogether. This is not something most of my students want to hear.

And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at their age either. I was just as obsessed with getting married as the next twenty-something girl in my time. When I did get married, though, it was as much a question of legal necessity as romance—my boyfriend was Mexican, I wanted him to come live with me in the U.S., and the only way to get him here was to get married.

So we did. We went to City Hall in Staten Island and got our license; we were married in front of friends and family by an Ethical Culture minister (a woman) at the United Nations Chapel in New York. And immediately we became, in society’s eyes, each other’s “significant other,” automatically welcome in each other’s hospital rooms, given joint custody of our yet-to-be-born children, and awarded society’s pat of approval in the form of tax breaks, easier credit lines, and access to housing.

The ease with which we transitioned from dating to marriage should be available to anyone in the United States, regardless of sexual preference. My husband and I, in marrying, crossed other lines that previous generations would have found intolerable: a Catholic marrying a Jew, a Mexican marrying a woman of European descent. As Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis points out in her commentary on the New York State Court of Appeals gay marriage ruling, “history has shown that normality is a flexible standard,” which can change over time. If this were not true, a woman entering into marriage in this country would still be forfeiting to her husband all her rights to her children and property, a tradition it took years of determined work by feminist activists to overcome.

I feel sure that we’re going to look back on this time of gay activism for marriage rights the same way we now look back on the years of struggle for women’s electoral enfranchisement—with a kind of disbelief that the people of the time were so obtuse as to resist what was so obviously right and necessary.

That doesn’t make it any easier for today’s gay partners, though, or for the activists who now have to gird their loins for the battle in the state legislature.

And why is it, a little voice keeps whispering in my ear, that these divisive issues always seem to come up at election time? While gay marriage is certainly as important as any other human rights issue of our time, what really matters just now is getting rid of the crew in Washington: the Bush gang and their cronies in Congress. We all need to keep our eye on that prize, even as we move forward as best we can on other fronts.