http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100018973&ft=1&f=1001

Read it it’s a facinating article.

C-Span is right now holding hearings on Sexual Assault in the Military. Questions point to the recommendations given to Military personnel upon sexual assault/rape revelations. One woman tells her tale of following protocol, informing authorities, yet being met with ridicule and marginalization.

One question raised by Rep. Carol Shea-Porter pointed to the counterproductive practice of removing victims of abuse from their posts. Such a practice leaves perpetrator environments in place and focuses the problem on the victim.

Alienating sex crime victims ices the slope toward more egregious systems of “justice” in which male-controlled institutions and nations actually condemn women for being victims of sex crimes, for example, penalizing a woman with 200 lashes and six months in prison for being gang raped.

My personal struggles with sexual harassment were just that, harassment, and therefore pale in comparison to the threats too many women face on their lives by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, oh, and, by having two x chromosomes.

My cases mirror only, in that I, as victim, was the one coerced into flight; leaving perpetrators behind to remain vindicated in their behavior.

My subjugation began in high school. And the insidiousness was the perpetrator’s inability to hide their obvious titillation inherent in missing my provocatively tough-girl point altogether. A perpetrator missing the point should never translate into a victim “asking for it”. I didn’t ask to demonstrate whether I could fit my fist in my vagina. They did. And other such zingers were carried out within earshot of my chemistry teacher. I kept my cool, but a well-meaning counselor was called in. Her answer to my problem was to transfer me to a different school. This, without any regard for my A and Honors average. This in light of my bright future. This transfer to a “special” school threatened my academic career. And I didn’t ask for it. And, luckily, I refused.

What’s missing from discussion about victims of sexual assault is the acknowledgment that these women risk so much in coming forward with their testimonies. I know an unnamed victim of rape who, in being subpoenaed to testify in the prosecution, knew that her participation in that process exposed her to potential security problems, the least of which was exposing her identity to the known perpetrator and his comrades. Luckily, she refused.

There is no doubt progress has been made in addressing the safety of potential victims in American institutions. But the bedrock of inequality keeps women from breaking the glass ceiling toward positions which could jurisdictate female perspectives on empowering, and not exiling, assault victims.

It’s more honest to address economic ebb-and-flow when we recognize whole swaths of individuals that participate in neither: the poor.

Of course the policy makers are running around like headless chickens to stimulate the economy. The prospect of poverty now touches more than America’s untouchables. It must boggle the minds of the poor that it took the collapse of the middle class for the government to take notice of poverty. And it must not hearten anyone at the bottom to realize that economic recovery proposals tend only to target the middle class.

Most politicians would be satiated in realizing the recovery of the middle class alone. Because some politicians think so small as to ignore the systemic nature of their decisions and confine policy to those matters directly affecting their voting constituency. After all, homeless people don’t vote, right? And Neocons have worked hard to see that minorities don’t vote. And super-capitalism has saddled the working poor with enough of a survival obstacle course to ensure they will have no time to commit to any political participation whatsoever.

For too many Americans, recession is a way of life, chronically. Why is it any more unthinkable for middle-classers to join the ranks of the poor? Who is truly losing in what we’ve only now brought ourselves to call a recession? Isn’t poverty a signal that our society never really “won” in the first place? Only now can’t we tell whether the guy sleeping on a park bench once traded on Wall Street or is one we previously wrote off as lazy. Only now do we recognize the peril in assuming people who can’t work won’t work.

Poverty is a plague on our society, and we’re now aware of its cost to the economy. Now, imagine what kind of “boom” we could experience in an economy bereft of it.

The consumer class has become exhausted at all levels. This is the freezing of the credit markets: people don’t want to consume anymore.

The fact is the money that our economy functions with has no underlying value. It’s completely imaginary. This is why the monetarist theory is failing. We can of course always print more, can’t we? I used to be a Monetarist when I worked in the securities industry. There is something very appealing to the Monetarist mindset; we can control and stablize the economy by controlling the money in the marketplace. When this money does not represent real value (be it work gold etc.) and all value is derivative we get in the situation where we are today, with a working class that wants to work and build for the future, not consume today with no future tomorrow.

Our system has failed us when we have work to be done, and people to do it, but the system actively keeps the workers from work.

Nobody wants to let go of their stack of cash, for fear that it will be worthless. It is worthless.

I’m calling on all my friends to end the consumer class. What will be the currency of our post consumer era?
 

doubleplusthanks to my sexy editor

I’m figuring out this whole “contributor” deal; and how to get y’all full posting privileges. Your patience is appreciated (Brandon, I published your pending entry…that ok?).

Copied from my Facebook profile:

In the words of David Walker, a free black man writing in 1829:

“Not indeed, to show me a colored President, a Governor, a Legislator, a Senator, a Mayor, or an Attorney at the Bar. But to show me a man of color, who holds the low office of a Constable, or one who sits in a Juror Box, even on a case of one of his wretched brethren, throughout this great Republic!!”

I find it interesting to see how the bar has changed. 

With a little help from Wikipedia, this helps me gain some perspective:

2009: Barack Obama, first Black President
1990: Douglas Wilder, first elected Black Governor
1870: Hiram Rhodes Revels, first black Senator
1870: Joseph Rainey, first black Representative to the US House
1966: Robert C. Henry, first black Mayor
1845: Macon Allen, first black man to sit the Bar
1891: Wiley Overton, first black police officer in NYC
(I found no statistics on black jurors.)

We are looking at massive change, not just in the past ~200+ years, but within my lifetime. Equality is the promise of our nation, all men (and women) created equally. I keep seeing folks in the cafeteria coming to a stop to watch this event on TV. We have come such a long way in this country. And we still have so far to go. Never in my lifetime did I expect to see a day such as this. But it is so nice to see.

Not only is sustainable agriculture more economically and socially sound long-term, failure to empathize with our fellow animals weighs on the human race’s prospect for a sustainable future on our one and only planet. No one has offered mankind a more reasoned approach to the challenges of large-scale contemporary livestock farming than Temple Grandin. She is a realist: agribusiness is here to stay. It’s unreasonable to expect a widespread conversion to vegetarianism, and it’s unthinkable to enslave animals in the ways we’ve seen all too often in factory farming. With all of that in mind, and in the context of the ethical treatment of animals, we are duty-bound to design better systems to ensure the livelihood of those animals we raise for food. And, for some reason, we’ve been heretofore unable to address these problems adequately without the wisdom from someone like her. Someone with autism.

For years, journalists have picked her brain for clues on how we may all better understand our fellow animals. What strikes me each time is the common-sense solutions she gives on such designs as non-slip flooring in slaughter houses. Anyone could surmise that the feeling in slaughterhouse air must be frightening for an animal. Add to that some stressful events like slippage and shouting herders and you’ve got what amounts to a terrifying end-of-life experience for these animals.

Regarding shouting, Grandin stressed in a recent interview on NPR (link needed) that “first of all, we need to get everyone to calm down.” Anyone with a house-pet knows the effect a stressful environment has for their beloved animal. Imagine the discussion of implementing calm handling at feed lots and slaughter houses turning to the catalyst for their stress-levels in the first place. Maybe factory farming is stressful for animal and human alike. Maybe that dialog would then lead to the discussion of the true cost of cost-cutting in the farm industry.

Maybe since autistic individuals tend toward honesty, a society could rely on them to point out problems in the system before anyone else even notices the problems. How much more could we learn if we focused not on some “cure” for autism, but on ways to foster the very special, and sometimes very specialized, talents that appear to be the hallmark of this “disorder”? We’ve effectively proven that “normal” psychology is not the definitive mindset in addressing to the problems we face: we wage war on everything, imprison animals and humans with impunity, destroy our planet, etc. Are these really the traits we want to recognize as “normal”?

Today, many of us witnessed the inauguration of our 44th President, Barack Obama. As a nation, we have cried out in rejoice for the changes to come; what we perceive to be the end to our eight-year-long nightmare of being lied to, deceived and oppressed. We are embracing the thought of a new regime, a new voice to lead the masses to brighter days than these. We have tasked this man with the burden of an entire world: economic crises, war, poverty, rising unemployment, increasing foreclosures, and amidst all that, restoring our place as a world power and leader.

There is nothing wrong with hope. It is the fuel that drives us and the target upon which we set our sights. It is every rung on the ladder that we climb to achieve greater heights. It is in our very nature to want to grow, to expand, to exceed, to become greater than our ancestors, to become more than what we’ve been told we can be. We need hope in our lives. 

But, with hope, there must also be caution.

While we hope that President Obama can right our ships and stop the hemorrhaging, we must also realize that, while we have charged him with that task, he has also charged us with one: to take action in our own lives to change our own world. 

We must remember that things will not change overnight. There is much work to be done. We must remain hopeful that things will, indeed, get better if we have the resolve to withstand the hardest times. We must keep an eye on the past and remember what has been done to put us here, and to not repeat those mistakes. We must realize that, even as the President has said, things will get worse before they get better.

I’ve heard many today criticize his inaugural address in that there was no “we will march” call to action or specific demands asked of the people. I would argue the opposite. While President Obama may not have stated the methods in which we can change our world, he has instead left an open-ended invitation to us all to find our own way to change the world around us in the ways in which we are able to do so.

To me, this is where our hope lies. Not in one man, but in many. In us all. 

We cannot burden this man with the task of saving the world without doing something in our own lives to aid his cause. We must remember that he is but one man. He can do many things with his power, but his mission has been to return the power to us. To you. To me. That is our charge. We have been given hope that we can make a difference in a world that we once saw as unchangeable. We have been given the inspiration to evolve ourselves into greater people—people that will make up a greater nation. We have been given the initiative to do what is within our own reach to change this country and this world for the better. 

This administration may not succeed in all that it hopes to achieve, but it will exist as a symbol: a symbol of hope to those who have no hope; of peace to those that know no peace; of power to those who have never had power. That is what this election and this inauguration has been about to me: a symbol of a new day for all of us. We remember now all that is possible when we stand together as a country.

Maybe you don’t agree with his policies, or don’t like him as a person, or don’t want him to succeed. But, maybe you’re also missing the point of what many of us see in President Obama. He has reminded us of what this country was meant to be: a nation governed by the people, where we have the power to influence our own destiny. He gives us hope of what is possible and what can be achieved. We are optimistic again because of what he stands for, and to me, that is more important right now than anything else.

We needed hope. And now we have it. Let’s make the most of it.

Discuss…

What are your thoughts on this day?

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Tracey Bushman
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