"There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the men and the women.
There is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't.

Why don't you come on back ...to the war?"

                                                         (Leonard Cohen)                     

                        

                                 Frederick Douglass (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                      A Common Thread

There is a common thread that runs through all of the social justice issues now being disputed in pretty much all of our world and it is this: if you wish to revise or even dispose of some moré or custom or law, and if you are an adult citizen, the onus is then on you to explain what you will put in its place.

The social order is an easy thing to take for granted when it has been basically stable for generations, and, for the most part, it works. We mustn’t forget what life looks like when all social order stops working. There are only a few societies in the world now in which roving gangs of bandits rape, plunder, and kill with little or no fear of consequences.

But make no mistake. The bullies have always been about, and they are there in your neighborhood today. They would take what they wanted in ten minutes if they believed they could get away with it. A basically cooperative community of citizens used to supporting each other via laws protecting what we call “human rights” is all that stands in the way of the bullies in your hometown.

A nation in which most people no longer care about their own laws is speeding down the road to collapse. Anarchy. 

Somalia comes to mind. It is what we call a “failed state”, which only means that over most of its map, no rule of law exists. There are only local warlords whose empires keep changing by the month. They hijack ships, buy ammunition and guns, and kill any who dare to interfere. They rape at will. We need to keep in mind that there are such states and there is nothing in the nature of humans here, in the West, or anywhere else that makes any of us exempt from falling into similar straits.  

Every area of the world has known such times, Europe and America included. And all of Africa, Latin America, China, India, the rest of Asia. We humans are depressingly similar in our vices. We don’t want Al Shabaab, the Taliban or Isis ruling in any part of the world. They are mostly hated even in the territories that they still control, and for good reason. They hurt people. But they will conquer and rule if we dissolve our own democracies and open the road for them. 

I believe that people who criticize any system anywhere, if they are adults, know this. They may hate some features of their nation’s system, but they do not want to, as some SDS leaders said in the 60's, "burn it all down". Responsible adult citizens can see what we get if we simply "burn down" whatever current system is in place in our society and put nothing in its place. The Bully Wars leading to the Big Bully rule.

                                            

              George Francis Train (credit: Matthew Brady, via Wikimedia Commons) 

What makes much better sense is for us to dismantle the parts of our society that we can see are unjust by democratic means and then replace them with better institutions, ones that take the health and happiness of all the citizens into account and try to make provision for them. The order needed in society if commerce and daily life are to go on must be balanced with measures that protect the rights of individuals and/or oppressed groups, especially their right to work to reform the parts of the system that they abhor. A democratic government’s job is to balance these elements and enable many different kinds of people to live together, work, trade, and get along.

I repeat: adults know this. First, we get a system that, for the most part, works. Then, we figure out how to make it better, to update it regularly, without having to go to war with each other as we try to make social evolution happen.  

This is why the deeply moving thing about some of our biggest peaceful heroes all through history into modern times is that they offered a vision of a society that really could replace the corrupt one they were trying to fix.

                                                        

                                                                  James Mott                                          

       (credit: Anna Davis Hallowell and Lucretia Mott, via Wikimedia Commons)

Nelson Mandela said that he envisioned a “rainbow nation, at peace with itself and the world.” He did not say all non-Africans had to leave. Martin Luther King’s political effectiveness came in large part from his attracting millions of white people to his marches. As white people looked at their society and the events of daily life there, and then they looked at Martin’s way, his marches and his speeches, they saw that the status quo’s way of life was wrong in many ways. But more importantly, they also saw that it did not have to be so. Keeping an effective social order did not require that the citizens endure with these injustices. Decent people really could replace the bad and build a better world.    

                                       

                          Henry Blackwell (credit: Library of Congress, via Wikipedia) 

My point today is that this insight applies to the hardest dispute of all, namely the ongoing struggle being waged by millions of women against the male-dominated world in which they must live. The women of the world, especially of the West, I feel, can learn something from Mandela and King. 

Get inside the heads of the people who are not female but who nevertheless see that you are living in a system that puts unfair limits on your opportunities. Reach out and make allies of them. In short, ladies, you would be wise to get inside men’s heads; you will discover that many of the painful things in your world are in the male one as well. From finding common ground, you will then begin to build a coalition analogous to that found by Nelson and Martin and, in more recent times, Barack. 

And Susan Anthony and Cady Stanton. They had male allies, lots of them, who were fed up with the male order of their time. They had lived through the Civil War and seen how its horrors were driven by the racism and sexism of patriarchy. They were men who saw that to deny people who were just people, just as capable of rational thought as men and who brought some fresh and valuable insights to all tables at which they were heard – to deny women these basic democratic rights -- wasn’t just wrong: it was stupid. It robbed the state in which it occurred of half of its most valuable assets, namely its human assets, its capable citizens.

Yes, there are plenty of words and actions of women in what are nebulously and loosely called “feminist” organizations that are hypocritical or naïve or outright cruel. No, men, that should not mean that we should shut them out, anymore than male naivetes and hypocrisies and cruelties will ever justify their shutting us out. We are justified in telling them that we will not put up with, for example, female teachers who hate little boys. (I've known such people.) In short, we are justified in discussing real grievances with candor, reason, and evidence. But we are never justified in shutting other people out just because they aren't "like us". That view makes no sense in any case, but especially not in this one. If they can speak, they deserve to be heard.  

Why? Because along with our different sensibilities and worldviews in the real world comes this basic fact of reality: men and women have been built for one another by literally billions of years of evolution. The women, with all their gifts and flaws, are an emotionally and politically necessary part of our reality and their reality and in other words, the world as it is. Nothing is ever going to change that. So however hard it may seem at times to communicate to the other sex what we really think, we have no other choice. If we don’t make and keep making that effort, our world is not just going to stay stupid and cruel. It is going to get worse. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear arms proliferation. I don't need to sketch images of how these scenarios end. 

Get motivated. Articulate. Compromise. Find consensus. 

We have only a small chance of fixing these things if we, the socially conscious of all genders and races, work together. But if we fall into squabbling and squander our energies in wrangling, we have no chance at all. 

My thoughts, anyway, to all the troopers in the gender wars. 

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a fine, pluralistic day. 

                              

                                  Martin Luther King Jr. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)