This article was submitted by Lee Marcus of Arkport.
America is the country where children are routinely shot dead in school.
Woke now?
I’ll tell you who’s woke. Steve Bannon. Last week, Bannon announced that what we’re seeing today is the end of patriarchy, and it’s going to be bigger than the tea party movement!
He’s right about the patriarchy, even if the comparison to the tea party is hilarious. Any movement in the direction of equality between the sexes is, of course, a threat to patriarchy. You can pick your moment in modern history: was it 1848, when American women (settlers), (inspired by the power, dignity, and true equality of the women of the Haudenosaunee nation) met in Seneca Falls to introduce the Declaration of Sentiments and demand the right to vote; or in 1920, when we finally got it? Was it the 1970s, when women met in CR (consciousness raising) groups and again took the revolutionary step of comparing notes about the lives we were living, turning that into a sweeping liberation movement? Or was it in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when American women saw a presidential candidate more qualified than any other in modern memory defeated by one less qualified than, not only any candidate in history, but arguably any average child. Pick your moment when you think the patriarchy began to falter.
But Bannon was talking about the MeToo movement. For him, the idea that women’s bodies are no longer up for grabs just rocks his world. It’s even more revolutionary than white supremacists walking around with tea bags dangling from their headbands and spouting anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman, anti-education, anti-free press, anti-voter … you get my meaning. It’s big.
Do you think it’s possible for white men (and the remaining obedient women) to do something other than spew hate and shoot bullets? Where is the male counterpart to the Haudenosaunee woman in this story, the role model of male decency, fairness, and “good mind?” Because it’s all too obvious that we’re raising white men for a world of privilege and entitlement that does not exist, and when they get old enough to realize this, they go haywire. Fundamentalism/pornography/domestic violence/pedophilia. Undermining everything America has stood for with last-ditch efforts like the tea party, a regular smorgasbord of politicized hatred. Fantasizing about going down in a blaze of bullets and taking a dozen or so innocents with them. How long before one of them decides to shoot the moon and take us all, all of humanity, with him?
The group that Americans and people all over the world have to fear is white men. If you want to dispute that, consider this: how many Muslim men with explosives in their shoes does it take to make us all take off our shoes in the airport? One. What percentage of all rapes need to be by Latinos before we commit to building a $33 billion wall to keep them out? 9%? So let me ask you, how many mass murders will it take before we are able to identify the demographic group responsible? If the unhinged actions of one Muslim can be used to smear 1.8 billion Muslims around the world, why are the deaths of thousands of innocents not enough to even whisper the words “white male?” Have you ever heard a broadcaster say those words?
In 1963, Betty Friedan published a book called The Feminine Mystique, which codified exactly how femininity had been distorted to keep women powerless. Fast-forward 50 years. We’re way ready for The Masculine Mystique. Isn’t there a single male writer who can figure out what’s going on with white men? Why are they killing innocent people in numbers that make the combined casualties of all of our wars pale by comparison? Women may think we know the answer, but that’s not going to help. Men need men to figure this out, man up, and solve it.
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