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    • Mar

    3

    Thoughts on Prisons

    Filed Under heteropatriarchy, media, rants, sadness | 3 Comments

    I had the misfortune of seeing a few minutes of an MSNBC show about prisons. It was about “dangerous” teenagers in jail. I got to see a young man be pepper-sprayed and then face planted by four guards for kicking a door and resisting going into segregation. Something about the way prison was depicted in this show - and in a previous episode that I watched with my grandmother the other day - dismayed me. It was a flat portrayal - no analysis, no critical eye, no reflection … just a paint by numbers depiction of how tough and scary working in a prison is.

    I’ve been in prisons before; it’s not fun. It’s not a place you want to be, even as a visitor. But didn’t it disturb anyone else - the people making this show - to see a teenage boy on the floor groaning while grown men called out “get the shackles?” And “decontamination” showers. What are we doing here? What is the point?

    The LH says that he’d like to see prisons operate on a completely different model. Right now they are run like schools; but perhaps instead they could get funding based on how well they rehabilitate. Prisons who churn out repeat offenders lose funding, and lose inmates. Competition can be a good thing; the people running prisons would be motivated to do a better job. As it stands today,  it’s actually good for prisons when someone gets locked up again, and again, and again. Hey, who says crime doesn’t pay?

    Popularity: 17% [?]

    Sep

    26

    Riane Eisler Comes to Portland - Real Wealth of Nations

    Filed Under books, capitalism, class, events, heteropatriarchy, local, people, workshops | Leave a Comment

    I agreed to serve as moderator at Riane Eisler’s presentation on her book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. Dr. Eisler is best known for writing The Chalice and the Blade, and having been an influence on David Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.

    Dr. Eisler’s talk will be followed by a panel discussion featuring four Portlanders who are working in areas related to children, sustainability, food, and local currency. We’ll be looking at how to create and support a “sharing and caring” economy in which meaningful work, families, health, and the environment are priorities - not afterthoughts.

    The event will be held at First Unitarian Church (SW 12th and Main) in downtown Portland at 7pm on Friday, October 26, 2007. Co-sponsors include KBOO community radio. Tickets will be sliding scale, $5-$20 - but no one will be turned away due to lack of funds. Seating is limited (to about 600), so purchase your ticket today!

    Click below for a link to pay using PayPal, your debit/credit card or checking account.

    A little background information: Real Wealth of Portland was organized by several local women, namely Marcia Meyers and Pat Osborn, who both attend First Unitarian Church. They started a small group, which expanded to include me (Hafidha), Andrea Drury, Celeste Howard, Kimberly Ford, and Judy Bennett. The group has been meeting weekly since the first week of August to strategize ways to organize book groups, and foment a caring and sharing revolution in Portland. Marcia’s been indispensable; she has helped to coordinate bringing both Dr. Korten and Dr. Eisler to General Assembly in the past.

    For more information, questions or comments, please visit realwealthpdx.com or email realwealthpdx@adrury.com

    Click here to buy tickets!


    Popularity: 39% [?]

    Sep

    12

    Parents Just Don’t Understand

    Filed Under heteropatriarchy, movies, people, pop culture, questions | 4 Comments

    Yesterday the theme of parenting reoccurred throughout the day. At lunch with my grandmother, the issue of spanking came up; and while watching The Last Mimzy it became overwhelmingly apparent how typical it is for parents to not listen to their children.

    During lunch, my grandmother spoke about how she got spanked more than her sister because, as the oldest child, she was expected to know better. She still believes in spanking, and tends to equate spanking with discipline: Parents who don’t spank their kids are letting their kids run wild; some kids need to be spanked more because they’re bad/hard-headed, and so on. At one point she admitted that she probably didn’t benefit from spanking, but she still thought it was the right thing to do.

    When the LH told my grandmother that he’d never been spanked by his parents, she said, “Wow. You must have been an angel.” He laughed and said he had most certainly not been an angel. But his parents were the “hippie” parents who sent the kids to their room to calm down, and then talked about what had happened; the kids even had input into what their punishment would be! And both kids and parents were expected to apologize to each other if they’d been disrespectful in any way. A consequence of this is that the LH and his brother actually liked and got along with their parents when they were teenagers. Unlike most of their friends, they didn’t feel the need to lie, and they trusted their parents to be fair and reasonable.

    My grandmother thought this was pretty interesting, and shocked me by offering that, because of this, the LH and I were likely to have well-behaved children even though we weren’t going to spank them! Later, when the LH mentioned that he was raised as an atheist, she shocked me even further by agreeing that belief in God had nothing to do with whether you could raise children to be good, moral people. I swear, if I had proposed these things I would have gotten no end of argument. The LH has a way of getting my family members to agree with him on pretty radical points. Just a few weeks ago, with a few sentences, he had my religious, anti-evolution brother conceding that human beings were descended from the same ancestors as apes!

    Anyway, back to the subject of children: last night we were watching The Last Mimzy, a science fiction family movie about two siblings who find relics from the future. Weird but truly exciting things start happening to the kids, and the parents (mom in particular) get freaked out. But instead of asking the kids what’s going on, or where they found the “toys,” they become very reactionary, trying to get rid of the toys, or calling in experts. It doesn’t ever occur to them to get the full story from the children before drawing conclusions, or to take the time to observe their children’s relationships to the objects.

    Somehowthe desire to protect one’s children didn’t include being in dialog with them. Instead there was a real pattern of interrogation followed by assumption followed by decision. And it didn’t matter how the kids responded to any of these steps - that was the trajectory the parents were on.

    All of this has me thinking about how, from birth, I’ve been conditioned to ask questions, gather information, and make decisions. Often it’s just easier to make assumptions - it saves time - in the short term, but the misunderstandings can cause confusion long after the initial interaction is forgotten.

    It’s also astonishing to me how what many parents want more than anything is for their child to be normal. In Mimzy, the mom is really upset that her kids are exhibiting qualities of genius. “Something’s not right,” she says. The dad doesn’t get it at first. After all, what’s so wrong about suddenly excelling at science? But when his daughter demonstrates telekinetic abilities, he jumps onto the same page as mom: surely something is wrong with his child, and it must be examined and corrected so that she can be normal again!

    What we don’t understand is frightening, I know. But I wonder how much confusion and pain it causes when we stop listening because we think we know our children or the other people in our lives. Is it really any less than if we just admitted that we don’t?

    Popularity: 32% [?]

    Sep

    5

    Getting Married Phase 3: Deconstructing the Wedding

    Filed Under gender, heteropatriarchy, life changes, love, plans, questions | 6 Comments

    And now the Donut Husband (DH) becomes the Legal Husband (LH)Last Friday afternoon, the DH and I went to the courthouse to sign marriage papers in front of a judge. The next morning I left on a road trip to the California Redwoods with two female friends, returning home very late last night. He spent the weekend fixing computers, writing documentation, watching Heroes, and hanging out with our friends.

    Our original wedding date was August 31, 2008. So what happened? In my earlier post on this topic, Getting Married Phase 2: Why Am I Doing This? I tried to look at why we were even getting married at all. I was asking questions along the lines of how would our relationship change once we went from “just” living together to being married? Now I’m chronicling a key decision we made: to separate the wedding event from the legal marriage.

    About a month ago, we decided to do the legal thing sooner rather than later. The DH still wanted to “seal the deal” with me, and I was still trying to figure out ways to avoid becoming a Bride-zilla.* At the same time, P. Lutus’s essay had made a deep impression on me, particularly his comment that “people often forget that they will have to build the thing (a human relationship) after achieving the symbol for the thing (marriage).”

    We had to do some hard thinking about what we wanted the wedding to be. Was it to be a moment of triumph: a culmination of multiple years of dating and living together, and trying each other out? I was surprised to learn from the DH that when he’d asked me to marry him, it wasn’t so that we could “see” if we wanted to be married! He already considered us married, in a sense. I was so accustomed to seeing engagement treated and portrayed as a sort of incubation period, during which the couple becomes accustomed to the idea of being married, and decides if they really want to do it! This was not the case for us.

    The DH and I came to the conclusion that we wanted our wedding to be a highly festive gathering of family and friends, at which time we publicly declared our love for and lifelong commitment to each other; on this occasion we would combine new rituals and familiar traditions that symbolized our particular journey (already in progress) as a couple.

    With the wedding event now stripped to its fundamental purpose, it became apparent that there were some things that just didn’t need to happen there - like becoming legally married. I’d been very worried that I would become emotionally overwhelmed (and subsequently depressed) with planning the wedding. Past experience + my recent readings of statistics and human behavioral studies suggested that the likelihood of this happening was high. It was important that I not conflate the stressful experience of planning a big event like this with being a wife.

    We agreed to make it extremely clear in our own minds that the success of the wedding had nothing to do with the success of the marriage. The experience of signing our legal papers a year before the “big day” has already given us breathing room. While we spend the next year continuing to lay the foundation of our marriage, we can plan a wedding event that celebrates how far we’ve come and the distance we have yet to go.

    I’m not sure yet what our one year anniversary wedding ceremony extravaganza will look like (or even what it will be called), but so far it look as though a few things will be missing: no bride will be given away by her parents (if anything, his parents should be transferring him to me), no registry for household items (we should do a reverse registry for all the stuff we don’t need!), no wedding party divided by sex (does he not have female allies? do I not have male allies?). We’ve also been having a lot of fun brainstorming ideas for things that, in our current time and place, would really demonstrate our commitment, e.g. exchanging of computer passwords, public joining of cell phone plans, and a promise to share rollover minutes. Just kidding! (I think.)

    Stay tuned!

    *Bridezilla (a portmanteau of bride and Godzilla) is a generic term used to describe a difficult, unpleasant, perfectionist bride who leaves aggravated family, friends and bridal vendors in her wake. A bridezilla is obsessed with her wedding as her perfect day and will disregard the feelings of the family, bridesmaids and even her groom in her quest for the perfect wedding. [from Wikipedia]

    Popularity: 27% [?]

    Jul

    21

    Blasted Out Of Innocence, Part 2 (Sex Ed in the Early Ages)

    Filed Under current affairs, education, gender, health, heteropatriarchy | 1 Comment

    At one point during the O’Reilly interview, Rev. Haffner brought up the recent Catholic sex abuse settlement case as an example of why children need to learn about their bodies from a young age. O’Reilly seemed to dismiss this on the basis that the victims involved were in their early teens.

    This alarmed me. As Rev. Haffner had pointed out at the beginning, early childhood sex ed is about laying a foundation for future, more comprehensive education. If children aren’t being taught from the get-go that it’s okay to even say certain words, when will they ever develop the comfort level to discuss sexuality? During adolescence - perhaps the most awkward stage of life?

    As a child reared in a very religious home, I never, ever used words like sex or penis. I was in my early 20s before I even pronounced the word rape. I When I would see a news story about a woman being raped, and wanted to talk about that with someone else, I’d say the woman was assaulted, attacked, or - if I was really shaken up - violated. I remember being so embarrassed about sexuality that between the ages of 12 and 15, I didn’t get any new underwear. The ones I had were practically reduced to shreds by washing and drying, but I couldn’t bring myself to let my mother know that I needed *gulp* panties.

    And I didn’t come from a particularly repressive family; I just never had the opportunity to use words expressing sexual concepts at all - in positive or negative contexts.

    Certainly, I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell my parents about the sexual abuse I witnessed happening to some of my friends. When I wanted to avoid going over to one friend’s house in particular because of the things her brother did, I would feign illness or become sullen; my parents, not knowing what was going on, would become irritated with me.

    Are children who are taught sex education from a young age better equipped to protect themselves and advocate for themselves during and after dangerous situations? I’d like to know this. If the evidence says yes, perhaps more parents, teachers and other concerned adults can view sex education as being a matter of physical and mental/emotional health.

    Popularity: 24% [?]

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