by Roxanne -

True Freedom

Photo R. Meshar

Often we like to think that we are free. After all, if we are adults we can go where we want and do what we like. However, if you think about it, many things restrict our freedom. Lack of education or income, along with discrimination, gender and age can restrict our freedom just for a start. Illness, abuse or addictions may also be factors that restrict our ability to freely choose in our best interests. Cultural and family norms may also restrict the choices we see available.

When you think about it – anything that distracts us or prevents us from choosing in our own best interests and those of the common good (to which we are inter-related, inter-dependent and inter-connected) restricts our freedom.

We are not truly free until we are free to choose for our own health and well being and the well being of others.

Justice begins within.

 

 

by Roxanne -

InnerPeace – Joyful Living

Photo R. Meshar

Am I qualified to write a post on what it takes to live joyfully? Probably not any more so than others who also live joyfully. On the other hand, I certainly have seen the back side of this coin. Meanwhile, others have commented to me that I seem very joyful, happy and peaceful. Students have even written it on their course evaluations. So perhaps writing down a few of my observations is helpful.

Those of us who come out of physically or emotionally abusive families, usually have not learned the the healthy psychological habits of living joyfully. Just like learning to set healthy boundaries or only allowing healthy relationships into one’s life, living joyfully is a learned skill. The joy, of course, is within us – within each and every one of us. But it is a skill to learn how to allow that joy to emerge, allowing it to penetrate our everyday life and relationships.

Here some of the habits necessary for joyful living –

1. Take time to reflect and be grateful every day. Do not seek happiness in external things, situations, addictions or behaviors. If you are caught in addiction seek help.

2. Retrain ruminations and thoughts away from victimization, bitterness and resentment. Drinking thoughts like these is no different than drinking poison – and wondering why the other person doesn’t drop dead. Rather, retrain your mind to focus on the positive things in your day, in your life. Get help through therapy if you need it.

3. If you can’t find something positive – create something. Greet the cashier at the grocery store. Say a pleasant “hello” to someone on the street. Do something nice for yourself. The amount of positive energy in your life is dependent on the number of positive actions you are willing to take.

4. Create a network of healthy and supportive relationships. This is a minimal requirement to begin living joyfully. Without others who also live this way we do not have good models to emulate or the support we need to make difficult decisions and choices. Again, introspection, spiritual direction and therapy can be helpful here.

5. Once healthy relationships are in place, begin removing dysfunctional, abusive or unhealthy relationships from your life. Usually this last step will usually happen on its own. Oil and water will separate.

As adults only we can decide which relationships are life-giving for us. Accept relationships and situations for what they are – as they are. Decide what you are willing to tolerate and more importantly what you are not willing to tolerate. This is not about creating drama or ultimatums. It is about slowly, but surely, removing yourself from unhealthy situations. If positive change occurs you can always re-assess. Until then, healthy adults do not worry about other adults, neither do they take care of them, either financially, physically or emotionally.

To allow yourself to take care of another adult, or to allow yourself to be taken care of by another adult is not love – it is co-dependence, enabling and perhaps enmeshment. If other adults in your life need care, point them to resources to get the help they need. Real love desires that other adults have independence and freedom.

6. With your new-found freedom, healthy relationships and energy enjoy your new, joy-filled life!

Justice begins within.

You may also like Fill Your Life with Fabulous and Introducing Fabulous Fridays.

by Roxanne -

Cross and the Lynching Tree

In Jame H. Cone’s new book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, (Orbis, 2011) white, Christian theologians are taken to task for failing to make the connection between the cross and the lynching tree. Cone references Acts 10:39 – “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree” – then details the pervasive history of lynching in the U.S. which occurred in virtually every state. Lynching emerged immediately after the emancipation and was a way for the white population to terrorize and control the newly freed black population.

Cone takes on theological giant Reinhold Niebuhr (Chapter Two) for Niebuhr’s extensive reflections on the cross, white supremacy and racism – yet noting Niebuhr’s failure to link Christianity and the cross over against white supremacy and racism. Later Cone quotes Niebuhr, “‘People without imagination really have no right to write about ultimate things'” a condemnation of Niebuhr’s white, racist theology itself (94).

Cone writes, “Walter White, national secretary of the NAACP and the author of several novels and the important book Rope and Faggot, indicted Christianity for creating the fanaticism that encouraged lynching. ‘It is exceedingly doubtful if lynching could possibly exist under any other religion than Christianity,’ he [White] wrote. ‘Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynching law . . ., but the evangelical Christian denominations have done much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds its outlet in lynching'” (112).  Take, for example, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacy organization promoting racism and committing acts of terrorism that openly identifies as Christian. In fact, a cross burning occurred in April of this year – right here in Minnesota.

Lest we mistakenly think that lynching involved only black men, in Chapter Five Cone details similar violence against black women. “Although women constitute only 2 percent of blacks actually killed by lynching, it would be a mistake to assume that violence against women was not widespread and brutal. Black women were neither incidental objects of white vigilante violence nor marginal participants in the black resistance against it. Like black men, they were tortured, beaten and scarred, mutilated and hanged, burned and shot, tarred and feathered, stabbed and dragged, whipped and raped by angry white mobs” (122).

Quoting Ida B. Wells, “pioneer of the anti-lynching crusade” Cone writes ‘Why is mob murder permitted by a Christian nation?’ she asked. White Christianity was not genuine because it either openly supported slavery, segregation, and lynching as the will of God or it was silent about these evils” (131). “As far as she [Wells] was concerned, white Christianity was a counterfeit gospel – ‘as phony as a two-dollar bill,’ as blacks often said in Bearden” (133). “She therefore challenged white liberal Christians to speak out against lynching or be condemned by their silence” (131).

Cone charges white Christianity: “White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as part of its religion, and white liberal Christians’ silence about lynching placed both of them outside of Christian identity. I could not find one sermon or theological essay, not to mention a book, opposing lynching by a prominent liberal white preacher” (132). Further, “White theologians in the past century have written thousands of books about Jesus’ cross without remarking on the analogy between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of black people. One must suppose that in order to feel comfortable in the Christian faith, whites needed theologians to interpret the gospel in a way that would not require them to acknowledge white supremacy as America’s great sin.” (159).

Cone brings to our attention the sexual violence of slavery still evident in the ongoing genetic linkage of whites and blacks. “What happened to blacks also happened to whites. When whites lynched blacks, they were literally and symbolically lynching themselves – their sons, daughters, cousins, mothers and fathers, and a host of other relatives. Whites may be bad brothers and sisters, murderers of their own black kin, but they are still our sisters and brothers. (italics author’s 165). “We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus” (166).

I believe Cone’s book can be summarized, in part, with this quote, “We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus” (166). Cone is correct that white Christianity utterly fails as a religion in its refusal to oppose or even acknowledge chattel slavery, on-going systems of white supremacy and the restitution required to begin healing both.

You may also like “Minnesota Nice” & Cross Burning.

by Roxanne -

What Made Sept. 11th So Tragic?

On this September 11th memorial let’s consider Catharine MacKinnon’s book Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. Catharine MacKinnon, a Minnesotan, is an international lawyer at The Hague. Her background is impressive enough. However, last fall I heard her speak at the University of Chicago and I can attest that she is even more impressive in person.

“MacKinnon is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.[3] In 2007, she served as the Roscoe Pound Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.[4]MacKinnon is a highly cited legal scholar.[5][6] She has frequently been a visiting professor at other universities and regularly appears in public speaking events” (Wikipedia).

In Part Four of her book,, entitled “On the Cutting Edge,” she unmasks the narrative of the lie of September 11, 2001.

“Every other day, as well as this one, men as well as women are victimized by men’s violence. But it is striking that the number of people who died at these men’s hands on September 11th, from 2800 to 3000, is almost identical to the number of women who die at the hands of men every year in just one country, the same one in which September 11th happened. Women murdered by male intimates alone could have filled one whole World Trade Tower of September 11’s dead. This part of a war on women in only one country, variously waged in all countries, is far from sex-equal on either side” (italics author’s, 261).

“Compare the response to September 11th with excuses for doing nothing about violence against women. . .  Will it be said that some individuals are just violent, so nothing can be done/ Will terrorism be seen as cultural, hence protected? Will the United States throw up its hands when it learns that Al Qaeda, like some pornographers and other sex-traffickers (sex their religious as well as their business) is organized in (what for men are) unconventional ways? Violence against women is imagined to be nonstate, culturally specific, expressive acts of bad apple individuals all over the world that is so hard to stop. Terrorism, which is all of these, is said to be so serious that there is not choice but to stop it, while seriously addressing threats to women’s security is apparently nothing but a choice, since it has barely begun” (269).

Here’s the bottom line. She notes that the attack on September 11th wasn’t considered serious and tragic because people were killed. “Women are killed every day and there is not a similar outcry or mobilization of resources. It was considered serious and tragic because powerful, white males were killed. Powerful white males became fearful for their own safety” (italics author’s, 275).

“ The fact that Al Qaeda is not organized into a nation with armies and territory did not stop this international response before it started. No one argued that the bigger Al Qaeda is, the less can be done about it. Yet the fact that male dominance is not organized as a state, but like Al Qaeda is literally transnational and pervades the world, is used to keep male violence against women largely unopposed in the international system” (268).

“ . . . international law still fails to grasp the reality that members of one half of society are dominating members of the other half in often violent ways all of the time, in a constant civil war within each civil society on a global scale – a real world war going on for millennia” (266).

“When the photographs of American soldiers sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison surfaced, the fact that identical acts are routinely committed against women (and some men) in pornography was typically mentioned, if at all, to excuse the crimes, not to indict the pornography. The connection was not lost on one Iraqi man who was abused by Americans in prison. ‘They wanted us to feel as though we were women,’ he said, ‘the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a women’” (273).

“The photos, mild by pornography’s standards, were routinely referred to as pictures of torture, yet calling pornography pictures of torture is usually derided as an extremism comparable to calling violence against women a war” (273).

“ It is hard to avoid the impression that what is called war is what men make against each other, and what they do to women is called everyday life” (274).

Her words should shock us into reflection and out of our romantic notions of patriotism and patriarchy. Let’s remember the victims of 9-11, but let’s not forget thousands of women who die every year in this country and even more around the globe – at the hands of men – husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins and grandfathers.

You may also like Patriarchy: Abusive by Design and Resisting Patriarchy.

by Roxanne -

Prairie in Autumn

Now our prairie is golden, white and the deep purple of native asters. Berries and crab apples are now brilliant red too.

And our 3 foot-square garden is on its third crop of Swiss chard (first crop the deer ate) and purple peppers.

In a garden plot, on a patio or in a pot – it’s fun to grow some of the food we eat. Plus, it reminds us to be cognizant of where out food comes from, who grows it and how much effort, water and work it takes to bring food to our table. For those of us in the U.S., much of our fruits & vegetables are harvested by undocumented workers, essentially slave labor.