FAMILY SECRETS
If you go up into the attic of the house of the U.S.A., and poke around a little, you will find an old, musty chest. It’s maybe a chest from the 1880s I would imagine. Slowly you open the creaking top of the chest, and inside you find a box labeled in faded black charcoal Family Secrets.
Every family has its secrets—some just have more than others. But this find is special, I mean it’s unique; it’s historic, isn’t it? Yes, it is. The U.S.A. Family Secrets is mixed in with a bucket of mortar to patch the brick of the house. It’s mixed with denial, doublespeak, and hypocrisy. Granted this kind of covert hype makes it easier to control children, because the chest of family secrets is like Santa’s bag of goodies at Christmas time. As long as we don’t let the family secrets out, our kids are happy, and ignorance is bliss, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ and they think they’re going to live in the Garden Land of America.
We are the nation that purports to be a “Christian nation,” aren’t we? How is it then that we have trained ourselves so well to turn away, to turn our eyes towards the ground, to avert looking into the eyes of Mother Truth? This makes us a nation of dishonesty. Dishonest about the cruel oppressions of the past, their causal effects on the present, and their prophetic link to the future. Hypocrisy is being one way on the inside, but changing the outside to project our rightness in our own eyes. It’s wearing a mask like an actor who takes on the “face” of the person she’s portraying. We want the audience to see us with the mask—to see through the real face to only register the one portrayed.
We have “falsies” and “truthies.” They are all around us. It’s hard to get close to people when they have eyes in the back of their heads, but they have ways of watching. The “Truth Police” can only exist where there is no trust or a little trust. Since our forefathers (for me white, Scottish American) began this sewer of hypocrisy and doublespeak, to get what they wanted for themselves (shall we get real?) isn’t it for us to attempt to bring some answers and confessions to the public domain. Using doublespeak means we say one thing but mean another for our own purposes. It’s a clever distortion under cover in a land where statistics can lie depending on who is running the numbers.
To rationalize and continue our denial about what we actually did to human beings who don’t look like us or have the same color of skin hue, we must pretend that truth is stranger than fiction. We’ve created “sincere fictions” (Joe Feagin) to hold up the whole lie for somehow we have to, I mean just have to keep it held up. We like our fiction on CDs, movie theaters, DVDs, and draft houses, where we can suck our beer and punch more pizza into our mouths. We have to have it pretty to justify ourselves in our own eyes. We are the innocents! Our previous, familial generations could never have rapaciously ripped off the naïve and weak Indians in the way some people argue? The slaves from Africa were brought her to civilize them and bring them into another form of consciousness, out of savage wilderness, lonesome lands were only wild dogs and two-winged ones can exist. Their masters took care of them. Sure, you had the occasional rape or children out of wedlock coming from the consensual unions of whites and blacks. Indeed, they were happy and provided for by their owners and the plantations, were they not?
These are the fantasies that are fatal. When children wake up to the fact that the ones who love them the most (the “gods”) have lied to them for years about the truth of a being named Santa Claus, this is a rude and traumatic shock to a child’s entire conscience, brain chemistry, cognitive processes, and affective education for their sentiments and emotions.
Family secrets are closed off from public view, and peculiar masks and hypocritical means must be found to keep them hidden; the light hurts their eyes as they lie in the attic with chains of invisible silk.
© Christopher Bear Beam 11/09
Filed under: Male-Dominated Culture, Mental Health, Protection of Human Rights, Sexism
THE WOMEN’S HOLOCAUST
By Christopher Bear Beam, M.A.
There are many holocausts that many in the West – and all over the planet – have not much heard about. The article “War Rape” in Wikipedia cites that 500,000 women were raped in the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. War Rape was first recognized as a crime against humanity when the International Criminal Tribunal tried the Former Yugoslavia. It was evidenced that Muslim women in Foca (southeast Bosnia and Herzegovina) were subjected to the systematic and widespread gang rape, torture and sexual enslavement by Bosnian Serb soldiers, policemen, and members in paramilitary groups. Crimes against women are also recognized as integral to the strategy of war in some cultures.
We must never forget that rape is a crime of violence. As far at its effects, a recent study (cited by Wikipedia) lists STDs or VDs, (including HIV) and pregnancy. Another two physical effects are incontinence and vaginal fistulas. The short-term or long-term psychological wounds may include depression, anxiety disorders (including PTSD), multiple somatic symptoms, flashbacks, difficulty re-establishing intimate relationships, shame and persistent fears.
We have forgotten about the African holocaust that took place in colonial, slave-trading days. The millions of Africans, who were stolen from their homes, put on floating coffins in absolutely deplorable conditions, where men, women, and children, in the millions, died in the Middle Passage. All people need to learn this history, and remember it.
I say this in the spirit of “identificational sorrow,” a concept that means that we do have a link to our European ancestors who were culpable in this African Holocaust. It doesn’t matter if our defense is “Well, my family were never slave-owners,” because we were the ones who benefited from this genocide, and we still, even today, are reaping the benefits. The largest slave-traders in America lived up north of the Mason-Dixon line: the duplicity of the DeWolf family, who amassed a fortune from the bestial treatment of African slaves, made us all culpable, so that we can no longer turn away our eyes to escape our shame. This was another one of our own white-driven holocausts.
Then there are the indigenous peoples of the land in North and South America who have been the targets of genocide and holocaust. Native Americans had their land taken by theft, were dispossessed to places other than their homeland, slaughtered, tortured—men, women, and children. Eventually, their children were taken from their families by ‘good Christian folk,’ housed in boarding schools, stripped of their language, their names, their native clothing, sometimes of their womanhood by forced sterilization, their spirituality (you can only really strip a person or group of their religion, but their spirituality may become more impervious through resistance), and made into the image of the white man. The saying, as a rationalization for their abuse, was, ‘Kill the Indian, save the man.’ This was both a physical and a psycho-spiritual holocaust, since the psychological trauma, poverty, lack of access to resources, internalized oppression, and intimidation of beatings, lynching, and rapes were seen as its consequences by future generations.
When the early immigrants came to America, they created a political moment (a moment for European American history) by inviting the leaders of the American Indian Nations to come and meet with them to see if any kind of strategy might be engineered for peaceful co-existence in order that they might take more of the land and resources of America. The white men noticed that Native Americans brought women with them to these assemblies; in Native culture, women were viewed as equals to men, so they were in leadership responsibilities. The white leaders were horrified because of their sexist views of women, so they counseled the male Native American leaders to leave them at home. After all, Europeans reasoned, they weren’t intelligent enough for the business of ruling, controlling, and stealing what wasn’t theirs to steal, and this was, in the end, what leadership was all about, right? I doubt if the Native Americans took their advice.
We never have to look too far away for historical examples, once we wipe the historical denial from our eyes, and can use our special vision called ‘remembering the past and our part in it.’ The examples are there. I suppose one could even dispute the term genocide or holocaust (there are various interpretations and definitions); in my mind, we don’t need to limit it to the extermination of targeted people. The forced and coercive transfers of any group of people from the land of their ancestor’s kills their spirit… Dislocation leads to the decimation of people’s identities.
If we research very far in the distant past, we can locate the almost invisible, yet primeval, string of yarn that stitched the ideology of Domionism–the design of the chain of the hierarchy of life. Dominionism (growing out of European philosophy and theology) espoused the ideology that men should control nature to make it habitable and productive. For this, they cleverly twisted the theological word stewardship. At the top of this ladder reign men, and at the bottom they placed the ecosphere. Next on the hierarchy, one step down from men came women, but they were viewed as pretty far down the ladder, closer to the earth, which is base, wild, and savage. Women were made invisible, seen as seducing men and leading them into moral depravity, the essence of physicality and sexuality; impudent, easily persuaded by evil spirits (the Devil), unintelligent, in need of control and guidance, etc., etc., etc. You can see the close connection the way Europeans viewed animals.
During the “Dark Ages” the majority of criminals brought to tribunals and village kangaroo courts were women. Is there any reason to wonder about the Women’s Holocaust and how it could happen? Author Rossell Hope Robbins writes about this era being a “shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest shame of Western civilization, the blackest of everything that Homo sapiens, the reasoning man, has ever upheld” (cited by Jim Mason in An Unnatural Order: Uncovering the Roots of Our Domination of Nature and Each Other, p. 226). This emerged as a power struggle between women and institutional male power. Eighty-five percent of the victims during this time were women.
Mason reports that victims of this holocaust range between 200,000 to a high of two million women burned at the stake during this 300-year period. The sordid paradox of the Women’s Holocaust is that it happened during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. This is just another example of how male-dominated power and extermination is truly crazy making.
Women were already cast in the role as being complicit with the Devil, so it was no stretch to level accusations against them for behaviors the church claimed as heretical. But really the causal factor behind this holocaust was that of sustaining the power of men and the church. If the church had been holding high the truth of the dignity and sacredness of all people, things, and every created being, why would it be torturing and killing so many women who they ruled were guilty of spurious charges?
Women were accused of witchcraft; some were covered with burning oil, or burned at the stake. No doubt, there were many terroristic rapes as well. Women were butchered or drowned, with their children forced to watch these insane and demonic acts; imagine, children forced to see their mothers killed… What else could this have resulted in except PTSD thousands of years before it was labeled this by contemporary psychologies? Women were also killed at the hands of church and state for being herbalists or healers. They were seen as evil because of their love of the earth and its restorative powers.
The mistreatment of women as inferior to men was part of the Holocaust of Women, and its practices migrated into the New World. It resulted in the Salem Witch trials in the New England states. It has continued to migrate by way of many more covert and subtle ways of oppression: at one time the suppression of civil rights such as voting, abusiveness, murder, rape, domestic violence, sexual harassment, discriminatory treatment, and a culture that still lives in many places steeped with sexism as a normal part of its life. I use the words “its life” advisedly because now sexism and misogyny are a part of our overall system. Systemic sources are bigger and more powerful than individuals. But it’s still a holocaust, no matter how you look at it or try to defend it.
I was so moved by a homiletic of a woman in our community Betty Duff that I became physically ill when I listened to her remarks: like a dredged out well with nothing left inside. All of us men had a mother; we may have sisters, aunts, girl cousins, and grandmothers we knew, yet each of us as men has assisted the White Male System to continue to live and breathe. I think of my own social conditioning growing up as a boy, then a young adult, and now an older adult. I am now recovery from this sickness of the male-dominated, sexist, and superior system; I listen more closely to my inner conversations around female stereotypes, as I have become more conscious and aware. My brain registers thoughts and ideas that I picked up in the land of domination and power. Now I’m moving through the plane of acute awareness, deconstruction, and reconstruction, and the old thought processes and behaviors are often hardened like fossils in ancient burial places. Healing is a dirty and messy business, but the end results are cleansing and lifting.
© Christopher Bear Beam, M.A. August 2009
Many, many thanks to Betty Duff who researched this time period and shared it with our community, Marilyn Douglas-Jones who offered help in editing, and Deborah Levine who gave me helpful feedback prior to the publishing of this blog on the American Diversity Report.
Filed under: Culture
I recommend seeing the new movie Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo De Caprio and Kate Winslet. In some ways I’m a sucker for stories rooted in the Fifties, having been born in 1949, and growing up during the Fifties.
Watching this flick reminded me of so many things: people living their lives emotionally “shut down,” the many taboos that folks didn’t speak about openly, in tandem with the surrounding air of family secrets entrenched in so many families of that era.
Looking back at this historical time phase, it’s very easy to observe and label these kinds of cultural road signs. We have our own contemporary ones today. An interesting question to ask yourself is: what are ours? Perhaps one of them is that we are so much more open, that we are now ‘in your face’ about our issues, and we’re more prone to take dramatic risks in our lives. There is much more openness about our resistance to authority. Our time might be called socially regressed aka Murray Bowen, creator of Family Systems Theory.
In this film, the wife and husband (Winslet and De Caprio) are just beginning a family, and have moved to the suburbs to see if they can play out the American Dream. Yet both of them have the sense of uncertainty about what this new kind of life is all about. You can feel the inner boredom, the restlessness, and their pointed questions about the genuine consistency of life, and how to see themselves in it. ‘What is all of this really for,’ they seem to be asking themselves.
The wife in the story is the protagonist who sees the need for herself and her husband, and instigates an idea to move to Paris. Underneath the lines, though, is her growing depression, and the feeling of being trapped within this mapped out life. Both of them may think they know the map, but the territory definitely escapes them.
Her husband is a “company man” who works for a company that his father worked for. He thinks about how meaningless his father’s life had been but buries it underneath his skin by having an affair and abusing alcohol. He doesn’t want the same thing his father got, but he doesn’t really know what he wants. He is a chameleon that appears to change his convictions and ideas with others’ influence and persuasion. He is the man lost on an Atlantic City boardwalk walking alone with no gravity pulling him to the center of the earth.
For this writer the primary emotional component of their relationship is anger and rage. They rage at each other and blame each other for their own entrapment. In one powerful scene, Kate Winslet’s character tells her husband that she had thought they were special and that this life was supposed to be different because of their specialness. She blurts out that all of this emptiness wasn’t supposed to be happening to them.
In this scene we may see the source of so much inner anger, frustration, and blaming others for one’s own problems. The source of anger often is the gap between our own expectations and what is really going on in the world around us. Our expectations are so often simply the idealized, non-realistic, and highly valued norms of what makes us happy, successful or a failure. By “highly valued” I mean that we set such high and perfectionistic values/goals for ourselves by our mutilating self-talk, we tell ourselves that we are failures, we aren’t happy, and that our lives must be nil and useless. Thus, using these standards we are either successful or in a place of failure. This is either/or thinking. This sets the stage for existential depression, discouragement and demoralization.
This incongruence can only cause anger and a sense of being thwarted in one’s life pursuits. The problem is not the other person, but it’s our own thinking that is maladaptive. It’s the illusion of the expectation being reality, not life itself. It’s the rift between our conceptually constructed ideas of ‘what life is supposed to be like’ and what really is. If one can’t see this or accept it, it rattles our emotional cages and we’re in for the fight of our lives—the result of no acceptance is a creeping anger that grows like a troll under the bridge until it bursts out in a hail storm of un-sanity.
Finally, as the film is nearing its end, there is a certain fait accompli. I thought that De Caprio was going to commit his wife to a psychiatric hospital. At point, he calls her “crazy.” Our white, male conditioning has trained us in our sexism well. Male superiority says that women are crazy, sick, over emotional, protected, sheltered, unintelligent, and morally bad. This is the white male system will do everything in its power to maintain control and perpetuate women as being inferior.
In fact, during the Fifties, psychiatry and psychology had been co-opted by the robber baron class. This privileged class of neo-faith-healers didn’t seem to recognize the mental illness of depression. The wife, from what we observe in the film, was going through a clinical depression. Many times anger is hidden within the presenting problem of depression. We might say depression is anger turned inwards on oneself. Women were particularly prone to depression including Post Partum Depression. They were taught by the White Male System to know their place, and that place was at home raising families. Yet as they raised families their role didn’t stop at being mom; they had many other talents, skills and gifts. Because there was a ‘code of silence’ about this, they felt fearful of communicatively expressing their emotions about the faulty expectations spoken of above.
A good example of this is my own mom. In our old home movies, my primary memory is of her fading back out of the picture into the kitchen. But mom worked for the War Department in WW II doing the kind of work that demanded high intelligence. She is a poet, writer, visual and textile artist, and has a very intuitive sense about people and life. She is a thinker, and she can hold her own in an argument or discussion, even now at the age of ninety-one.
Her working ethos when raising her own family was that of ‘the wind beneath my wings.’ These were my father’s wings. He was dad, the leader, the boss, and it was expected that he stood out as the most capable. Her role was to be the wind that would lift her children and husband into the Land of Success, like the role Kate Winslet played in the film. It strikes me that this kind of sexism is pernicious, because it oppresses the authentic thoughts and abilities of both men and women.
In the end, the wife dies just before childbirth. The conclusion of the film is the metaphor for life during the Fifties. She had sacrificed and given everything for her family, but she gave her true self away as well. Stereotypes are the lazy and sloppy thoughts of ignorant people who are so numb to themselves, they would rather die than living to be who they really are.
Filed under: Culture
Americana’s Mythology of Innocence
Sitting in our opulent homes in the
new millennium,
staring into neon squares
blinking, blurring, lighting, blipping, and snowing,
we lay asleep in our recliners.
Someone speaks the truth
about the “real” Americana, and
we raise a curtain of myth-full
innocence, aghast and unaware.
Will the real Americana please stand up?
Hitler looked to American history,
of European colonization and
our methods of oppression and genocide–
as the heroes, archetypes and the bedrock
of how to extinguish those labeled with viruses,
as they marched from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
with their imperialistic resource guarding.
We don’t want to believe this,
must be a lie of the Illuminati,
because we’re the innocents,
so how could Americans get called out
as the brutal slayers.
We gasp, recoiling in holy rage and blindness,
close our eyes and sleep on.
Or we vilify, put down, and persecute
the messengers, calling them
extremists and revolutionaries
(indeed we are).
Have we forgotten why we
Europeans came here to Americana?
We came to escape monarchical oppression
and despotic exploitation,
and we went to war to defend
our right to exist as a
free nation.
But when non-whites resist,
violently or non-violently,
we call them seditious,
and subversive.
News flash: thinking is the most
subversive activity in which
we can engage,
but first we have to
de-mythologize our myth of
innocence, then transform.
The American Indian wars
continue on with relocation,
fraudulent privitization of
sacred lands,
abysmal health care systems,
and the triumphalism of
Americana sovereignty over
sacred compacts called treaties.
Slavery grinds on
with one out of four black males,
age eighteen to twenty-five years old,
enslaved in the prison-industrial
trade combine, with its use of
arbitrary laws and punishments
as dirty currency.
Arab Americans are military captives
falsely profiled and renditioned,
taken to secret prisons, detained
without legal charges, bodies held unlawfully,
and tortured to extort information
in order to lock and load our innocence,
keeping our frame in place and in perpetration.
I read the headlines today.
Bush secretly went to Iraq
to sign a security deal
with Malaki’s government, and
a journalist stood up in a
press conference, throwing his
show at Bush, and calling him
a dog. Then he threw the other
one, saying it was for all the
widows, orphans and innocents
offered on the imperial altar;
throwing the shoe was a sign
of utmost disrespect, and most
Iraqis feel the same way
as this journalist.
We wonder, ‘how can this be?’
Mythological innocence never
sees its shadow,
even in broad daylight behind a building,
simply because we don’t
see or know ourselves.
Iraq, present day symbol of
Americana’s killing machine that has
operated on the same dynamics
since its birth, is the perpetrator,
and the rest of the non-white
world hates us for the trauma
we bring…and because we don’t
call it what it is—savage brutality
and sacrificial baby killing,
and even some of the whites,
the Europeans, long to see the
end of capricious power wielded
by a wild-west administration,
the reflection of frontier-busting,
western movement years ago;
power-hungry domination,
our optical illusion
of innocence and messianic mystique.
©Christopher Bear Beam, MA 121508
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