Post No. 1,413 - Scarred Psyches

In my opinion, most people alive today have, or wind up with, scarred psyches - which I've written about elsewhere, for instance, here. 

In my case, the transphobic abuse I've experienced - continuously - over the last three decades has left me with an official diagnosis of PTSD (although I favour it being described as trauma, with PTSD left for those whose trauma also involves death). 

As for others with scarred psyches, I'm in the process of trying to write a book on the topic, arguing that being a bit kinder to others - and ourselves - is the cure, and also pointing out that many conservatives are particularly scarred. 

I've just come a passage in a book a biography of Robert F. Kennedy titled "Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon" by Larry Tye (pub. Random House, New York, 2016, ISBN 978-067964207, Amazon), which illustrates some of what I am talking about. 

After his brother's assassination, which was the third death of a sibling (together with a major health issue with another sibling) that he had experienced, Bobby Kennedy obviously took some time to recover. As he recovered, he decided to get back into public service - which is what serving in elected office is, but was struggling with campaigning effectively. After a TV interview that he subsequently realised he had handled well, his confidence grew, and he started campaigning - and living - more effectively. 

From the book (p. 332): 

"His hands still trembled . . . But he finally displayed bits of the old joy not just with crowds of voters, but with the kids whom he had always touched and been touched by." 

At a rally, he spoke encouragingly to a young girl who was embarrassed by her freckles. The book continues:

"He never knew that what he'd done sent Cathy "prancing around this house like no one you've ever seen," according top her mother. "He was no more capable of doing that in the beginning of that campaign," added Feldman, "than he could fly."

In the context of what I'm aiming to cover in the book I'm trying to write: 

• Bobby Kennedy started his life with quite conservative leanings - even aiding the appalling Senator McCarthy early on, and showing fairly conservative leanings in his work as an Attorney-General. 
• The great Dr Martin Luther King Jr. thought Bobby Kennedy had potential. From page 236 of the above-mentioned book:

"Somewhere in this man sits good," the preacher told his lieutenants early on. "Our task is to find his moral center and win him to our cause." 

• Contact with other people, combined with his own suffering, overcame the scars (which is what they are) of conservatism around his heart, and allowed him to realise his potential. 
• The scars of small-mindedness afflicted those who left the young girl, Cathy, with embarrassment about her freckles. 
• The kindness of the newly healed Bobby Kennedy was able to help heal Cathy's scars. 
• The only people not helped here are those who encouraged Bobby Kennedy's conservatism (his father, predominantly), and those who affected Cathy.

Now to see if I can apply some of that to myself . . .

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Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering” (just as binary gendered [men’s and women’s] sporting teams are either both given the gender descriptor, or neither).

Copyright © Kayleen White 2007-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-ShareAlike basis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/  

 

Post No. 996 - Cross Posting: Sustainable Progressivism

From https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/sustainable-progressivism.html

The great Dr Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:

“It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.”

I agree with this - but only when thinking in the short and medium term. In the long term, true, sustainable change can ONLY be achieved by changing the heart.

As an example, consider the overlapping issues of racism and slavery. At the height of the Age of Imperialism and the “New Imperialism”, a century and more ago, there was a widely held view that “the white man’s burden” meant predominantly white nations should occupy other nations, and seek to impose their views of how to live on those other nations, whose people were seen as inferior (see also here). To simplify considerably, that view of inferiority was significant in considering slavery to be acceptable.

Nowadays, many, if not most, people in those nations see racism as wrong - or, at the very least, highly questionable; most, I suspect, see slavery as wrong.

What has changed over the last few centuries? Laws, certainly - slavery has been subjected to increasing legislation for around several millennia [see Note 1 below], and advocacy against slavery dates back quite some time as well - for instance, the Roman Emperor and noted Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in support of the Stoic view that people are equal – although he didn’t take action to end slavery (see here for a nuanced discussion of the obstacles and issues, and also here; incidentally, the word “stoic” has changed: in the context of this paragraph and the referenced historical era, it is a philosophy more akin to Buddhism than the connotation of repressed emotions the word has today).

However, there has also been education and face-to-face interactions and deliberate campaigns and some good science (to counter the bad science, including the appalling applications of eugenics) that have shown the perceptions that people had that ownership of other people as property was wrong, and that has shown many people - perhaps until the growing, fear-driven xenophobia of this millennia - that racism is founded on wrong presumptions, and thus is unfounded, and is actively harmful, and thus is actively morally wrong.

To choose another example, consider sexism. As with racism, there are still a disturbingly large number of people who are sexist, but, also as with racism, their number and the vehemence and violence of their views have been reduced as compared to a century or two ago. As with racism, legislation - often in response to campaigns which, effectively, educated and thus changed the heads, if not the hearts, of Parliamentarians - has helped (e.g., giving women the vote, first done in the then colony [now nation] of New Zealand in 1893 and the then colony [now state] of South Australia in 1894 [see here]), but what has made the change sustainable is, in my opinion, education, face-to-face non-stereotypical interactions and deliberate campaigns.

Science is less clearly an advantage in the fight against sexism, but it has been beneficial, for instance, in dealing with homophobia (e.g., Evelyn Hooker’s 1950s study) and, to some extent transphobia - although bipartisan education to counter stereotypes and other fallacies and misconceptions by those who had never had to think deeply about their gender identity helped in achieving the final stages of anti-discrimination legislation here in the late 1990s. (It was also not helpful that it took so long for scientists to listen to trans people and stop assuming that problems being experienced by trans people were due to being trans, rather than the vicious discrimination experienced from bigoted people. [See Perkins, R, “Transgender HIV/AIDS Needs Assessment Project”, 1994; McNeil, J et al, “Speaking from the Margins”, 2013; Dept. of Health (Vic.), “Transgender and gender diverse health and wellbeing: Background Paper”, 2014]; Note 2) Subsequently, the normalisation of gender identity issues has proceeded, often with education, but recent backlashes suggest there is a need to not take gains for granted, and find a way to educate those who are most personally threatened or insecure (or simply intellectually wrong) about the range that does exist in gender identity.

The backlash also shows the need for, in the short to medium term, legislation to, in Dr King’s words, “restrain the heartless”.

The longer term approach of education to change the minds and then the hearts of those who are discriminating could be described as “social engineering”. However, if that is the case, it could equally be argued that it is undoing the deliberate, wilful and malicious social engineering of people who created ad propagated such hate in the first place.

At some point in history, someone decided – whether out of active hate, ignorance or intellectual incompetence - to teach their kids that “x” is “bad”, and actively demonised “x” to push that biased viewpoint in. My view is that by the time such warped “parenting” gets to the 4^th generation, when one is beyond any chance of talking to the originator of these malicious views, it will have been degraded to the furphy of “oh everyone knows that … “x” ”, and challenging it becomes much harder – as every advocate for social advance over the last few millennia has known.

That bad parenting, based on the “Mini Me” view rather than love and wanting one’s child to be the best and all that they can be, is active and malicious social engineering that harms the child as well as the victims of the child’s learned hate (bigotry).

In the short term, the acts of hate that are discrimination need to be banned – by governments.

In the medium term, affirmative action needs to be implemented to reverse the damage that has been caused by possibly centuries of such hate – and government needs to take a lead in this.

In the long term, education to counter and stop the passage of hate is needed, education until inclusive views become part of the endemic “oh everyone knows ..”. That education can be delivered to a limited extent by advocates, but for such changes to become widespread and established enough to be sustainable, the resources of government and its influence on education are needed, which will require recognition that hate is as harmful as drink driving or not wearing seatbelts.

Notes

Note 1: the following partial list is from this Wikipedia page, which also includes steps along the way to abolishing serfdom:

 - abolition of slavery in the Maurya Empire in India in the 3^rd Century BCE by the renowned Emperor Ashoka (I couldn’t find any independent verification of this online);

 - short term abolition in China during the Qin and Xin dynasties in China in the 3^rd Century BCE and 1^st Century CE respectively (I couldn’t find any independent verification of this online);

 - after some kingdoms made partial abolitions (for Christians only), abolition of slavery and freeing of any slave who reached France by King Louis X in 1315 CE;

 -  after abolition in quite a few other places, abolition in the United Kingdom in 1834, and the USA in 1865, which was partially countered by the notorious “Black Codes”; and

 - all the way up to a League of Nations Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery which was still being ratified by nations as recently as 2008, and new anti-slavery acts such as the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015.

Note 2: there is some useful guidance on appropriate behaviour here.

WLNGRHDMT

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Finally, remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, and to mind our Mӕgan.

 

Post No. 740 - Can One Person Make a Difference?

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