This blogaround brought to you by exhaustion.
Recommended Reading on the Connecticut School Shooting [content note for guns, violence, privilege, and disablism for this whole section]:
Peter: The Truth No One Will Tell About the Sandy Hook Slaughter
Charles: The Bell Tolls for All of Us
Sikivu: Nice White Boys Next Door and Mass Murder
Jessica: About "I am Adam Lanza's Mother"
Carolyn: What About Adam Lanza's Father?
Digby: Guess Who Nixed Renewing the Assault Weapons Ban?
Atrios: Hero Fantasies
Aaron: We Get Bitter; We Cling to Gun Control
Renee: Thoughts in the Wake of the Connecticut Mass Murder
Adrienne: We Live in a Culture of Violence, and It Needs to Stop
Heather: Senator Feinstein to Introduce Assault Weapons Ban on First Day of New Congress
Angus: Quote of the Day
TDW: South Carolina Newspaper Issues Apology After Running Large Ad for Firearm Sales Alongside Coverage of Connecticut School Shooting
The Onion: Right to Own Handheld Device That Shoots Deadly Metal Pellets at High Speed Worth All of This
Other Recommending Reading:
Taegan: GOP Plans Attempt to Change Electoral Vote System [See also: Jamelle Bouie.]
Ryan: John Boehner Still Struggling to Learn How to Negotiate
Molly: What Will Secretary of State John Kerry's Foreign Policy Look Like?
Finaira: The GTFO Fallacy [Content Note: Various marginalizations in gaming.]
Fannie: Critical Opinions in the Abortion Debate
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Monday Blogaround
Daily Dose of Cute
"Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...."
*snap*
"Zuh? Whuzzat? OMG I was having the WEIRDEST dream about giant mice..."
Top Five
Here is your topic: Top Five Worst Holiday Songs. Go!
Please feel welcome to share stories about why your Top Five picks are what they are, though a straight-up list is fine, too. Please refrain from negatively auditing other people's lists, because judgment discourages participation.
On Sitting with Fear
[Content Note: Guns; violence; misogyny.]
In my previous post, I said that a meaningful exploration of a culture that encourages and abets aggressive, violent masculinity, particularly in straight white cis men, needs to be part of our national dialogue on gun reform and homicide prevention.
Because I don't just want to call for a conversation, and then contribute nothing to it, here I go, trying to make a contribution.
Let me start here: One of the things that privilege does is insulate one from legitimate fear.
Most very privileged men—white, straight, cis, able-bodied, middle- or upper-class men—spend their lives without knowing sustained fear. Every person knows individual moments of fear—the sort of fear that grips a human moments before a car accident one can see coming but cannot avoid, or in the moment one begins to choke on a bit of lunch while eating alone, when one isn't sure if a cough will dislodge the intruder. Privilege doesn't insulate any of us from that kind of fear.
But the sustained fear of being hurt, being victimized, being exploited—unexpectedly, at any moment, and most frequently by people one trusts—is something that the very privileged do not know intimately, the way the rest of us do.
This difference is particularly stark between women and privileged men.
Women live a life of sustained fear. Which is not to say that most women exist in a state of heightened anxiety at all times, but is to acknowledge the reality that our lives are fundamentally different from men's because of a real threat of rape/violence at the hands of men, mostly men we know. (And because we are stupidly and wrongly tasked with its prevention.) Men's and women's lives are very different in that way.
(This difference is what underlines privileged men asserting that they have a right to feel safe.)
Because of this difference, most women learn how to live their lives against a backdrop of present threat, to a soundtrack of the dull roar of constant fear. For the most part, we learn to ongoingly process fear as we move through our days on such a subconscious level it's as natural as our hearts beating without conscious thought—we position our keys in hand as a potential weapon and scan deserted parking lots for signs of danger and size up dates in search of anything dangerous with the ease that we execute any one of thousands of other routine daily tasks.
Privileged men don't understand this reality, and, upon having it explained to them, will often react with disgust, with contempt. They accuse women of being oversensitive, of having a pessimistic view of the world, of profiling men, and yawn gaslight blah fart.
Fear—or, perhaps, fear management—is a central part of womanhood in a way it is simply not a central part of privileged manhood.
So boys, especially privileged boys, don't learn how to sit with fear the way girls do. We tell boys explicitly not to be afraid; we tell them that being afraid makes you a pussy. They learn that to be afraid is to be like a woman, and to be not a man.
And then we structure the world so that privileged men don't have a lot to be afraid of, so that it is easier to maintain an identity that is rooted in not being fearful, even though fear is a normal part of human experience.
So, there are large parts of the male population in this country who don't know how to process fear. And then there is this entire industry that is dedicated to planting manufactured fear in those very people. The Republican Party. Fox News. Conservative Christianity. A vast weapons industry whose marketing is based on the specious premise that there is Something to be afraid of, Something from which you need to protect yourself.
The same people whose privilege affords them the luxury of never having to learn how to sit with, how to live a life in the echo of, how to process fear are the target demographic for manufactured fear.
And the less privileged among their ranks—the working class men of otherwise undiluted privilege—have real fear about job insecurity or healthcare access or how the fuck they're going to pay the mortgage next month. They are fears that are out of their personal control, and for which the Fear Manufacturers are happy to provide scapegoats—immigrants and brown people and feminists and kissing boys—lest anyone notice the Fear Manufacturers have been the architects of that real insecurity, too.
What is one to do when one has no capacity to process fear, no ability to sit with it and live with it, no developed strategies for coping with fear?
Well, in a lot of cases, one buys a gun.
And when that doesn't make the fear go away, one buys another one. And another. And another. And magazine clips that shoot more bullets. And more deadly bullets. And so forth and so on.
Maybe where gun reform really starts is teaching privileged male people that it's okay to be afraid, and teaching them how to live with fear.
Fear is a part of a mortal life. Only privilege makes it seem like it could ever be otherwise.
In Pursuit of Doing Something Meaningful
[Content Note: Guns; violence; disablism.]
In the wake of the shooting at Newtown, there is one thing on which we can all agree: Something has to be done.
Republican Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and professional garbage nightmare, thinks we need to shove more religion into schools, because: "We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be surprised that schools would become places of carnage?" This is obviously a solid theory, since no harm ever comes to children in religious institutions. Ahem.
Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas thinks we need to arm teachers, because: "I wish to God [Principal Dawn Hochsprung, who reportedly ran at and tried to stop shooter Adam Lanza] had had an M-4 in her office, locked up so when she heard gunfire, she pulls it out and she didn't have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands and takes him out and takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids." Also a solid idea. Never mind that every single teacher to whom I've spoken since this happened, including those who own guns, wants nothing to do with being responsible for a deadly weapon in a classroom.
Gohmert is not the only gun advocate who recommends more guns. I am loath even to dignify that absurd argument with a response, but I will simply observe that the US already has more guns per capita than any other country in the world, but also has, with the exception of Mexico whose stats are skewed by drug-related violence, the highest gun-related murder rate in the developed world. If more guns really translated into fewer gun homicides, we'd have the fewest gun homicides, not the most.
There is also the usual talk about violent video games, with no one sensible to observe (at least on television; it was certainly observed in my living room by my Scottish husband) that kids play the same violent video games in Britain, and lots of other places, but they don't have easy access to the sorts of high-powered deadly weapons used in those games except in the US.
What other discussion there has been on the topic of Doing Something has largely centered around "mental illness," a vague term that public commentators are broadly applying to everything from depression to developmental disabilities to personality disorders to the neuroatypical spectrum. The inexactitude of the language is complemented by the pretense that access to comprehensive mental healthcare will somehow "solve" this problem, eliding key realities of some psychological disabilities, like:
1. Not all people with mental illness are dangerous, and not all killers are mentally ill, i.e. meeting any standard of psychiatric diagnosis. (In fact, being mentally ill makes one more likely to be victimized by violence than to perpetrate it.)
2. Not all killers who are mentally ill can be helped by psychiatric care. This is The Thing we don't want to talk about at all—that there are dangerous people who can't be "fixed" by all the mental healthcare in the world. Most of these people currently end up in (and out of and in and out of) the prison system.
3. In addition to the continuing stigma around seeking care for mental illness, perpetuated and entrenched by ill-informed public "debates" that demonized people with mental illness, some mental illnesses themselves inhibit care-seeking. Relying on people with mental illness to "flag" themselves in need of care, especially men prone to aggression and violence, is not a realistic expectation. And an increasingly fantastical one the more that mental illness is stigmatized.
I am totally and unreservedly in support universal access to comprehensive psychiatric care. I believe universal healthcare to be a human right. But mental healthcare reform is not necessarily, forgive the turn of phrase, the magic bullet some imagine it to be.
Centering the discussion around mental healthcare—whether it's advocating for better psych care services, or advocating for background checks on all gun purchases—is ultimately just another way of eliding what the real and forever problem is: Anyone outside of law enforcement or the military having access to guns that are designed for nothing but the murder of other human beings.
That is the subject about which we need to have a meaningful discussion. And it is the primary subject we continue to studiously avoid.
There is one other subject that is off the discussion menu—and that is the fact that mass killings are committed by men almost exclusively. Of the 62 mass murders carried out with firearms across the US since 1982, 61 of them were committed by men. Forty-four of the killers were white men.
Every one of the men who picked up a gun—or multiple guns—and started shooting people was socialized in a patriarchal culture that encourages an aggressive masculinity one of the key expressions of which is meant to be violence.
That is not incidental. And you can bet your ass that if there was an epidemic of mass slaughters committed by women, their gender would be mentioned. How we raise girls would be examined. It would be talked about. Womanhood would be on the discussion menu.
But we carefully ignore talking about how it is men, mostly white men, picking up guns and killing lots of people. We carefully ignore talking about how many of these mass killings start with an incident of domestic violence. In Newtown, Adam Lanza started by killing his mother. We carefully ignore talking about how mass murder is a male problem (that is, committed almost exclusively by male people, not that most male people do it) in the same way that rape is a male problem.
Instead, we Other every individual man who commits these acts, and imagine he exists in a cultural void (except for video games). Only when they do something like this do we Other white men, even though what Adam Lanza did is sort of the ultimate patriarchal act—destroying women and children.
That is something we are never, ever, supposed to talk about.
And it makes me angry that we can't talk about it, not only because I think it's part and parcel of all the intersecting things that are part of this problem—gun access, healthcare being a privilege rather than a right, a cultural fetishization of violence—and thus must be addressed as part of a meaningful solution, but also because it prevents us from really talking about what it means that all seven of the adults Lanza killed were women, and how it is (mostly) women who stand on the line between violent men and children. In schools. In churches. In homes.
That discussion needs to happen, too.
Yes, we need to do something. There is not one solution. But for the love of the children whose lives have been lost, let us at least endeavor to have an honest conversation. For once.
Blog Note
It's not just you: Text is rendering really tiny in comments at the moment. I've let Disqus know and hopefully it will be resolved soon.
In The News
[Content note: Gun violence]
Weekend Updates:
10 people were shot, including 4 teens, Friday afternoon and night in Chicago.
Two police officers were fatally shot outside a grocery store in Topeka while responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle yesterday.
50 shots were fired outside an upscale mall mall in Newport Beach Saturday.
An Indiana man threatened to "kill as many people as he could" at an elementary school near his home. Police found 47 guns hidden throughout his home.
A man opened fire in a San Antonio movie theater parking lot last night, wounding one person before an officer shot him inside the theater.
Here is a timeline of mass shootings in the US since the Columbine High massacre.
Last night: A teen was shot to death in St. Louis. A 16-year-old was shot in southwest Houston. A young man died of multiple gunshot wounds in Suffolk, WV. A man was found shot to death at a tattoo parlor in South Gate. Two men were shot to death in a home in Dallas. A 24-year-old man was shot to death in Philadelphia. A man was shot to death at a Georgia car wash. A Miami man was gunned down in front of his family. Three men were killied with an assault rifle in Birmingham. A teenager was shot at a party in Savannah. A 19-year-old man was shot in Columbia, SC.
The President's Speech at Newtown
[Content Note: Guns; violence.]
Yesterday, President Obama gave an address at a prayer vigil in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and 6 women were killed in a mass shooting last week.
[Full transcript here.]
It was a powerful address, particularly this part:
This is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.Surely, we can and must expect more.
And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we're meeting our obligations?
Can we honestly say that we're doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?
Can we claim, as a nation, that we're all together there, letting them know they are loved and teaching them to love in return?
Can we say that we're truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?
I've been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we're honest with ourselves, the answer's no. We're not doing enough. And we will have to change. Since I've been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings, fourth time we've hugged survivors, the fourth time we've consoled the families of victims.
And in between, there have been an endless series of deadly shootings across the country, almost daily reports of victims, many of them children, in small towns and in big cities all across America, victims whose -- much of the time their only fault was being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can't be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.
If there's even one step we can take to save another child or another parent or another town from the grief that's visited Tucson and Aurora and Oak Creek and Newtown and communities from Columbine to Blacksburg before that, then surely we have an obligation to try.
I hope the President will, as he promised, pursue meaningful legislation to stem the tide of gun violence in the US. For right now, I am just glad that he is our President. There are times when I am just immensely grateful that we don't have a total dipshit as a president, and this is one of them.
Sunday Shuffle
Usually it's Masquerade/Why So Silent but this video is just Masquerade. Anyway, how about you?
Open Thread
This week's open threads have been bought to you by incredibly useful inflatable things.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
Belly up to the bar,
and be in this space together.
Thank You
This was supposed to be the final day of my year-end fundraiser—and I wouldn't bring it up at all on a day like this one, except today was the part where I wrapped it up by saying thank you, and I still want to say that.
Thank you to everyone who has donated. Thank you to the new subscribers. Thank you to everyone who contributes to the space in other ways—to our regular contributors, our moderators, our guest contributors, to anyone who has offered to do a transcript, to those who have linked to, quoted, Tweeted about, and otherwise supportively recommended this blog, and/or to the people who have taken the time to send me the occasional note of support and encouragement.
This community couldn't exist without your support. Thank you.
Photo of the Day
"Vigil outside the White House happening now, organized by pro-gun control groups."—@gzornick
Top Five
Here is your topic: Top Five Favorite Songs. Just the flat-out best songs that you love to listen to when you need a good song. Go!
Please feel welcome to share stories about why your Top Five picks are what they are, though a straight-up list is fine, too. Please refrain from negatively auditing other people's lists, because judgment discourages participation.
President Obama on the Connecticut School Shooting
This afternoon, I spoke with Governor Malloy and FBI Director Mueller. I offered Governor Malloy my condolences on behalf of the nation, and made it clear he will have every single resource that he needs to investigate this heinous crime, care for the victims, counsel their families.
We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years. And each time I learn the news, I react not as a President, but as anybody else would — as a parent. And that was especially true today. I know there's not a parent in America who doesn't feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.
The majority of those who died today were children — beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. [long pause; the President looks down] They had their entire lives ahead of them — birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own. [pause; wipes away tears] Among the fallen were also teachers — men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.
So our hearts are broken today — for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost. Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well, for as blessed as they are to have their children home tonight, they know that their children's innocence has been torn away from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain.
As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it's an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.
This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight. And they need all of us right now. In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans. And I will do everything in my power as President to help.
Because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need — to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories but also in ours.
May God bless the memory of the victims and, in the words of scripture, heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds.
Sign the petition here asking the White House to pursue Congressional legislation to address regulate gun ownership. If you are on Twitter, tell @BarackObama that you Demand a Plan to end gun violence in the US.
Open Thread: Connecticut School Shooting
[Content Note: Guns; violence; terrorism.]
The previous thread was starting to get long and unwieldy with updates. Here is a fresh thread for discussion and information sharing. I will make updates from here forward in comments.
Please take care to maintain the guidelines of the safe space. Also: While I realize many articles with important updates will contain photos of victims/witnesses, I'm going to ask that we not post or link individual photos of victims in this thread for the purposes of discussing the photos.
None of the victims/witnesses have consented to have their photos taken. I know no one here would share them with anything but undiluted compassion and empathy, but nonetheless, I don't feel good about linking to the images. I can't imagine a worse thing than strangers gawking at me in my grief.
In The News
[Content note: Homophobia]
Friday News Updates:
Illinois Lawmakers plan to push marriage equality legislation before the state's current session ends early next month.
Here's a new Star Trek trailer! Neat!
Stephen Hawking and a long list of scientists have joined the chorus of voices calling for an official pardon of Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing.
The Hubble Space Telescope has picked out what may be the most distant galaxy yet found.
Scientists say they may have discovered why homosexuality exists.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey took in $13 million from screenings at or soon after midnight last night in the U.S. and Canada.
The pope says gay marriage "actually harms and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society."
Meanwhile, this gay couple opens their home to special needs children.
The piano from Casablanca is up for auction.
