2nd part ~~ Building Cultures of Peace: Four Cornerstones

Building Cultures of Peace

If we are to build cultures of peace we have to start talking about something that still makes many people uncomfortable: gender.

"Our Job is to To Male it Visible"

by Riane Eisler

originally posted Feb 11, 2010 to YES! magazine
Page 2, continued from Linda's Hearth's last-prior blog, 5 - 23 - 2010

The Economics of Domination and Partnership

The roles and relations of the two halves of humanity can no longer be considered “just a women’s issue” (though we’re half of humanity, that phrase again shows how we’ve been conditioned to devalue women and anything associated with women). In reality, gender roles and relations affect everything about a society from its institutions (for example, whether families are more democratic or authoritarian) to its guiding system of values.

Let me give you an example from economics. Most of us would never think economics has anything to do with gender. At most, we think this refers to the workplace gender discrimination we’re finally beginning to talk about. But actually it goes much, much deeper. Economics has huge systemic effects.

Have you ever wondered, for instance, why it is that so many politicians always find money for weapons, for wars, and for prisons, but when it comes to funding health care, child care, and other “soft” or caring activities, they have no money? Nor do they have money for keeping a clean and healthy natural environment—rather like the “women’s work” of keeping a clean and healthy home environment.

Underlying these seemingly irrational priorities is a gendered system of valuations we’ve inherited from earlier, more domination-oriented times. To meet the challenges we face, we must make this visible.

Neoliberalism is actually a regression to dominator economics: to a top-down economic system where trickle down economics is really a continuation of dominator traditions, where those on the bottom are socialized to content themselves with the scraps dropping from the opulent tables of those on top.

This is an ancient economics of domination, which transcends labels like capitalism and socialism. Indeed, the two large-scale applications of socialism, the USSR and China, also turned into domination systems, highly authoritarian and violent, with horrendous environmental problems, because the underlying social system did not shift from domination to partnership.

That’s not to say we should discard everything from capitalism and socialism. We need to retain and strengthen the partnership elements in both the market and government economies and leave the domination elements behind. But we need to go further to what I have called a “caring economics.”

Now, isn’t it interesting that when we put “caring” and “economics” in the same sentence, people tend to do a double take? We’ve been told that caring policies and practices may sound good, but they’re just not economically effective. In reality, study after study shows that investing in caring for people and nature is extremely effective—not only in human and environmental terms, but in purely financial terms.

Why Is Costa Rica Smiling?
How a focus on peace is helping this Central American country top the Happy Planet Index.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland suffered from poverty and famine. Today, these nations are invariably in the highest ranks not only of United Nations Human Development Reports but of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness reports. This is largely due to the fact that their norm became a more caring economics, a more caring society.

These nations have government-supported childcare, universal healthcare, stipends to help families care for children, elder care with dignity, generous paid parental leave. In short, they economically support caring work in both the market and the household. As a result, they have very long life spans, very low poverty rates, very low crime rates, and a generally high standard of living for all. They are also in the forefront of moving toward sustainable energy and invest a larger proportion of their GDP in helping people in the developing world than other nations.

They are not ideal nations, but they have moved farther than most contemporary nations to the partnership side of the partnership-domination continuum. They have more democracy and equality in both the family and the state. They have been in the forefront of trying to leave behind traditions of violence inherent in domination systems. For example, they pioneered the first peace studies and the first laws prohibiting physical discipline of children in families. And, in contrast to domination systems that subordinate the female half of humanity to the male half, they have a much more equal partnership between women and men. For example, approximately 40 percent of their national legislators are female.

As the status of women rises, men no longer find it such a threat to their status, to their masculinity, to also embrace more caring practices and policies. These nations also have a strong movement to disentangle masculinity from its dominator equation with conquest and violence, including a strong movement for men to take responsibility for violence against women and children.

Between child-battering, wife-beating, sexual abuse of children, rape, bride burnings sexual mutilation of girls and women, so-called honor killings, and other horrors, the number of lives taken and blighted by intimate violence worldwide are much greater than those taken by armed conflict. And yet this violence is still largely invisible.

Our job is to make it visible. If we really want a more peaceful world, we can’t just tack that on to a system that idealizes violence as “masculine” and devalues caring and nonviolence as “feminine.”

Building Cultures of Equity and Peace

Let’s join together and move into that second phase of the peace movement: that integrated phase that takes into account the whole of human relations, from intimate to international. Let us muster the spiritual courage to challenge traditions of domination and violence in our primary human relations – the formative relations between women and men and parents and children.

Let us work for systemic change, for the new norms that will enable a future where all children, both girls and boys, can realize their enormous human potentials for consciousness, creativity, and caring.

---

Riane Eisler adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from the speech she gave while accepting the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Dr. Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, and social activist best known as author of the international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future and The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies and is included in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers, as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King. Her website is www.rianeeisler.com.

Linda's Hearth ~~ Hopefully the Hearth-related meaning shines through this article!

A New Way ~ A Culture of Peacekeepers

BUILDING CULTURES OF PEACE: FOUR CORNERSTONES

by Riane Eisler
for Yes! e-magazine, posted Feb 11, 2010

photo © The Home Office April 201o

We stand at a critical point in human cultural evolution. Going back to the old normal where peace is just an interval between wars is not an option; what we need is a fundamental cultural transformation.

As Einstein said, we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them. If we think only in terms of the conventional cultural and economic categories—right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, capitalist vs. socialist, and so on—we cannot move forward. What we need is to look at social systems from a new perspective that can help us build not only a nuclear-free world but also the better world we so urgently want and need. I believe we must change our underlying social configuration: we must transition from a system of domination to one of partnership.

My Passion and My Work

We’ve been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love.

I was born in Europe, in Vienna, at a time of massive regression to the domination side of the partnership/domination continuum: the rise of the Nazis, first in Germany and then in my native Austria. So from one day to the next, my whole world was rent asunder. My parents and I became hunted, with license to kill. I watched with horror on Crystal Night—so called because of all the glass that was shattered in Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues—as a gang of Gestapo men broke into out home and dragged my father away. As a little girl, I witnessed brutality and violence.

But I also witnessed something else that night that made an equally profound impression on me: what I today call spiritual courage. We’ve been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love. My mother could have been killed for demanding that my father be given back to her; many people were killed that night. But by a miracle she did obtain my father’s release—yes, some money eventually passed hands, but it would not have happened had she not stood up to the Nazis. So we were able to escape to Cuba, and I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, because the Nazis confiscated everything my parents owned. And it was there that I learned that most of my family—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents—were murdered by the Nazis.

These traumatic experiences led me to questions most of us have asked at some time in our lives: Does it have to be this way? Why is there so much injustice, cruelty, violence, and destructiveness, when we humans also have such a great capacity, as I saw in my mother, for caring, for courage, for love? Is it, as we’re often told, inevitable, just human nature? Or are there alternatives—and if so, what are they?

We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect

***David Korten: "Those of us who choose to cooperate rather than compete are not fighting human nature. We are, instead, developing the part of our humanity that gives us the best chance, not merely for survival, but for happiness."***

These questions eventually led to my research. I found very early I simply could not find answers to them in terms of the old social categories (right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, capitalist vs. socialist, and so forth). These categories just look at this or that aspect of a social system, never its fundamental configuration. None of them answer the most critical question for our future: the question of what kinds of beliefs, values, and institutions support our enormous human capacities for caring, for consciousness, for creativity, for sensitivity—the capacities that are most developed in our species, that make us uniquely human—and which promote capacities we also have for cruelty, selfishness, and violence. Neuroscience teaches us that we humans are genetically capable of many different kinds of behaviors, but our experiences profoundly affect which of those genetic possibilities are expressed.

Connecting the Dots

I look for patterns, drawing from a large set of data that cuts across cultures and periods of history. It then becomes possible to see social configurations that had not been visible looking at only a part of social systems—configurations that kept repeating themselves. There were no names for them, so I called one the Domination System and the other the Partnership System.

It is in our primary human relations—within our families and friendships, the relations that are still not taken into account in most analyses of society—that people first learn, on the most basic neural level, as we today know from neuroscience, what is considered normal or abnormal, moral or immoral, possible or impossible.

If we are to build cultures of peace we have to start talking about something that still makes many people uncomfortable: gender.

If children grow up in cultures or subcultures where violence in families is accepted as normal, even moral, what do they learn? The lesson is simple, isn’t it? It’s that it’s OK to use violence to impose one’s will on others, both in intimate relationships and international ones.

I want to illustrate this with two cultures. One is Western, the other is Eastern; one is secular, the other religious; one is technologically developed, the other isn’t: the Nazis in Germany and the Taliban in Afghanistan. From a conventional perspective, they are totally different. But if you look at these two cultures from the perspective of the partnership/domination continuum, you see a configuration. Both are extremely warlike and authoritarian. And for both, a top priority is returning to a traditional family—their code word for a rigidly male-dominated, authoritarian, highly punitive family.

Now, this is not coincidental. Nor is it coincidental that these kinds of societies idealize warfare, even consider it holy. Neither is it coincidental that in these kinds of cultures masculinity is equated with domination and violence at the same time that women and anything stereotypically considered feminine, such as caring and nonviolence, are devalued.

I want to emphasize that this has nothing to do with anything inherent in women or men, as we can see today when more and more men are fathering in the nurturing way mothering is supposed to be done, and women are entering what were once considered strictly male preserves. But these are dominator gender stereotypes that many of us—both men and women—are trying to leave behind.

If we are to build cultures of peace, we have to start talking about something that still makes many people uncomfortable: gender. We might as well put that on the table; people don’t want to talk about gender, do they? But let’s also remember what the great sociologist Louis Wirth said: that the most important things about a society are those that people are uncomfortable talking about. We saw that with race: Only as we started to talk about it did we begin to move forward. We’re beginning to talk more about gender, and starting to move forward, but much too slowly.

This is important for many reasons, including the fact that it is through dominator norms for gender that children learn another important lesson: to equate difference (beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between female and male) with superiority or inferiority, with dominating or being dominated, with being served or serving. And they acquire this mental and emotional map before their brains are fully developed (we know today that our brains don’t fully develop until our twenties), so they then can automatically apply it to any other difference, be it a different race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Next page » 2

photo © The Home Office April 201o

YES! Magazine encourages you to make free use of this article by taking these easy steps. Eisler, R. (2010, February 10). Building Cultures of Peace. Retrieved May 23, 2010, from YES! Magazine Web site: http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/building-cultures-of-peace. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons License.

Linda's Hearth publishes PART TWO of this article tomorrow.

My Fav Poems and Very Short Stories, second column

me, 2008

TOTEM

My darling bobcat,
You darken my door again,
Lean, looking bewildered,
Talking like
we've always been together.

And you've simply returned tonight
From some hunting trip,
To show off your new trinkets --
a dripping brain,
a tired womb, or two,
pocket holes where you thought

your last quarter rested,

maybe a new mouth to feed --

whom you may never meet,

or not 'til the child is grown.



But it is winter now,

And you've been gnawed to the bone,

Scalped, slightly stewed,

Your batteries stolen,

Your whiskers frightfully white.



And you line your precious trophies

Along the steps to my door,

And when I've again licked well

Your new war-wounds,

You're stalking, out for more.



Mountain lion,

The hungry, lean smile,

Fast heart, faster feet.











(c) Linda Lemaster

September 11, 1992

about midnight, full moon coming





Foot Note -
Started this special collection, 'My Fav Poems and Very Short Stories,' with a simple song from Rumi about LOVE. I will enter favorite poems I've loved or I discover, no particular order beyond capacity. Suggestions welcome - click the blue "comment" spot below any entry. Most of my favorites are not those written (so called) by me; this one above is a good'un.

My Fav Poems and Very Short Stories, Number One in collection

early Picasso sunset

~ LOVE ~

The whole world could be chocked with thorns:

A lover's heart will stay rose garden.

The wheel of heaven could wind to a halt:

The world of lovers will go on turning.

Even if every being grew sad, a lover's soul

Will stay fresh, vibrant, light.

— Rumi

~~~

Welcome Earthlings! prayer

Welcome Earthlings!

Scopes Park, Photo by Linda Lemaster, 2007

Now today you say it's Earth Day A special holiday - no day off to enjoy said Earth, but lots of trinkets to show you've been there! Watch those footprints!

With your Soymilk Uplink
Facebook Similies
Corporate Smiley Green-Faces

(I heard the news today, oh boy)
"only seventeen percent of your toxic drinking water bottles getting recycled"

Now we're bad guys - now corporations tell us what is good and what is bad memory becomes obsolete
Our Own Story gets lost in the smoking clang of commerce
of success of Manifest Destiny
in the form of an open-bid contract
measurable objectives
of who can be the sleaziest
in the Game of Slide-In-Bye

War Mongers Dignified by their missteps, retired for bad training while their orders murder on
Intensive Care Veterans' hospitals mired in rats feces and mildew'd windows and lost records,
Our living heroes lost, alone
Philidelphia's ringing citizen democracy not dead yet
merely drowning
in the Roar of burning flesh, smeltered souls, and empires sold at auction
by banks
now rewarded for screwing their clients
in Spades

Walt Whitman, Benjamin Franklin would have to go underground, or to jail
if they visited today. Earth Day

We do not need to believe
To feel Her Ire
Her Lava is also my womb
My suffering is also her Pain
Her Oracle is the only true map to Life

We do not have to understand, just kneel down
and put our fingers past the dirt, feel the Life in this ground
Forget the parcel number and unhang from meridian logic
Breathe past the inTOXicated grasses, be careful in Her River's detritis accept Great Ocean's salient secrets
Quick, get to the Life of 'the thing', find your senses, awaken them
walk barefooted
while you still can

Great Mother
Just a Match in the Wind of God perhaps
For us
ever-embracing our enfeebled engorged Humanity
Her swirling Emerald Dress of Song and tragedy
into Her Divine Grace her Gaia children's Boat and Bosom

She is hearing our Song, even as we don't hear each other

We burn her Entrails, suck blood from Her Womb
as tho she were already cold
While demanding more More not even hungry just rapacious

Great Mother I give you my puny Earth Day

Your Oracle everywhere,
the den of sowbugs
the broken twig pictograph
the absence of bossy jaybirds, the lone tulip
even the stoplight flinch

Awakens me to Your Grace
Great Mother I give you back my Life

And you give me back my Song!





(c) Linda Ellen Lemaster . April 22, 2010
Brash Collection, prayer, "Welcome Earthlings"

THE HEMPEROR: GLOBAL CANNABIS COMMUNITY MOURNS PASSING OF JACK HERER

Jack Herer proudly shows off his hemp boxers!
At HempStalk in Portland, Ore., 2008.
Photo by Bonnie King

by Bonnie King, Salem-News.com
originally published Apr-20-2010, 04:20


Center stage is exactly where Jack Herer belonged. A talented, “bombastic” man, Jack’s energy was contagious and his legacy is alive and well.

(SALEM, Ore.) - Jack Herer was born June 18th, 1939, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York. In 1940 his family moved to Buffalo, where he was raised, the son of a collection agency manager. A “normal American nerd”, he grew into a respectable young man, joining the military, getting married and starting a family.

And then, at age thirty, he completely changed direction, becoming one of the very first American Cannabis activists, and inevitably the most world renowned leader for hemp education.

Jack didn’t start out as the “kind of guy” who smoked pot. He was a Goldwater Republican, in the sign maintenance business. In 1969, recently divorced, he was introduced to cannabis by a girlfriend. He wasn’t much interested in it before then, and after briefly trying it a couple of times he was fairly sure it didn’t “work on him”. Jack was therefore naive to the euphoric or medicinal properties of the herb. When he decided to really give it a try, he said he had the most incredible sex of his life.

That inspired him to learn more. What he learned, he shared.

Jack Herer spent the early 1970's in Venice Beach, California, where he re-established himself in the world by opening two head shops. In 1973, Jack published his first book, G.R.A.S.S. (Great Revolutionary American Standard System), and met his friend and mentor Captain Ed Adair.

Jack & Captain Ed
Captain Ed changed Jack’s life, bringing new enlightenment to what Jack had already learned, and sparked the flame that never dimmed from that point forward. Jack soon founded an organization named HEMP (Help End Marijuana Prohibition).

Jack believed that the cannabis sativa plant should not be illegal because it has been shown to be a renewable source of fuel, food, fiber and medicine, and it can be grown in virtually any part of the world. Jack was dismayed with the U.S. government, which he said hid the proof of these facts from American citizens.

Jack and Captain Ed formed the Reefer Raiders in Los Angeles. They spent the next twelve years assembling all types of information about the history, properties and benefits of cannabis.

In 1982, Jack was at a party and had the opportunity to outline the hemp story to Tom Rutherford, a state senator from New Mexico. The senator told Jack that if the facts were real and if they were put into a book, then pot would be legalized.

That’s all Jack needed to hear, and he went to work on The Emperor Wears No Clothes, which would become one of the seminal books on the history of hemp and marijuana prohibition, used by experts and laymen alike as an essential research tool and a catalyst in the advocacy to decriminalize cannabis since it was first published in 1985. Over 600,000 books have been sold, it is translated into a dozen languages and there is an online version available on JackHerer.com.

In 1988, Jack ran for United States President, (1,949 votes) and again in 1992 (3,875 votes) as the Grassroots Party candidate.

Described by close friends as “bombastic”, "tireless", and "inspirational", Jack spoke out as often as possible about the benefits of hemp, the medicinal uses of marijuana, and his deference to paying the government “one thin dime” for the privilege of using the herb. His impassioned message never faltered through the years, always ready to take on the unenlightened and share his vault of knowledge on the subject of hemp.

In 1990 he told Steve Hager of High Times, “Our leaders are acting like lemmings. I want them to legalize hemp and start cleaning up our planet right now. I don't want to wait 20 or 50 years for something to be done about petrochemical pollution. And they have to let the people in jail for drug violations out of prison today! And pay them back for attorneys, for bail, for losing their jobs and their property! Everything must be restored!!”

Jack determined that legalizing hemp would reverse the Greenhouse Effect, a direct result of burning fossil or old carbon fuels.

“There is only one plant that can completely substitute for fossil fuel. The plant is an annual that grows in all 50 states. It is the fastest growing sustainable biomass on the planet. It can produce paper, fiber, food, and fuel,” Jack said.

Jack and Captain Ed made a well-known pact, a pledge that is now a famous quote, one that strikes the heartstrings of those that knew them both.

In Jack’s own words: “In 1974-75, possession of under an ounce of hemp/pot was decriminalized in the state of California. Captain Ed was 33 years old and I was 34. Ed’s pledge that I took in 1974 and again in April 1980, 1986, and 1988, and finally in the hospital four days before he died in August 1991, was that we’d swear to work every day to legalize marijuana and get all pot prisoners out of jail, until we were dead, marijuana was legal, or we could quit when we turned 84. We wouldn't have to quit, but we could.” --July 15, 1998

Jack & 2008 Initiative
On August 16, 1991, Jack lost his partner Edwin “Captain Ed” M. Adair III, to Leukemia, Ed was 50. Jack remained resolute, and continued the quest for decriminalization.

the one and only Jack Herer.

In 1996 Jack assisted Dennis Peron in the passing of California Proposition 215, leading the way in the medicinal marijuana legality. A total of fourteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia have enacted laws allowing medical marijuana use, as of today.

A specific strain of cannabis was named after Jack Herer in honor of his work and is known around the world. The strain has won several awards, including the 7th High Times Cannabis Cup, the “Academy Awards of Marijuana”. Jack Herer was also introduced to the Counterculture Hall of Fame at the 16th Cannabis Cup in recognition of his first book, G.R.A.S.S.

The Emperor of Hemp, http://www.emperorofhemp.com, is a 1999 PBS documentary by Anita Roddick about the life of Jack Herer. It is considered by some to be one of the best pot documentaries of all-time, revealing the reasons why industrial hemp and cannabis were outlawed in 1937.

In July 2000, Jack had a heart attack and a major stroke while on stage at the World Hemp Festival in Oregon, resulting in long term rehabilitation for ongoing difficulties speaking and moving the right side of his body.

He recovered fairly well, and was back in action after three years. In May 2004, Jack revealed that treatment with the aminita muscaria, a psychoactive mushroom was the "secret" to his recovery.

Every year, Jack and his crew would travel thousands of miles making appearances, book signings, and speaking engagements at hemp festivals and other events. Jack loved to share his wisdom.

Jack also attributed much of his recovery success to Rick Simpson’s Healing Hemp Oil, which he hoped would receive the recognition deserved for its many medicinal uses. In 2008, Jack said that Rick Simpson’s Healing Hemp Oil had changed his life. Using the healing hemp oil healed the wounds on his legs from diabetic ulcers that he had struggled with for years. He also took it orally and said he experienced better muscle mobility. He recited case studies of cancer survivors and many more success stories. He couldn’t rave about it enough.

On September 12th, 2009 Jack said he felt better than he had in years and talked about his upcoming European tour with Rick Simpson. He was enjoying the Oregon sunshine, and the positive environment surrounding him at the HempStalk Festival while he visited with fans, and many long time friends.

September 12, 2009
Yet, later that day Jack suffered a sudden heart attack after speaking onstage. He was given CPR for over twenty minutes, and then rushed to Emanuel Hospital. He remained in critical condition for several days. About a month later, he was transferred to Avamere Rehabilitation Center where he made some progress, but was unable to fully recover.

Jack was released to his home in Eugene, Oregon in late March 2010 and passed away with his wife Jeannie at his side on April 15, 2010.

Jack is survived by his wife, six children, a brother, a sister, grandchildren, and a worldwide cast of thousands. He is loved from all corners of the globe, and will be greatly missed.

On that fateful day in September, Jack encouraged the audience to continue the fight, to see the initiatives through to success, not to bow down to undue influence, and resist the temptation to agree to pay the government to use cannabis. Jack was unyielding in that regard; he did not believe in taxation on any level.

Jack Herer has left the stage, but his message and his legacy will reverberate infinitely. The work he did was a gift to all generations, the foundation of a more enlightened social consciousness, and an example of what a man can do, when he puts his mind to it. And so it is. The fight must go on.

Jack’s last words to the audience, and to the world,
“See you next time!”

Jack Herer
June 18th, 1939 - April 15th, 2010
===================================================================
April 25th: Jack Herer's Memorial will take place on Sunday, April 25th at 1:00 at Eden Memorial Park - 11500 Sepulveda Boulevard, Mission Hills, CA 91345.

To read excerpts from The Emperor Wears No Clothes for free online, visit JackHerer.com

Photos courtesy JackHerer.com; Facebook.
===================================================================

Bonnie King has been with Salem-News.com since August '04, when she became Publisher.

AROUND TOWN -- This will be my occasional column about great events and cultural vitality --support free radio everywhere you can!

Come to the Party in costume, be a pirate.

FREE RADIO SANTA CRUZ celebrates 15 years!

101.1 FM

That's me by the middle mic, outfitted for the high seas. Because Free Radio Santa Cruz gave a great party. Included costume contest; bean counting for an alternative voting system and it worked quite well.

Me number two at pirate-looking!

Thanks for all those votes among folks and families of all ages. The musicians were all great. I'll review a bit further when I'm able to get more photos into this blogspot.

I do not attend very many public gatherings any more, because of this struggle due to environmental/chemical allergies all over the place. So far this year, I have been lucky, finding moments of community without perfumes and ammoniated kitchens and deisel exhaust and toxic food additives. The Pirate Radio Celebration at Kuumbwa Jazz Center earlier this month was one of those "lucky" events - safe for me. Fun.

I even danced a little bit. Happy Birthday FRSC 101.1 fm