My 2 Cents on Our Current Events.

Today it was Matt Lauer.  Before today, it was Kevin Spacey.  In the past few weeks, the #metoo movement has taken off.  It seems the last straw broke the camel’s back and women have had enough.  I have heard and read comments ranging from admiration for women’s bravery for speaking out to blaming and shaming other women for waiting too long and accusing women that they are only going on a witch hunt.  My heart is saddened.  I have daughters and a son who are watching this play out.  I wish I could blind their eyes and cover their ears to all this ugliness, but hiding the truth is exactly what led us to the place we are now.

I have my own stories of sexual harassment.  I had a professor at a prominent university who sexually harassed most of us female students.  For me, it was groping my pregnant belly and telling me how sexy pregnancy made me.  To others, it included sexually explicit text messages.  Accusations were brought before the Dean and he was “punished.”  He kept his tenured position but was no longer allowed to advise students (a critical part of his job.)  The message to us – our experience did not matter.  He made money for the school.  The administration will overlook his indiscretions.  We women would just have to deal with it.  And it was swept under the rug.  But it was not okay then and it is not okay now.

We need to be having conversations about power and privilege.  Until we address this, until we can really start talking about it, women will continue to be sexually harassed, human trafficking will continue, racism and discrimination will continue . . . these cycles will continue unless we make a conscious effort as a society to change it.

My oldest wanted to be Donald Trump last year for Halloween (before he was President Trump.)  And then the Howard Stern recordings hit the news and I told her despite her fantastic impression of “Making Halloween Huuuuuge Again”, I could not allow her to represent him.  Perhaps if he had owned his words and made amends, our conversation would have been different, but instead he chose to continue to bully and justify his actions.  This led to a deeper conversation about objectification and what it means when we forget to see people as our fellow human beings and only look at another as something to possess.  We had a history lesson on slavery and the Holocaust and the awful truths that come when we fail to see another in their humanness and lose our ability to hold all life as sacred.  When humans feel entitled and fail to keep their power in check, tragedy lurks.  The Nazis were ordinary German citizens; slave owners were businessmen and women, but their power went unchecked, they dehumanized those whom they held power over, and unspeakable abuse occurred.  For a more recent history lesson, read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment where ordinary college students in a matter of hours became sadistic “prison guards” toward other innocent college students playing the role of prisoner.  We all have the ability to both nurture and destroy one another.

When we fail to really listen to one another, we are quick to bully, blame, and judge.  Life is complicated.  One of my favorite concepts I learned in high school from the great Mr. Watt was ETHNOCENTRISM.  The world is right only from my perspective.  Again, this speaks to privilege and our difficulty at having real conversations with real people.  Privilege is another tough conversation I have with my own kids.  As we drive through “ghettos”, my kids will ask if these are bad neighborhoods.  They notice the bars on the doors and windows and the trash littered streets.  Then we talk about what it would be like to live in this neighborhood; what it would be like to go to the local school as we drive by the rundown playground.  Do they think they are equal to the school they go to?  Do they think the neighborhood is a place where the children can run and play freely outside?  The answer is sadly, no they are not equal.  But we are quick to blame these neighborhoods for all the cities violence and drug problems.  We are quick to blame them for being needy on the system; for using up tax dollars of the “hard working people” so they can sit around and be lazy on welfare. 

Back in my therapist days, I had a young boy as a client.  He lived in an apartment with both his parents who both had jobs.  There was a lot of violence in his neighborhood – gun shots were common, and in one incident, a bullet went through his bedroom wall.  This kid could not sleep.  And when one does not sleep, one falls behind academically.  And when one falls behind, one will either act out or give up.  This kid was giving up and at 10 years old had suicidal thoughts.  His family was doing the best they could, but they were locked into a lease and moving was not possible.  They were going to have to live with the constant fear and a little boy too afraid to close his eyes at night.

But we as a society don’t want to have these conversations.  I gave up on the major network news stations when a morning headline was about a Kardashian and a few stories down in an “oh by the way” was an account of the Syrian civil war and the thousands that are dying.  I flashed back to a conversation I had with my great-grandmother showing her pictures from a trip I had taken to Dachau, a German concentration camp.  In all sincerity, she did not believe that 6 million Jews were killed along with another 4 million Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, and other unwanted types.  But the 1940s, news in America did not focus on the atrocities then, and we are quick to bury our heads in the sand now.  We don’t want to feel uncomfortable.  We would rather numb ourselves to tragedy.  But these patterns will continue to repeat themselves until we start having real conversations using our active listening skills.

Maybe the #metoo will lead to other “revolutions” that confront the long patterns of power and privilege in the sexual abuse/harassment arena.  Black Lives Matter has sparked conversations about racism and discrimination.  Unfortunately, what I mostly see is more division and blame.  My hope is that we will rise above and start having real conversations that lead to healing.