Titanic Post

Recently, Dawn Provencher, Educator, County Chair of the Democratic Party,  wrote a letter to the editor quoting words spoken at an actual event where people were actually cursed at and spit upon by despicable people because they objected to health care reform and the person who made it happen.

In the lead up to the vote on health care, racist Tea Party protesters were spitting on and shouting the N-word at Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), an African-American lawmaker, while Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was spat on and slurred for being a homosexual.

Dawn did the right thing by reminding the readers of this newspaper that such historically charged and damaging epitaphs should not go unchallenged.  She did the right thing by reminding us all of why these words should never be spoken in anger or used to belittle other human beings.  She did the right thing by writing those words, and you did the right thing by printing them, because everyone should know that we as a community will not tolerate words that diminish the dignity of human being.

A media that is over-protective of its consumers by censoring certain words is not doing us a favor.  These words remind us that part of our society is still living in the past and may act again as they did in the past.  We don’t need protecting from words and ideas; we need to deal with the emotions that cause those words to be spoken.  These are Democratic values.

Originally published in the Alamogordo Daily News sometime in March of 2010.

In reply to Don Omey’s well written letter to the editor of the Alamogordo Daily News of May 2nd,  2010.  Published May 19, 2010.  I would like to make a few comments.

First, with a few exceptions, I agree and support the mission statement of the Otero Tea Party Patriots. What American wouldn’t want to “preserve the spirit of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights”, and want “limited [but adequate] government, [smart] spending, [equitable] taxation, advancing a [smartly] regulated market economy, holding elected officials accountable for their decisions and having them be responsive to their constituents.”?  Also, your objectives of educating the public on these issues, and teaching the public how to become citizen lobbyists are commendable.

My concern is that your education of the public and teaching the public how to become citizen lobbyists is not in the interest of American citizens but rather for the interests of your financial backers: Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, the principal organizers of the Tea Party Patriots movement and the Tea Party Express. These two lobbyist-run think tanks are well funded and provide the logistics and organizing for the Tea Party movement from coast to coast. The Tea Party Patriots is not a grass roots populist organization, but a top down astro-turf temple to conservative interests. (more…)

Being a V-Man is recognizing that we men are privileged. This means that we men often claim the privilege of being the head of our households – that we men sometimes claim the privilege of making financial decisions at home.  We are aware that men can claim a higher status than women. We are aware that if we are white, we can claim undeserved privilege over other races.

As a V-Man, I know that we were raised this way.  Our fathers and even our mothers passed this on to us by modeling what their parents had modeled to them. We see it in movies and on the TV and in our daily lives – everywhere.  As boys we are raised with the Four Basic Rules of Masculinity:¹

1. No Sissy Stuff!  Reject all things feminine.

2. Be a Big Wheel!  A bumper sticker put it this way: ‘He who has the most toys when he dies – wins.’

3. Be as sturdy as an oak tree!  What makes a man a man is that he is reliable in a crisis. And what makes him reliable in a crisis is that he resembles an inanimate object – a rock, a pillar, a tree.

4. Give ‘em Hell!  Give off the aura of daring and aggression. Take risks; live life on the edge.

The single greatest obstacle to women’s equality [and safety] is our behavior resulting from our sense of privilege.

You are a V-Man if you are a man who believes that women and men are created equal, that your role in a relationship is to help each other grow mentally and spiritually and to protect the women in your life from harm, that you understand your own gender and recognize and honor the feminine within you, that you recognize that power and status is not everything, and that being a man does not mean we have to resemble an inanimate object such as a rock, a pillar, or a tree.

We recognize that the differences between men and women are fewer than the differences within each of our respective genders.

A V-Man recognizes that most domestic violence involves male anger directed against their women partners.  Boys are not born to be violent, or to be superior to girls. These attitudes and behaviors are learned through stereotypes of what our society thinks it means to act and behave like a man.  V-Men know this and want to break that cycle.  Thank you!

Want to know more about gender issues? Interested in V-Man workshops?  Contact Peace and Justice of La Luz at pajoll@zianet.com — Visit our website at http://pajoll.org

¹ Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel

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