February 8, 2007
The Forms of Denial are Many. . .
. . . and the Violence Goes On
By Stephanie Hiller
The women, about 20 of them, are sitting around a large wooden table in a beautiful, brightly lit room. There is one young man among them. The building in which they are sitting is beautifully designed, spanking new, adorned with plants and original artwork celebrating woman in her many forms. It seems like a center for the arts in a plush city. Instead, it is the Santa Fe Rape Crisis and Treatment Center.
The women are working on a fundraiser for this center and for the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families. Esperanza means "hope." Some of the funds from these events will also go to the FGM Fund in Africa to stop female genital mutilation.
The fund raiser begins this week with an art show and culminates March 8 in a production of Eve Ensler's famous Vagina Monologues, a play in which women talk about their experience of their vaginas skirting neither the pleasure nor the pain that surrounds this delicate organ, even including graphic detail of their sexual lives. It is at once hilarious and poignant, edifying and heartbreaking, for women's experience of their sexual identity is mixed, to say the least, and their joy is often overwhelmed with the deluge of their sorrows.
The women are pleased. They survey a beautiful poster of the first event, the art show, which meets the standards of artistic excellence for which Santa Fe is well known. They talk about the details of what needs to be done for the various events. They are working hard, and they are proud of their efforts, as indeed they should be. They are all volunteers except one, the executive director of V-Day Santa Fe. She does most of the talking. Half the women say nothing at all.
The young man is introduced by a fellow student. He says he is dedicated to bringing men together to stop the violence against women. There is no surge of approval, though of course the women approve. There is no discussion of the awesome responsibility men have to stop the violence. I am a visitor. I say, praising him, "Only men can stop the violence against women. We can protest it, but we cannot stop it." This comment elicits no response. They are busy. They are working on an event. It will raise money, so that other women, like this woman here from Esperanza Shelter will deal with the suffering of the abused and tortured women and children. Torturing women has been going on for a long time. These women are doing what they can to stop it. It has to be enough. They have done what so manywomen refuse to do: they have dared to care about women.
We help, but our own lives are undisturbed; we pray for our daughters and go on. We have no power to stop the torture, not really, certainly not by putting on an art show and a theatrical performance that will stir up women's and some men's feelings about what women experience. Certainly it will raise awareness, and that is important. It will wake some people up, but it will not solve the problem. To solve the problem we will have to go out into the streets, go into the halls of power, pour ashes over our heads and wail. We will have to do something women don't like to do: make demands. We will have to refuse sexual favors to all men until they make the unwavering commitment to censure the ongoing abuse of women and children. Perhaps we will have to separate ourselves and our daughters from all contact with men, and live in women's community. Chances are, we're not going to do that. We're going to hold an event and be grateful we have been spared. The people who attend the event will make their contribution; money helps, and giving money is a very simple way to assuage one's guilt.
The forms of denial are many. In Taos on Christmas I sat down to dinner with a half dozen New Age folk. For some reason I had the gall to mention that the United States is about to invest billions of dollars in new nuclear weapons under the proposed Complex 2030 program, and New Mexico was likely to be a key player. The woman across from me, who had introduced herself earlier as a medicine woman, looks at me straight on and says, "I don't believe they have any nukes."
I look at her.
"I think they've all been dismantled by the cassias," she says.
I don't know who are the cassias. I imagine they are creatures from outer space, or maybe they are divine spirits roaming the globe looking for nuclear weapons to dismantle, I am too shocked to ask. Finally, I say, "I'm from California. I've heard a lot of way out things, but that is the furthest out thing I've ever heard."
The conversation ends there. I leave thinking how amazing this is, that these nice people exploring the ways of consciousness and healing in Taos, "the soul of New Mexico," facing the great mountain that is said to intervene dramatically in people's lives, "spitting out" some of the newcomers and favoring others, that these soul seekers and spiritual adventurers could be so deceived as to imagine there are no nuclear weapons on the planet.
We go about our lives, as we must. Far away, Iraqi soldiers have been tortured by our military, civilians are yanked out of their homes or bombed to ashes within, streets and municipal offices of a once functioning though repressive government are reduced to rubble, American sons and daughters accomplish these feats. They kill and are killed, all in the name of freedom. Whose freedom, then?
We are supposed to stay positive. Who can be positive when so many suffer? If we are all truly one, not separate from one another, how can we be cheerful at the sight of 600,000 dead Iraqis?
I tell a friend in California, a peace activist, that I am worried about the coming attack on Iran. "Oh," she says blankly. "I try to take a positive approach." She is positive about her community TV show, her grandchildren, her poems about war. She is not going to worry about Iran until the bombs fall.
When the bombs begin to fall, it will be too late. It is always too late but this time it will be really too late. The bombs will be directed at nuclear facilities. Fallout will spray up out of the ground.
Nuclear bombs will be used. We are not going to have the mess left behind that we have now in Iraq, oh no. Better to decimate the place all at once, absolutely smash the thing to smithereens, like we did to Hiroshima, thereby, as we like to believe, "ending the war," when the war was already ended, Hitler dead and the Japanese about to surrender. We cherish our illusions dearly. George Bush and Dick Cheney have great illusions. They share the illusion that by destroying Iran and thereby impressing all terrorist insurgencies that they'd best not mess with the United States of America, they are going to bring peace to the world. They believe this, and so do their pals at the American Enterprise Institute. Got to get things under control. Can't get pussy whipped by some A-rabs. We'll show 'em what we are made of, what kind of men we Americans are. Turns out the freedom we hear so much about is their freedom -- their freedom to control the world's dwindling oil supply, their freedom won by conquering all the countries on whose lands the oil fields lie -- and anyone who doesn't like it be damned.
People will die, thousands of them. Thousands have already died. Thousands more will suffer. It will be "worth it," as Madeleine Albright said regarding the number of Iraqi children killed under sanctions. Babies will be born deformed. That has already happened wherever depleted uranium was used. Perhaps people will lose the ability to have children as is told in the new movie, The Children of Men. It will all be part of some divine plan … At a shamanism conference last month, a woman spoke about the willing sacrifice of those who died at the World Trade Center -- those souls who had agreed to give up their lives, as she put it, to wake us up. Didn't seem to do the trick. Another woman spoke about those souls who had willingly surrendered their lives in the tsunami. Willingly turned black and bloated in the poisonous waters of the Indian Ocean whilst their abandoned children wailed on the shore.
Denial has many forms and they are all more or less disgusting because denial allows the perpetrator to continue perpetrating whilst we go on with our knitting, clickety-clack, whilst we smoke another bowl or donate to charities to help those poor women who have been abused. Our denial has allowed, allows, and will continue to allow the destruction of the planet, causing more suffering, especially for humans, as floods wipe out Jakarta, hurricanes tear through Florida, snow piles up in Denver, entire islands become submerged under the tidal wave of "global warming" and starving refugees flood into already crowded metropolitan cesspools like Kolkata.
While we dream, while we meditate, while we change ourselves in preparation, one can only assume, for personal redemption at the pearly gates; whilst we fight battles over genetically engineered food (yes, it's important) and refuse to eat meat or milk or supermarket bread while half the world starves; whilst we dally and delay, the waters are rising, the earth is burning up, and instead of addressing the problem, governments take up arms against a sea of troubles and raise the temperature higher with a firestorm of radioactive depleted uranium and nuclear bombs, clearing away in one fell swoop the peasants who toil in the way of progress, the surplus population as Scrooge calls them (every year at Christmas!), the dirty brown-skinned "wogs" as the last great imperialists, the Brits, used to call everyone "east of Calais." We are just like our numb compatriots sitting in front of the television, beer can in hand, playing video games during every vacant moment lest they be tempted to think, or preoccupying their robotized minds with investments or insurance policies that will do absolutely no good in the fires of Armageddon, and neither will it matter which brand of new car they buy.
Yet there is still time -- not much, but some -- to avert the catastrophe that has already begun, a disaster of epic proportions that will be vastly expedited by a nuclear war in Iran but that is coming toward us anyway, slowly and inexorably, while we entertain ourselves with the vast array of diversions the modern flesh is heir to.
What can we do?
We can object! We can speak. We can write. We hold meetings. We can organize -- a march. A work stoppage. A fast. We can stop fooling around with all the other issues, important though they be, and devote all our extra energy to stopping the war on terror. We can prioritize all the problems that we face and deal with them later, once the most urgent and pressing threat to life on this planet -- WAR -- has been brought to a halt.
It can happen. We have to believe that a world without war is possible. What we believe, what we hold in our conscious awareness day after day, is even more important than what we do. By holding this awareness, that life without war is possible, we change the whole consciousness of which we are a part.
There has been too much war, for too long, and war has become only more heinous, more ugly, more threatening to life and planet. And in that rising horror of war is the hope: that we humans will finally realize a better way to live.
Believing that a world without war is possible, a world without violence against women and children, we begin to do truly positive things. We will start to insist that governments all over the world hear our plea. They are all the same, all capable of torture, all eager to rule the planet if only they could, all equally ready to stomp on the necks of the oppressed with their wrought iron boots.
Yet they are all human. They too want to survive. They too feel the impending catastrophe. This is an unprecedented moment, one in which there is only one choice, only one path to survival, only one victory, one goal: and that is to stop war and start working together to address the ills facing this planet, now, today, even if it's already too late, because we never can know the results of our actions until we try to fulfill the profoundest urgings of our own beating hearts, but we do know what's going to happen if we don't do anything.
We can do something, anything, because, as folks murmur cutely about growing old, "It's better than the alternative." We can risk our lives now for the chance -- the miracle -- of survival, or we can just lie down and die.
Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened Woman. This article is the second in a series on ending the global violence. The first essay, Machismo: Why the US Won't Pull Out of Iraq, may be found here.