Today I read the headline story on cnn.com, yet another report of a school shooting . . . except this one was in a community closely related to my own (or at least the one I was born into). Amish and Mennonites are by no means one and the same (in fact, the Amish split from the Mennonite denomination because they felt Mennonites were adopting an attitude toward culture that was too liberal), but members of both faith communities have very close ties with one another--ties of blood and ties of community--and I am sure that the worshippers at my parents' church are very heartbroken over what has happened (and may even know some of the people involved).
This attack, of course, comes on the heels of another school shooting in which a man apparently molested 6 girls one by one before the police stormed the building--and a public scandal involving the actions of Congressman Mark Foley.
For me personally, however, the violence of the daily headlines only adds to the chaos. This past weekend, I received in my email (for the third time in as many weeks) a report of a female TCU student being raped on the outskirts of the university campus. No one knows the identity of the men who are responsible for these rapes (though the TCU police seem to have it narrowed down to two latinos in an SUV . . . which narrows it down to approximately several thousand people), but at a point when TCU's campus reconstruction efforts have torn up many of the university's lighted walkways, these reports are (for good reason) eliciting a lot of fear from the student body.
And what do all of these news reports have in common?
For one thing, all of them feature the same human response to pain.
It is not for me to evaluate the deeds, thoughts, and words of others--I am not God, and I do not even have the capacity to evaluate myself, much less anyone else. A man who forces himself on a woman--or anyone--for pleasure is certainly guilty of a greivous sin, against others but also against himself. However, this does not in turn allow me to pass judgment on him, to say that he is "wicked" or "psycho" or "a monster."
And yet that is exactly what our adversarial culture wants us to do.
Men like Mark Foley are all too often written off as "perverts," just as men like the school shooters this past week are written off as "maniacs," and the rest of us go on our merry way, never taking time to consider for a moment what deep social flaws might have driven these men to do what they did in the first place . . . and as "bleeding heart liberal" as that previous statement may have sounded to you, I want you to know one thing, ladies and gentlemen:
If we were to examine ourselves and our society for any flaws that might be contributing to the violence we see in the news every night, we would have the tools and the information we need to prevent it from happening again.
These incidents have something else in common as well: All of them reveal, to a certain degree, our unhealthy attitudes toward sex and sexuality.
I'm a big believer in the importance of love as a part of any sexual activity--I think that sex without love is a danger not only to the bodies of the people who engage in it but to their souls and spirits as well--but I also believe that in order to fully enjoy sex, one must fully understand oneself as male/female, or (more to the point) as masculine/feminine. We live in a society that does not teach young boys how to be men anymore, and this is a problem, because a boy who does not know how to be a man can be a very, very dangerous individual.
I wish I could give you a roadmap to cultural healing, to a place of reconciliation with who we are as sexual beings, but I am afraid that the ascendancy of a political-religious establishment dedicated to superimposing mid-20th century concepts of manhood and womanhood onto 21st century American men and women makes this roadmap impossible. What saddens me the most about these crimes is not that they happened but that a religious establishment bent on maintaining its hold on power will doubtless use them to justify its continued delineation of sexual "no fly zones."
Meanwhile, the pain-filled voices of victim and victimizer reverberate against each other in the wind . . . and we go on, pretending we can't hear them.
This attack, of course, comes on the heels of another school shooting in which a man apparently molested 6 girls one by one before the police stormed the building--and a public scandal involving the actions of Congressman Mark Foley.
For me personally, however, the violence of the daily headlines only adds to the chaos. This past weekend, I received in my email (for the third time in as many weeks) a report of a female TCU student being raped on the outskirts of the university campus. No one knows the identity of the men who are responsible for these rapes (though the TCU police seem to have it narrowed down to two latinos in an SUV . . . which narrows it down to approximately several thousand people), but at a point when TCU's campus reconstruction efforts have torn up many of the university's lighted walkways, these reports are (for good reason) eliciting a lot of fear from the student body.
And what do all of these news reports have in common?
For one thing, all of them feature the same human response to pain.
It is not for me to evaluate the deeds, thoughts, and words of others--I am not God, and I do not even have the capacity to evaluate myself, much less anyone else. A man who forces himself on a woman--or anyone--for pleasure is certainly guilty of a greivous sin, against others but also against himself. However, this does not in turn allow me to pass judgment on him, to say that he is "wicked" or "psycho" or "a monster."
And yet that is exactly what our adversarial culture wants us to do.
Men like Mark Foley are all too often written off as "perverts," just as men like the school shooters this past week are written off as "maniacs," and the rest of us go on our merry way, never taking time to consider for a moment what deep social flaws might have driven these men to do what they did in the first place . . . and as "bleeding heart liberal" as that previous statement may have sounded to you, I want you to know one thing, ladies and gentlemen:
If we were to examine ourselves and our society for any flaws that might be contributing to the violence we see in the news every night, we would have the tools and the information we need to prevent it from happening again.
These incidents have something else in common as well: All of them reveal, to a certain degree, our unhealthy attitudes toward sex and sexuality.
I'm a big believer in the importance of love as a part of any sexual activity--I think that sex without love is a danger not only to the bodies of the people who engage in it but to their souls and spirits as well--but I also believe that in order to fully enjoy sex, one must fully understand oneself as male/female, or (more to the point) as masculine/feminine. We live in a society that does not teach young boys how to be men anymore, and this is a problem, because a boy who does not know how to be a man can be a very, very dangerous individual.
I wish I could give you a roadmap to cultural healing, to a place of reconciliation with who we are as sexual beings, but I am afraid that the ascendancy of a political-religious establishment dedicated to superimposing mid-20th century concepts of manhood and womanhood onto 21st century American men and women makes this roadmap impossible. What saddens me the most about these crimes is not that they happened but that a religious establishment bent on maintaining its hold on power will doubtless use them to justify its continued delineation of sexual "no fly zones."
Meanwhile, the pain-filled voices of victim and victimizer reverberate against each other in the wind . . . and we go on, pretending we can't hear them.
posted by Brian Bly at 4:22 PM
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