Department Of Yet Another Reason Why I Love Norway
I have immensely enjoyed the times moiself has had the opportunity to travel to/around several European countries. Each of those times involved at least one embarrassment-by-association experience, wherein Some Otherwise Enlightened World Citizens ® that one finds in, say, a Rick Steves travel group feel compelled to bray about the high taxes of, for example, the Scandinavian social democracies. [1] This typically happens after visiting a country’s house of parliament or other such facilities: we visitors are chatting amongst ourselves, comparing and contrasting, say, Norway’s standard of living with that of the USA, and SOEWC will feel compelled to remind everyone how the people who live in those countries must pay “far too much taxes to *the government.*“
This triggers moiself and others to remind the braying ignoramous Ugly Americans SOEWC that, it’s the people of those countries, not some random/arbitrary “government,” who understand that the government is not some far away entity. It is them; it is *their* government. This is how they vote to collect and spend *their* money, on a system which runs on the premise (read: reality) that a higher standard of living for everyone benefits everyone. [2]
Why is it that so many folks in the USA seem to forget what they pay for later ( is it simply that, the timing? ) rather than up front? By not having a portion of their taxes fund a system of national health care they think they get to keep more money in their pockets; they have financial amnesia when it comes to what later flies out of those same pockets, sometimes seemingly at light speed, for medical insurance premiums and copays and care and medications and visits and “conditions not covered” and…and…and….
Fortunately, we have level-headed (if bemused by USA obliviousness on the subject) Norwegians to explain it to us.
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Department Of History To Keep In Mind
Several years ago I found this old employee status board in an antique shop. It’s currently in my office, keeping track of the comings and goings of my imaginary coworkers. These coworkers are people, real or fictional, whom I admire in some way. When the Cesar Chavez sexual abuse scandal broke, I reminded Mark about that board – I asked him to go into my office and take a look at it, and notice whose name was #7 from the top. [3]
I always thought Dolores Huerta was the un- (as in, lesser) sung hero of the farmworker’s movement. Little did I suspect what Huerta endured – what she felt she had to endure and keep silent about – for a cause she put above her own mental and physical health.
Amid the rush to cancel the memorials to Chavez’s name (and in some cases, rename them for Huerta), moiself offers this suggestion: how’s about we stop naming public facilities – from roads to recreation centers to parks and preserves – after people? Our idols *always* turn out to have feet of clay (or in Chavez’s case, feet of…festering ICK).
As for the legion of progressives who feel let down/betrayed by and disgusted with Chavez, I am almost one of them. But, not really, as in, not fully. And if you are, I ask you to consider…why?
Progressive male leaders were/are still…male leaders. Male leaders’ sexism in the 1960s-70s anti-war and civil rights movements helped motivate what has become known as Second Wave feminism, and was an open secret among activists of the times.
When Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee activist Ruby Doris Smith presented a paper on at a SNCC staff meeting on “The Position of Women in SNCC,” SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael infamously declared,
“The only position for women in the movement is prone.”
Decades later [4] a few SNCC members pointed out that Carmichael was known to be supportive of women activists; thus, perhaps what he said was a “bad joke” taken “out of context.” No matter what Carmichael’s intentions might have been, [5] that statement is merely one example of “the entrenched misogyny of 1960s activist movements, which prompted the feminist critiques of the New Left that would later develop into the Women’s Liberation movement of the 1970s.” [6]
This embedded misogyny was arguably/most blatantly on view during the Counter-Inaugural Protest, [7] a series of speeches and marches organized by the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. When antiwar activists and feminists Marilyn Webb and Shulamith Firestone tried to address the crowd about the realities of sexism outside of and within the anti-war movement, they were booed and sexually harassed by men in the crowd (including fellow/male activist leaders), some of whom hurled a memorable taunt revealing the true feelings of many male leaders re what place women activists should occupy in the movement:
“Take her off the stage and fuck her.”
How’s that for progressive leadership?
In the late 1970s I read an article [8] about (or by?) the feminist, “Lavendar Menace” and LGBTQ rights activist and author Rita Mae Brown, in which Brown discussed her involvement in the (then) nascent Gay Rights movement. When Brown spoke/wrote [9] about the threats and hassles she and other lesbian activists received from men, and what it was like was working alongside men in civil rights organizations, she used a phrase that has haunted me ever since. Moiself cannot now recall verbatim the first part of the phrase, but I’ll never forget the second. When asked to describe men’s reaction to lesbians’ participation in human rights activism, she said something about how the strait men tried to break our spirits (which was not unexpected), but that
“…the gay men broke our hearts.”
Gay women made the heartbreaking discovery that although gay men were their supposed allies in the struggle for civil rights, gay men were still, first and foremost, men. As in, they interrupted, talked down to, belittled or just plain ignored the women in the movement, took credit for their female peer’s ideas and activism, and expected the women to get their coffee, answer the organizations’ phones, and type the groups’ memos. One lesbian activist wrote that, when it came to dealing with men, women in the gay rights movement had even less power than women in the civil rights/anti-war movements, because in the former, “…since they (gay men) don’t have to pretend to be nice to us and respect us in order to fuck us, they don’t even pretend to.”
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Department Of Among The Many Things I Don’t Know…
This department title might scare readers into thinking, Holy crap – this is gonna be the longest blog post ever. Not to worry. [10]
Dateline: Two Tuesdays ago; 8 a.m.-ish; morning walk. As I pass by one of the two banks in Manzanita I look through the bank building’s side wall of windows. Moiself sees two people, sitting at what I presume are their desks. One has her arms wrapped around a coffee mug; the other is slowly flipping through the pages of…a report or manual of some sort? I find moiself thinking thoughts I do not typically entertain; that is, thoughts about banks, and the people who work in them.
* Are they called bankers, or bank employees?
*And what exactly is a banker versus a bank employee?
* Is a bank teller a banker – what constitutes being a banker?
* What is there even for bankers to do, now that people can do so much of what they used to do in their bank at the ATM, and/or online?
*Are those two bank worker/people I saw sitting there, looking forward to a great day of Exciting Bank Work® …or are they just sitting there, resigned with casual dread to their lot: “Great, another eight hours where I have to justify my existence, look busy look busy look busy…”
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [11]
“[On religious dogma] …It’s funny, I’ve always been told that peace comes through Christ. That leaving or letting go of my faith would lead only to guilt and sadness. But here I am, finding the truest joy I’ve ever known in all the places I was told not to look.”
( Author and audio book narrator Natalie Naudus,
quoting her own experience, in “Gay the Pray Away” )
* * *
May you never idolize leaders of any social movement;
May you never have to look busy to justify your existence;
May you find joy in all the places you were told not to look;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Ireland and Great Britain also came under fire for their respective nationalized health care.
[2] I appreciated, during MH’s and my RS tour of Ireland, the Canadian nurse who was able to enlighten the Some Otherwise Enlightened World Citizen who started dissing the Canadian system of (gasp) socialized medicine ( despite SOEWC never having any experiences with that system). Canadian nurse graciously but firmly corrected the blatant falsehoods and distortions SOEWC attempted to attribute to Canadian health care.
[3] They are listed alphabetically by their first names.
[4] This happened in 1964.
[5] He died in 1998 and so can’t defend (or admit) anything now.
[6] Excerpt, Bryn Mawr College Flexner Book Club Blog, “The only position for women in the movement is ‘prone’”, 10-27-11
[7] Washington, D.C., January 1969
[8] In Rolling Stone magazine?
[9] Again, I can’t recall if she wrote the article or was the subject of the article.
[10] Yet.
[11] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
