Another Day, Another Newtown: The Obscenity of Gun Violence

When news of another school slaughter broke, this time again in Texas, the bile that rose in my throat was as bitter as the memory of Columbine, Newtown, Parkland – and the other grievous incidents of gun violence in schools – all 554 of them since Columbine, as NPR has reported.

From the Carolinas to California, 27 school shootings are among the 200 mass shootings this year alone in America, and it’s only May.   But this is not a time for numbers. It is a time for unprecedented action borne of rage about what is happening in our country. It is also time to answer burning questions: why is it happening, and what are we going to do about it? It is a time to shout our disgust and dismay, to demand gun legislation now, and to take action to end the slaughter of innocent children.

Here is what I believe must happen NOW. All living presidents (with the exception of Donald Trump) should stand together before Congress and declare that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We are done with the platitudes that surround grief and loss. We are done with inaction, and with turning the other way because political power is more important than loving our babies, especially among those who champion fetuses but ignore the needs of living children.

Go on strike because that is what it will take – teachers, clergy, workers, moms, women and men alike. Call for and participate in a national strike against violence and the insanity of mass murder. Bring down the economy as well as the evil that prevails on Capital Hill if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Call it what it is: a public health epidemic, not a gun violence or mental health issue.  We can and must learn the lessons of pioneering health communication campaigns, including, against all odds, the successful fight against the tobacco industry, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and demonstrated that people are capable of change.

It is vital for Americans to vote, this year and in 2024, with all the energy a soul can muster.  Stand in line for days if that’s what it takes to be counted among the family of humankind, and the families who must now endure unimaginable and unending sadness.

Most importantly, Americans who want the massacres of innocents to stop must demand an end to the filibuster and lobby for killing the Second Amendment -- the only way to halt the madness we’ve grown used to. Forget appeasing the irresponsible, vicious right wing with calls for limited legislation; go for the one thing that can stop gun violence faster and more conclusively than anything else -- an end to an irrelevant and antiquated amendment written before bullets and rifles that tear bodies apart in seconds were invented.

I believe that what lies at the heart of the tragic problem that is ours alone among developed countries is this: We are a nation wedded to violence and we always have been.

From the time white men first set foot on American soil guns have been used in genocides to eliminate non-white Native American peoples. During slavery guns were a way (along with physical punishment) to ensure forced labor and to instill terror among human beings who were bought and sold. Throughout our entire history guns have been part of our increasingly lethal war arsenals and today the sale of weapons in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, while the people least likely to be killed by a bullet are made exceedingly rich.

Killing, it appears, is in our DNA. Mass murder has come to define us, whether through war, incarceration, racist law enforcement, the consequences of ignoring poverty while clamoring for personal and financial power, and random gun violence. All of it results in deep-seated human pain in a nation that is “exceptional” in all the wrong ways. We must end our killing fields if we are ever to have pride in a country that asks us to pledge our allegiance.

We have become a country in which the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appears at NRA’s convention, held in Texas, three days after 19 children were brutally shot to death there, a country where a former president who tried to overthrow an election, and a Senator from Texas who thinks we need more guns, join the governor. It is a country that exposes the personification of evil and reminds us how often scum rises to the top.

So I say this to Governor Abbott: Have you, at long last, no decency? And to Ted Cruz I say: You are not sorry. You are guilty. You have colluded with mass murderers. May the words spoken to me by a 4-year old child ring in your adult ears for all eternity: “Sometimes sorry is not good enough.”  As for Donald Trump, there are no words.

To all the others akin to these monsters, I say only this: We condemn your evil. We will inscribe your names and your deeds and your selfishness in the world’s history books, and we will celebrate the end of your cruelty for all our days.

The Re-Victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

The Re-victimization of Sexual Assault Survivors

She was 24 years old when she unintentionally killed her stepfather as he attempted to rape her. She had been sexually assaulted by this man from the age of seven. If she told anyone, her abuser said, he would kill her mother.

Her name is Teresa Paulinkonis and she was 57 years old when she walked out of a state prison in California in March, her sentence of 25 years to life having been commuted by the governor.

Charged with premeditated murder, she spent 30 years of her life as a prisoner. During that time, she earned an Associate’s degree, wrote a memoir, taught classes, counseled others and successfully advocated for incarcerated women, including teenage women sentenced to life without parole for killing their abusers. In effect, she became a self-taught “prison lawyer” as women like her are known for helping gain the release of other incarcerated women. Prison staff have attested to her contributions as a model prisoner.

It has been a long journey for this woman of faith who is smart, compassionate, skilled in advocacy and trauma recovery, and perhaps most of all, patient. I know this because I have journeyed with her all those years, first as a correspondent, then as a friend and later as her liaison with dozens of women in her international support group. Although my friend and I have yet to meet face-to-face, I know the facts of her case and the makeup of her character.

I also know how she has been treated by the both the legal system and the prison system, both of which re-victimized her repeatedly in various ways.  I know how she persevered as she was denied parole three times, refused an appropriate retrial because perjury was committed during the first trial, by a judge who labeled her a “sociopath” because she told her story calmly. “Too practiced,” he said. “I don’t believe her.” It had taken her almost 25 years to be able to do that as she grew from victim to survivor. I know how strong and resilient she has had to be, and I know how broken and punishing the systems and institutions are that she has had to experience.

As she began the next phase of her life in which she hopes to be of service to other incarcerated women, she was once again re-victimized, this time by the media who reported on her commuted sentence.  Without seriously researching the facts of her case and relying solely on the language of the governor’s commutation and old court records, various press reported her release in a way that made her seem monstrous. 

She was described as a woman “convicted of bludgeoning her stepfather to death” as he watched TV. Relying on records of her trial in which a hostile relative committed perjury, to which he later confessed, she is said to have poisoned her stepfather, “according to authorities.” That never happened. Quoting the governor’s commutation statement which made no reference to sexual abuse, the media referenced “clemency that does not minimize or forgive her conduct or the harm it caused.” Not one word about the context of the crime. Not one word about her contributions in prison. Not one word about how many people have praised her character and fought so long and hard for her release.

For the advocates and lawyers working tirelessly to address sexual assault issues, prison deprivations and punishment (including sexual assault), and powerbrokers in the courts, prisons and other seats of power and misogyny, where largely white, privileged, uninformed male powerbrokers, who have absolutely no idea about women’s lives reign, it is sad, and maddening, to witness media adding to the re-victimization of abused women.

Those in a position to pass judgment, make assumptions, toss around unempirical psychological jargon, or do sloppy work make “bad trouble” as the late John Lewis might say. Whether lawyers, judges, doctors, jailers or reporters, most of them know little to nothing about the realities of sexual abuse, its prevalence, or its resultant lifelong trauma, and they show little inclination to learn. The fact is, sadly, they are often among the abusers women fear, and fight back against in order to survive.

For incarcerated women survivors of sexual assault like my friend, who are released from long years in prison for killing their abusers, walking out of prison does not always mean walking free. For my friend and many other women like her, the journey continues.

(A full--length feature of this commentary first appeared on Salon,com)

ME TOO: Who Among Us Doesn't Have a Story to Tell?

She was an exceptional legal secretary, a regal beauty, and an independent woman who repeatedly tried to ignore her boss’s advances.  One day, upon his return from a foreign business trip, he presented her with a string of French pearls and a litany of love. It was the 1930s so the secretary saw no way out but to quit her job. That woman was my mother.

She was a motivated professional who took her work seriously.  The first time it happened she worked for a medical board that certified physicians. At a formal dinner one evening, a doctor rubbed his hand up her leg under the tablecloth. She pushed it away. Later the doctor invited her on a trip to the Caribbean. She rebuffed him.

The next time, she was working in a different city when, standing next to her seated boss as he reviewed a document she’d handed him, he put his hand up her skirt. She slapped it away.

The time after that, she was on assignment in another country. Her work finished, she approached the local director to say goodbye. He grabbed her, kissing her on the lips.  Repulsed, she pulled away. But once again she told no one, because it was a time when women didn’t speak of sexual harassment or sexual assault, there being no words for it She was silent because she didn’t want to lose her job or be accused of “asking for it,” and she knew nothing would be done about it anyway.   That woman was me.

It isn’t necessary to cite other times it happened to me because by now everyone sort of gets the picture.  And I was one of the lucky ones: I was never raped.

Now, thanks to a growing number of brave, bold, truth-telling women, we are finally talking about the rampant sexual assault and harassment taking place in just about every workplace you can name. We are naming names. We are outing a pervasive culture of sexual abuse that exists in this, and most other cultures. We are refusing to be complicit via silence, choosing now to raise our collective voices in order to press charges so that we can put an end to the madness of male power and its concomitant sense of entitlement.

We thought Anita Hill’s dignity and truth-telling all those years ago might have been the beginning we see now, but it didn’t happen then.  Thankfully it’s happening now, because of a growing cadre of women who will no longer submit to second-class status, silence, or male prerogative.

Many of those women now hold public office. But they no longer hold their tongues. By telling their stories in the halls of power, they are starting to bring down men who insult them, trivialize them, accuse them of being liars and sluts, physically assault them, and once made them feel small and afraid.

There are men standing with us now too, taking up the fight against sexual harassment and abuse. Perhaps they heard playwright Eve Ensler when she said, “I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us?” To those men, we say, it’s about time, and if they really kick in, thank you.

Rob Okun is one of them. He is a writer and psychotherapist who edited a collection called Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.  In a recent blog on www.counterpunch.org he wrote, “For decades, men who have never battered or raped would offer excuses for not standing up for women who faced harassment – and worse – offering this lame rationale: ‘I don’t engage in these behaviors, I’m a good guy, these are women’s issues, not mine.’ Those days are over. Sexual assault is not a women’s issue; it’s a community issue, and men, ready or not, we have to break our silence.”

In his piece, Okun credits women with “dragging domestic and sexual violence from society’s shadows” as they created rape crisis centers and shelter for domestic violence survivors. He credits the few men who stood with them initially as allies while coming to grips with their own passivity in the face of violence against women. He calls upon more men to act. He also calls out Donald Trump, who “has yet to pay a price for his sexual assaults.”

The work of Okun and other men working independently and alongside women is encouraging. But like gun violence, the problem of sexual harassment and assault will not simply disappear. It will take concerted group effort, and individual brazen acts. It will require telling our stories. It will take laws and enforced regulations in various workplaces. It will call for zero tolerance.

Can we get there in the age of Weinstein, Spacey and Trump?  As one good man said not long ago, “Yes, we can!” But only, it seems, if we raise our voices, tell our stories, press charges, and vehemently declare Enough!

Revisiting "The Banality of Evil"

In the midst of troubling times that include torture, police brutality, sexual abuse, and other acts of violence I happened to be reading about the German-born Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, best remembered for her phrase “the banality of evil.” 

Arendt was writing about Adolph Eichmann after having covered his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 when she wrote those words. “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which first appeared as a five-part series in The New Yorker, was considered a “masterpiece” by many and is still widely studied and debated. It also continues to spawn vivid controversy about the meaning of her words and thoughts, which some consider to be wrong theoretically while others call them outrageously anti-Semitic.

What people thought – not about her but about how to live their lives – is a loaded word in the context of Arendt’s work.  Thinking – being a sentient human being - was central to Arendt’s thesis that Eichmann was not only “monstrous” but “terrifyingly normal.” In an attempt to explain intellectually the horrific times in which she lived she posited that Eichmann acted devoid of critical thought as much as ideology or other sinister factors in his character.  He was, she suggested, not very different from multitudes of others whose behavior may not be as hideous but who are all too willing to act without compunction, whether to succeed or to survive.

Arendt wrote later that she was “struck by a manifest shallowness in [Eichmann] which made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.  The deeds were monstrous, but [Eichmann] … was quite ordinary, commonplace…”  Eichmann was, she had said, “a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

While Arendt may have been wrong about Eichmann in terms of his capacity for evil, her argument that ordinary people can be brutal seems to stands up.  As Yehuda Kurtzer pointed out in a November Times of Israel blog, most Germans went along with events that led to the Holocaust.  Even Jews assisted the SS to buy time in their own lives. Later, decent men bombed North Vietnam because they were unquestionably following orders from what Arendt called “desk murderers.” 

In Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt, Kathleen B. Jones writes that what troubled Arendt most “was how many others were like [Eichmann] – terrifyingly normal, banal perpetrators of evil. What had happened, Hannah wondered, to make so many people thoughtless?”

After reading Eichmann in Jerusalem Jones wrote, “If I’d been born at another time, in another place, I could have been an Eichmann,” not because of any similarities in their lives or characters, but because of “the uniquely ordinary tale Hannah wove out of the facts of Eichmann’s life…I began to see I could no longer be certain I’d not only know the right thing to do but would do it.”  She continues: “I began to think the Eichmanns among us exist because the world has changed and there are no longer any simple formulae distinguishing right from wrong to turn to when we’re confronted with something unexpected. We have to decide all on our own what we should do and what we might have to risk doing it.  Thinking demands a burdensome kind of vigilant, imaginative observation of the world. Maybe that’s why many people prefer to avoid it.”

In a society in which police can shoot unarmed children and choke a man to death for selling cigarettes and not be indicted maybe we need to think about what Hannah Arendt was trying to tell the world.  When one out of five female college students is sexually assaulted on campus, when military women can’t report sexual abuse for fear of retaliation, and when famous men are alleged to have drugged and raped numerous women whose stories are doubted perhaps we need to think about how easily cruelty can enter our lives.  When politicians with an extraordinary lack of insight, compassion and intelligence can condone torture and legislate against ordinary people and when the ultra-wealthy spend untold amounts of money to buy those politicians, maybe it’s time to think about how quickly so many of us acquiesce and collude. Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves if this is a time to think again about “the banality of evil”?

In 2013, writing about “The Banality of Systemic Evil” on The New York Times Opinionator blog, Peter Ludlow made the observation that Hannah Arendt was making “a statement about what happens when people play their ‘proper’ roles within a system, following prescribed conduct with respect to that system, while remaining blind to the moral consequences of what the system was doing – or at least compartmentalizing and ignoring those consequences.”

It’s an observation that seems eerily prescient, and one that makes me suspect Hannah Arendt got a bad rap when what she was trying to do was simply make people think about some of the most urgent issues of the times in which we live.