Sometimes these blog posts come together through a seemingly endless trickle of related thoughts and topics. I line up ideas and draw correlations as if when I stand back, I'll see the secret to the universe. In order to not get overwhelmed, I'll occasionally table a draft until I figure out what it's about.
One of those posts was Why Women Should Rule the World. I chose that title because it's provocative. When I mentioned it to a friend, she was horrified. "Are you REALLY suggesting that only women should be in charge?" It kind of tickled me, provocation successful. I suppose the title should be: Competition, Make Way For Cooperation. It started out like this:
As our world becomes increasingly interdependent, wealthier countries will have to spend more resources helping less fortunate nations. Their problems are our problems and we can no longer shut them out. We may find ourselves depending more on cooperation, not competition,to get us what we want. To bring about this change, we might consider more women in politics and positions of power.
Only 16% of our federally elected representatives are women. Nancy Pelosi, during her trip to Syria, asked for cooperation from the Middle East. Men compete, women cooperate, it's how we're made. Without women, without a balance in government, we just may destroy our world and ourselves.
A while back, Matthew Dowd, the strategist that helped get President Bush elected, defected from the Bush camp after six years in part because of his opposition to the war. In an interview with the New York Times, a deeply disillusioned Dowd called for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Not knowing what he'll do next, Dowd said “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.” He added, “I do feel a calling of trying to re-establish a level of gentleness in the world.” I thought this was pretty powerful, a (male) political strategist calling for gentleness in the world and wondering why aren't taking care of each other. Especially since it's been proven that altruism makes us happier than selfishness!
The problem with my argument is that it makes the presumption that women would behave like women in politics and business. And obviously there are also men who can bring this kind of balance to our leadership. What I was fingering my way towards was the idea that we have been living in a masculine society for a long time now: a society based on domination, crushing the competition, winning at the expense of another's loss, taking what we want because we can. This is the economic model that I keep referring to, that has to change.
It used to be that competition drove innovation but in the last several decades, competition has suppressed innovation of a certain sort. We have the ability to reduce our dependence on oil, but we don't. We have the ability to insulate our houses with natural materials to reduce our dependence on natural gas for heat and electricity for cooling, but, for the most part, we don't. Why? Because it's not in the best interests of the companies selling those products. Why, people always ask, isn't there a high-speed commuter train between LA and San Francisco, a very well-traveled corridor? Because the airlines are making a bundle ferrying people back and forth even though the flights dump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The earth is like the bank account of a very rich uncle that died and bequeathed everything to us. We don't know why we're so lucky but we never really stopped to wonder. We just got to spending! Everything we "make" is made of the earth. Humans don't MAKE anything (except babies), who are we kidding? We just TAKE and then sometimes do some stuff to what we've taken and say we made it.
We've been taking for a long time now, withdrawing large sums from the bank account, but we haven't put anything back (and what we do put back makes us poorer). Given the laws of economics, what are the chances that the bank account is unlimited? The environmentalists are saying the account isn't dry, but it's getting there. How about curbing our spending now? In fact, with so little dough left, we have to get pretty innovative to make it last or INVEST IT WISELY so that it can grow to make us rich again.
A while back I was puttering around on the web looking for the digital version of a National Geographic article about the Jamestown settlers who intentionally and inadvertently changed the landscape of the future United States dramatically. They esentially created a new ecosystem in a few decades. I was going to use it to illustrate the point that the reason we're in such hot water is because we can change our environment so easily and rapidly, which means we can also change it for the better in the same way.
But I found that it had already been described in a thought-provoking theology blog and I discovered something. There's a term for and a whole study of what I was trying to describe! It's called eco-feminism. It basically describes a "feminine" way of relating to the environment. If we think about little girls and boys, it's easy to see what this means. Boys want to smash hills and break branches and destroy things to make other things. Girls want to smell flowers and make pretty things from twigs already on the ground and relish in the beauty of nature. One looks at something and sees what they can do with it, another looks to admire and is inspired to preserve. (The Wikipedia description is really quite fascinating - and much better than mine - you should read it.)
I guess the reason it took me so long to publish this is that I couldn't figure out exactly what my point was. I think it's this. When I was in college, majoring in Women's Studies, it was pretty radical to say that sexism was the same as racism, or any kind of discrimination, marginalization or subordination based on a person's race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc. And now I find my world rocked by the idea that it's even bigger and broader that that. The subordination of nature - plants, animals, mountains, oceans, air - also stems from the same need for domination.
While we've seen huge shifts in our attitudes towards people of color and women in this country in the last century, but we've also seen how quickly our "enemy" can change from fascist to communist to terrorist. Why, we haven't been concerned about human rights violations in China for a long time now. Not since we became their biggest client. Last I time I checked, they were still communist. And a recent eye-opening article written by an female reporter working in Saudi Arabia illustrates that while we may claim to fight oppression in one area of the world, we're quite comfortable allowing it to continue in another as long as it serves our needs. Women not only are covered from head to toe in public, they must also be kept out of sight of men at all times because even completely covered, they are a distraction and a source of unmitigated agitation and temptation.
Obviously, turning the world away from a model of domination is a big move. A change that will not tolerate such inconsistency and hypocracy. In order to truly view mother nature as something to love, protect and live in harmony with, we will have to also do that for our fellow creatures - animals and humans alike.
