Texas shooter targeted and killed a young woman who stood up to him because he was harassing her. Now tell me again how women should just be more empowered and tell men off when they do or say inappropriate things? Tell me again how women are"playing victims"? I am sick and tired of this shit. Almost every single one of these shooters has some history of domestic violence and misogyny. Hey, I have a radical idea! Let's start there!
Dennis C. Lee
At first, Sheila, I didn't want to take part in this conversation. I am, after all, a man and didn't care to be a part of what, on the surface, appears to be yet another #metoo, male-blaming rant. Or worse, I could be accused of 'man-splaining', a term I've seen in radical
philologist attitudes.
But then I thought about it. I thought about it as expansively as I could, not in finite, personal, cultural or societal terms, but in Eternalist terms, the most expansive terms possible, and I think you're right.
The misogynists will claim that some sort of love corrupts men, guides them to perform horrific acts of violence towards women. Love and in the case of the Texas shooter, a demand for respect. But these acts of disguised passion have the same objective the slave owners of the South, and their lackeys the KKK had; to desire to possess and control others in order to service their egos. 'Passion' becomes their excuse 'I LOVED her so much, I couldn't help myself.' And too many of us go about our business and say nothing, or simply think 'well, that's the way of the world'.
Case in point; the wife of a man whose pathological profile matches that of a wife beater is taken to the hospital for a sudden bruise to the kidneys, and not a word of suspicion is raised. The woman is famous in part because she has rarely been seen smiling, appears to be a distraught and somewhat unhappy person, yet a few days before her hospitalization photos of her smiling broadly and sitting next to her husbands' sworn enemy were in the press.
You're right. No more turning of a blind eye, no more silence. We will call it out. No more excusing hatred as mere passion or ego-centrism as self-esteem. The future will probably continue to be violent, sorry to say, because the balance of dynamics in human nature, which includes denial, will grow as exponentially as the population. But here in the present we can realize it does not have to be that way. By speaking out, with compassion and vision, we CAN move the fulcrum of those dynamics to a more peaceful and sane place.
