I've been in Florida during the George Zimmerman trial and got suckered into watching portions of it on TV.  It was on every major station so if you turned on the tv at any point during the day that was all you had to watch.  It was fascinating.  The prosecution did a totally piss poor job even to my untrained eyes, and the defense lawyer was a complete and total ass.  I guess that what they pay him to be but I just wanted to slap him. 

It was pretty clear that the prosecution hadn't managed to make their points or provide a coherent explanation on why George Zimmerman's acount of the night didn't make sense and even I would have probably had to return a not-guilty verdict on second degree murder based on the evidence presented.  The manslaughter charge should have been the initial charge and if they had done that they may have won that one.

But, as my daughter pointed out, the real lesson here was that it allowed me to find out which of my friends are racists. The conversations during the trial, and it really was a major topic of every conversation down here in Florida, gave insights into peoples' perceptions and fears of young black males that were so saddening and disheartening. Many of these people have never had a actual personal or friendly relationship with African-Americans, especially young men.  The young men who serve them at the local McDonald's are probably the closest they have ever been.  These white folks have no context except their longstanding belief that these kids and families are somehow different and dangerous and they firmly believe that Trayvon was a thug in training who had some kind of superpower that made George Zimmerman so fearful of him that he "had" to shoot him.  That's because these folks don't see that Trayvon was just like their kid, if their kid wore a hoodie and ate skittles and iced tea.

movie recommendation

Watched "Nowhere in Africa" on Neflix instant streaming tonight.  A German film from 2001, the original title was "Nirgendwo in Afrika".  It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for 2002.  I highly recommend it.  The advertised plot is that a German Jewish family flees to Kenya just before WWII to work on a farm.  Although critical to the film the real story is the difficult decisions that people must make in their lives. 

some things are forever

Overheard while sitting on the porch:

Two little girls walking by, one about six and the other eleven.  The older one asks the  younger, "What's your favorite TV show?"

The younger responds, "I like 'I Love Lucy'.  Have you ever heard of that?" and then she continues to provide a great synopsis of the show!

Lucille Ball is forever.

I used to love reading "News of the Weird" in the Washington DC City Paper.  Now all I have to do is read the Washington Post.

God is Opposed to Food Stamps?

GOP Lawmaker:  Rate of Pregnancies From Rape is "very low"

Some days you just can't win. 
Shake my head......

I guess I'm the neighborhood hippie

Recently we attended a neighborhood party and I was chatting with a long-time neighbor.  While discussing general stuff and kids, and grandchildren, etc. she made a comment, in response to my daughter's lesbianism, that our family had always been rather eclectic and avant garde.  This was not said in a bad way but was rather her way of understanding how I am so matter of fact about what my children do and have done.  Then I came home and read an article about grandparents not accepting their gay grandchild.  I realized how lucky I am that for my family, including grandparents and if still alive, great-grandparents, we never flinched at the choices our children have made. And it does make for an interesting family tree.

Read and discuss...

From Jezebel.com

Guilt Just Makes You Feel Guilty About Your Guilt

 Tracy Moore

I was going to ask you how often you, as a woman, feel guilty. But I don't have to, because studies have shown that you feel guilty all the time. At least once a day. And for the high-level worriers among you, the awful feeling in the pit of your stomach that you've yet again failed to do or be something better than you actually are can strike up to four times a day. That's a lot of sad trombones, ladies. What's our damage? Let's excavate.

In order to feel guilty all the time, a few components have to be in place: you'd have to feel enormous pressure to achieve an arbitrary benchmark. For women, that ideal no doubt, is "goodness." To be good. We are taught from an early age that we are nicer, kinder, sweeter, more compassionate, more delicate, more gentle souls. Spiritually nobler, sexually less tempted. This ideal of goodness, however, is at odds with our actual humanness, which causes untold levels of dissonance as we try to make our way through the world as people first, and women second, all while being so good.

Another component in place for guilt is that you'd have to believe your ability to be this thing you're supposed to be, in our case, "good," is entirely within your power, so that when you fail to hit the mark, you correctly deduce that it is your fault. So when you are treated badly, or skipped over for the promotion, or ignored, or worse, when crimes are committed against you, you search yourself for your own culpability.

In a Germain Greer piece over at CNN called "Guilt Poisons Women," she cites a Spanish study that found that women are "more susceptible to guilt."

Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

While some guilt is, of course, necessary for us to become "considerate, conscientious adults," on overdrive, it's a paralyzing anxiety that leads to real depression. And women tend to feel this at a much more significant level.

In the study, some 350 people were interviewed, aged 15 to 50, about their feelings of guilt about a variety of daily occurrences. Women, it turns out, cared a lot about hurting other people, whereas men felt guilty when they overate or binge drank, but not so much over things that actually affected other people who were not them.

The heightened worrying, it was concluded, led to a weakened defense system with fewer antibodies in their saliva, so that even when a woman was doing something she liked, it didn't make much difference if she was also fretting about what she should be doing instead. So much for escapism.

For many women, this becomes a kind of ever-present background anxiety over angering friends, forgetting a birthday, not being attractive, not being generous enough, and on and on and on.

Greer says:

Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require "educational practices and socializing agents" even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.

I doubt there is a woman among us who hasn't been told to smile more, be nicer, be more pleasant, make nice, play nice, share more and in general, sunny up whatever joint she happens to occupy. Certainly men are taught to be polite, too.

But you can't throw a friendly dart today without hitting a mixed message about "how to be" when you're a woman in terms of balancing other people's feelings with your own desires and goals. This very debate rages today over women in the workplace having to mix deference with determination in pursuing that corner office.

These lifelong messages of deference and greater sensitivity to others — some of which are incredibly useful, such as in the care of babies — combined with the pressure to achieve on equal footing with men, are a perfect recipe for guilt. It can become so ingrained in women to consider others at all times, that healthy activities that promote well-being that (may) serve only us, whether getting a master's or masturbating, can be loaded with guilty feelings of self-indulgence.

And this goes back further than our collective childhoods. Women have historically been handed a swirling cauldron of mixed messages about their "true nature," and it is almost always one of perplexing duality as viewed through man's eyes: we are pure, but evil, spiritually superior, but a gateway to sin. We are noble, but we have to be, since we're lower forms of life. Even our ability to carry children has been viewed with great awe and greater suspicion. Viewing ourselves through this distorted kaleidoscope of femininity as defined by others has not made it easy to become fully enfranchised human people, particularly when we are still fighting for the concrete laws and protections necessary.

In my view, the problem of women's guilt is precisely that gap between being "female" and being "human," when the very definition of feminine still comes heavily burdened with implicit or sometimes explicit instructions on the care and concern of others, and always, about how you come off and look. There is nothing in connotations of maleness per se that suggests a similar kind of reflexive, selfless concern. (Saving people is one thing; caring for them quite another.)

Sometimes it seems as if we decided collectively that women could join men in equality, but only if we promised to still be nice. Being "tough" — like men — while still feminine, as in pleasing, deferential, is still a recipe for success, even when the femininity is the very argument being used to keep us out of the things we want into, whether it's the military or the boardroom. Doing otherwise is seen as impractical.

But in a world where the blame for men's crimes still lands squarely on women's shoulders, "nice" feels like a suffocating mask. Or worse, it's massive scapegoating.

And Greer sees the cost of this scapegoating as a major impediment to women's true equality:

Women feel more guilt than men, not because of some weird chromosomal issue but because they have a history of being blamed for other people's behavior. You get hit, you must have annoyed someone; you get raped, you must have excited someone; your kid is a junkie, you must have brought him up wrong.

Any victim of sexual offenses who denounces the perpetrator should incur no shame. But she does. And to conceal the identity of a victim of a sexual offense, which is routine, is to endorse this profoundly misogynist prejudice. Until women feel free to identify offenders without shame, the wounds inflicted on them will remain unhealed.

Those wounds have been unhealed for a long time already. It was St. Jerome who allegedly said that women are the root of all evil, but St. Clement of Alexandria totally had his back when he said that the "consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame."

What is shocking about that is not that some misogynist dudes from the single-digit centuries — venerated Saints, no less — thought women were intrinsically shitty and ought to know it, but that women still suffer gravely from these attitudes to this very minute. Says Greer:

For example, the Indian gang rape victim who was given the International Women of Courage Award by the U.S. State Department on International Women's Day recently is known only by a collection of sobriquets, of which the popular favorite is "Nirbhaya," or "Fearless."

No member of her family was present at the ceremony to hear U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry say fatuously that there would be "no more stigma against victims or survivors" when he had perpetuated that very stigma by refusing to reveal Nirbhaya's identity.

Why can we not know who Nirbhaya was? Because to be raped by a gang of drunken goondahs is to be dishonored. The stigma extends to her family, her community and even to her university. She has been honored because she did the decent thing. She died.

She is not around screaming for justice; she is dead. Her achievement is to be a victim. When the Obama administration hooked its wagon to the star of a sex martyr, it did little for the women who endure humiliation and stigma every day.

And so we go on with our lives of continual apology. Greer says that, "Until women themselves reject stigma and refuse to feel shame for the way others treat them, they have no hope of achieving full human stature."

This is important, but easier said than done. And we cannot lay this at entirely at women's doorsteps. Feeling less guilty, while critical for women to behave as free people in pursuit of their own autonomous, emotionally healthy lives, still won't single-handedly change the compulsion for men and society to tell women what they are like, or how they are to behave, or to blame them as victims. But greater sensitivity from men for women to define themselves on their own terms could prevent all this from happening in the first place.

Image by Jim Cooke