Traditional Insanity and the Insanity of Tradition

Once again, a woman has been convicted of insanity for killing her children. This time, she drowned each of them, one by one, in the bathtub. It is difficult to determine if these type killings are occurring more often or if it is simply that we hear of them more frequently. One thing we rarely hear, however, is anything about the husband’s complicity in the crime. Nor, do we ever hear anything about the possibility of society’s complicity.

The question that is never asked or answered in these proceedings is whether the woman was insane because she killed the children or if she was insane because she acquiesced in having them in the first place. Or, perhaps, was she insane because she got married? Far too often, otherwise normal people take the traditional road – the road laid out by parents, religious leaders, friends, the custom of the times or environment, or the accepted dictates of society even when that traditional road leads directly to disaster.

It is not easy to consciously stray from doing what’s expected. We’re taught all through our lives to respect authority, regardless of what defines that authority. We’re incessantly told to conform, not only through direct teachings and conversation by also through covert and subliminal messages. What’s expected gets translated into what’s right, although the right in these instances means only what we’ve been told.

Someone once coined the term ‘the Peter Pan Syndrome’ for men who refused to grow up. The women’s equality movement also suggested a ‘Cinderella syndrome’ for women who automatically believed the fairy tale that once her Prince had come, everyone lived happily ever after, but that epithet never quite caught on outside the realm of ‘radical’ feminism. We also need a pundit to provide a catchy name to the men who are entrenched in paternalism and the women who willingly succumb to walking two steps behind such men.

Lately, all the morality mavens who profess Christian values rather than personal values they actually live by have been loudly banging the jungle drum about the temerity of gays and lesbians who want to prove their humanity and love through a marriage to someone of the same sex. They are convinced that any deviation from the traditional bonds and shackles of marriage as they define it will destroy civilization. What they are incapable of recognizing, much less admitting, is that the ancient rationale for such tying together of two individual people has less validity than it once had. Supposedly procreation is still the primary purpose, but the world is no longer under populated and the expectation of early death through disease or accident is not so dire. Nor, in a modern world which does not kowtow to the dictates of royal bloodlines or peasant attributes, does a guarantee of virtue and purity assure that only those deemed fit to rule others have an obligation to reproduce themselves.

Rather than demanding that marriages be limited to one man and one woman, we should be questioning the institution of marriage itself. We should certainly be questioning why we continue to not only assume but demand that our children marry and have children in their turn. We continuously emphasize that legal, document strewn marriage is the only ‘right’ thing, and that only by having children can anyone, but particularly women, be fulfilled. Both of those dictates are lies that have been perpetuated since the idea first occurred to a scam artist who set himself up as the authority on how to live appropriately in order to put some money in his pocket for his personal revels the following Saturday night.
Formalized, church approved, paper documented marriages are not a natural state. Finding a mate is natural, and in some animal species adhering only to that mate is normal, but it is never imperative. Mankind’s attempt to make it so is only another attempt at total control. Some people should never marry, yet they can be completely happy and fulfilled in their single state, finding congenial discourse and companionship with others of like or similar mind, yet although the suggestion that one should always question authority while respecting it, rarely occurs to anyone when the issue is traditional marriage or the tradition of marriage.

Were marriage not difficult enough by itself, the couple is then expected to have children. Funny that parenthood is one of the few ‘commodities’ that arrives without a how-to manual. Funny also that so many men set themselves up as the most commanding of authorities on having children simply because they contribute one Olympic swim team caliber sperm with tunnel vision. Women, on the other hand, who must endure the limitations of gestation and the rigors and pain of birth as well as the primary care of the child for the next twenty years, simply accept such an expectation from others with little demur because she’s been conditioned to believe that such is her duty in life.

Should every woman avail herself of a couple gallons of icy cold water to throw in the faces of all those who traditionally diminish her value as a thinking, responsible person able to formulate and adhere to her own decisions about her married state and her body as incubator, there might be far fewer court verdicts of insanity because she murdered her children when her hopelessness was caused by being force fed traditions. Only then could we honestly treasure our children instead of using them as an excuse to enforce a unnatural state on adults unable to cope with such bliss.

In all these instances in which children die at the hands of parents, there were far more victims than those whose names were read into the court decree.

Sticks, Stones, Broken Bones and the Deceptiveness of Truth

Remember the childhood rejoinder, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?” If being called names or being made the butt of gossip were not a shared commonplace, there would be no reason for such a universal and universally childish chant.

Like everyone else, I’ve been called many things during my brief (in galactic terms) sojourn in this world. I’ve been labeled a dreamer, an idealist, a cynic, a visionary, a lady, a bitch, a good listener, an oddity, a mystic, the antichrist, brilliant, stupid, a conceited showoff and a run-of-the-mill showoff. None of these brief epithets are true or correct, yet all of them are. And, as is always the case when aspersions are being cast or compliments rewarded, the labels themselves say as much or more about the person slinging arrows or bouquets than they do about the object of their attention.

The truth that defines us in any given moment depends upon the totality of the person or persons with whom we are interacting, the issue at hand, the timing, and the experiences that mould us all. This is the deceptiveness of truth. It also shows the dangers and craftiness of making judgments based upon single instances or points in time, and puts the lie to the childish refrain about words never hurting us.

The dangers of rushing to judgment should be obvious, but when passions reign or visual acuity is strained through a sieve of anger, we don’t always realize the precarious nature of our stance or the long term damage to our own integrity. Objective observation and evaluation is discommoded by the jerking of our knee. Such reaction might be forgivable in the heat of the moment, but should that initial judgment continue to stand when sufficient time for reflection has passed, we have squandered an opportunity to ferret out truth for the momentary thrill of righteous condemnation.

Craftiness, however, is never a forgivable ploy although it is too often a consistently used weapon in the arsenal of political gamesmen determined to inflict the greatest pain and damage on adversaries. Truth, in such instances, is not even relative truth. It is instead truth’s exact opposite…a chimera wearing a camouflage costume of false piety and petty deceit.

The crafty, the sly, the devious among us are the most dangerous to the health of all of us. They are emotional predators digging stake filled pits to lure the unwary, baiting traps with innuendo and slurs, using poisoned bread crumbs as false trails to the tainted meat of warped thinking and the well told lie. Their actions and dark nuances warp the reality of context so that any possibility of discerning the actual story, the correct timing, the properly uttered word or reason for what we suspect was seen or heard or experienced requires revisiting time past as the distorted world moves rapidly on. The loss of truth defies wisdom, and without wisdom, objective vision and a nose dedicated to seeking an honest truth which depends on more than out of context fact, the lights we shine on history to better view today and all our tomorrows grows dim, like headlights on a long road trip turn muddy and debris ridden. We collectively crash against falsely erected walls and sharp edged boulders purposely strewn over the pathway that should lead toward peace and an understanding for the betterment of mankind.

All our views of truth may never exactly coincide because we are each shaped by our experience, the nuances of our lives, and the basic intelligence we bring to the party. But when we allow the crafty and sly to intervene in our perceptions of what is real and what is not, we have no real hope of becoming more than we are at that moment.

Sticks and stones may break our bones, the honest truth can never harm us.

No Saving Grace - or Tom, or Dick, or Harry

Human beings are not my favorite things. There is nothing new in this. I’ve always harbored a deep distrust and disdain for humanity although the necessities of reasonable living have enforced a sociability and affability for the totality while reserving exemptions for specific individuals. Having been raised as the lone wolf cub to another lone wolf with a long heritage of lone wolfdom and a far more sociably tamed yet stubborn she wolf, my proclivities are self explanatory.

Nothing that has happened on the world stage over the last decade or more has given me any reason to change my assessment of people. Quite the opposite, in fact. The actors on that stage have underscored the wisdom of my natural reclusiveness. Although singularity does not exempt me from responsibility for my own contributions to the human condition on this planet, my preference is to be of the world if not in it, and yet I still wage consistent, if losing, battles to better it in line with my own conscience.

Reading about and looking at pictorial proof of what madness has sprung from the warped hearts and heads of humans most recently leads again to the eternal question of “why bother.” It’s obvious that I am not alone in this feeing. Dissent and protest against corruption, deceit, lies, war, poverty, bigotry, genocide, abuse, inequality and all other evils has steadily declined, as though we humans now arrive in this world equipped with blinders and calluses around our souls. We seem more and more willing to step back, sit down, and let someone else do ‘it.’ Perhaps it is no wonder that little is accomplished to advance the basic human condition beyond brutality.

The past two weeks are a case in point. We’ve seen the overly exalted leaders of the G8 countries (those who’ve designated themselves as the most powerful economic forces on this planet) in their annual summit meeting, this time in Russia. If rhetorical hot air from human gas bags could be collected and disbursed as energy, the problems created by the growing scarcity of oil as fuel could have been solved in one afternoon, scratching one item from the meeting’s agenda for all time, and coming close to solving the threat of global warming. Alas, all that gaseous obnoxiousness simply wafted out into the ether lost for all time unless it returns to haunt us because it creates a new hole in the ozone.

Another supposed agenda item was the question of balance of trade. Simply the name of that item is one of many malapropisms we all foster, because until the more advanced countries belly up to the bar of justice and cease underwriting things like subsidies of their own farmers, the poorer countries will never achieve anything close to parity, nor will they ever be able to fully feed their own populations. One wonders how much those stomach pains attributable to hunger affect the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, or the genocide in Darfur, or the extended empty bellies of children in Africa.

Then there are the photographs and the realities of a besieged population in Beirut, a once beautiful city destroyed by years of occupation and war only recently turned to democracy and rebuilt from rubble to be again turned to dust and shards and broken concrete by U.S. made bombs from Israel, another nation constantly threatened and besieged because of religious differences. Is there any person or nation of peoples or religions created by men free from blame for the centuries old turmoil in this region?

The inactions and actions of people and nations created Israel, Hezbollah, al Quaeda, Hamas, Iran and its militant fundamentalist government, Syria and its covetous government, the quasi dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Dubai, and the war torn and presently occupied and unhappy country of Iraq. The thirst for oil and power among the G8 countries, but especially the limited mentality of the USA in its current costume of cowboy boots and military desert camouflage with its sticky and itchy grasping fingers meddling in cultures it chooses not to understand, have all been large contributors to the grief stricken faces and broken hearts among the area’s less privileged.

Humanity. Does it contain anything humane? Are human beings truly capable of intelligent thought? Are they capable of empathetic feeling? Do they not see what is being wrought in their name? Or what they themselves create of the negative feelings they harbor for others of their species?

I have a very low opinion of human beings. It’s doubtful that will change.