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When the #YesAllWomen tag suddenly exploded my Twitter feed the other day, I didn't know right away it was a reaction to a... you know... SHOOTING. Because my Twitter feed hadn't filled with impassioned "WHY ARE GUNS STILL LEGAL?!?!" pleas for once.
For those of you who might be new here, I'm married to a certified Gun Nut (LITERALLY he's a Certified gunSMITH, but as he's currently working as an industrial technician instead of a gunsmith, we will stick to INTENSE HOBBY terminology for now). I KNOW, YOU'RE FREAKED OUT. To be honest, I don't love guns. He already knows that, should he kick it before me, one of the first things I'll do (I mean AFTER the funeral and junk) is sell the guns all off ("B-b-b-ut..." he did begin, but I continued, "YOU'RE the one who claims they're an INVESTMENT"). But I definitely understand his points about how If You Outlaw Guns Only Outlaws Will Have Guns (and seriously, of all the gun crime in America, how much of it IS committed with legally-purchased and/or owned firearms? Not much. Particularly when you think how much gun crime is linked to drug crime, and hey, that's not legal either). And when, every time someone dies from a gun, people explode with their "guns are evil and people who want them to be legal are accomplices to MURDER!" well... now you're getting personal. Whether you mean to or not, you're speaking about someone important in my life. And while he certainly has his faults, he's NOT the sort of person you believe him to be, and... well, let's just say I usually have to avoid social media after a shooting.
But #YesAllWomen-- could it be? People were actually getting to the ROOT of the problem, talking about the MOTIVATIONS of the shooter, trying to fix THAT? I saw this tweet that darnit I can't find now, but it was to highlight the irony of the conservative talking heads who would say "Don't try to make this about gun control!" after every shooting, but now when people are making it about misogyny instead they're like "uhhh... let's talk about gun control!" Heh, I thought. Almost that. ALMOST because anybody doing that switcheroo because they didn't want to talk about misogyny IS missing the point, but, hey, I was one of the people balking at the usual ThisIsWhyWeNeedGunControl reactions after other shootings, and I'm NOT suddenly changing my tune. Because YES. Because having guns does not make someone a killer, and I think it's important to ask "So what DOES make someone a killer?" instead, and THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE WERE DOING!
"Well then... he was mentally ill!" All right. Maybe he was. SO AM I. I am a person with mental illness* who has an arsenal in her basement. But you know? It's the weirdest thing, but I'm not inclined to killing sprees.
So could it be that there are attitudes and prejudices in the very fabric of our society that can make a killer? I think the very BIGness of these things, the pervasiveness of misogyny and racism and homophobia and whatever hateful attitudes drive people to murder, is what makes a lot of people uncomfortable. We don't want to talk about it, to face that these attitudes exist, because it's just too MONUMENTAL to face... and, yeah, we'd have to admit that maybe some of the bits of stone in that monument are OURS. That maybe we're complacent too often when we should be calling stuff out.*** I'm a master of, well, complacentness, and of avoiding problems because they seem too big to handle.
The other week I noticed a defense mechanism my husband and I tend to overuse in our domestic disputes: the "Yes, but" argument. "You need to stop doing this." "Yes, but you do all THESE bad things!" "Yes, but your bad things are WORSE!" And in the end, nobody changes, they just feel offended that someone so problematic could ever suggest THEY were the one with the problems. Struck me that this is how most political arguments work, too. "You're wrong about this!" "Yes, but YOU'RE wrong about THOSE things!" "Yes, but YOU're MORE wrong!"
Defense mechanism. Because we don't want to deal with whatever problem we might have to deal with, we try to shift the attention, shift the blame, and then we end up with this insurmountable stalemate. When if we'd only focused on the specific problem in question, we might have gotten somewhere.
If there's any hope for humanity, it'll come from people who can block out the "YesBut"s long enough to focus on the real problems and work toward real solutions. It'll come from teaching our children to love and respect others as human beings and not means to our own ends or obstacles in our way. It'll come from listening and then acting.
If there's any hope for humanity, it'll come from us realizing we're all on the same side, really. We all just want what's best. So maybe we shouldn't be fighting each other so much. Maybe we should be working together.
----
*For the record, you might be aware that I tried to wean off my meds the other week. This turned out to be a massive failure.** But I consider it more of a bump in the road: I'm back on them now-- a lower dose, but still-- and the difference is immediately notable. So it's more like, Well, we've all learned something this week, and that's that Amy can live a decent and healthy life just as long as she's got a little sertraline in her system! And we all lived happily ever after.
**Note: I still was not homicidal.
***Within reason. People who see everything through their "I have to call out all the [insert pet cause] injustice in the world and I will find that injustice everywhere even if I have to dig!" glasses bug me. I was just telling @friedapaula the other day that I've decided Literary Analyis (the bane of my college career, at least until Student Teaching) is genuinely Evil, at least the way we were taught in that class-- to look at each work through a specific pre-concieved mindset, forcing it to fit into that strict worldview, instead of letting the work speak on its own (and perhaps learning something from it, yourself). There's a difference between "I thought this character was a stereotype" amid a broader critique and "THIS WORK PROVES THE PERVASIVE BIGOTRY OF THIS AUTHOR." It's like, YES, call it out, but don't let it keep you from seeing the REST of the picture!
For those of you who might be new here, I'm married to a certified Gun Nut (LITERALLY he's a Certified gunSMITH, but as he's currently working as an industrial technician instead of a gunsmith, we will stick to INTENSE HOBBY terminology for now). I KNOW, YOU'RE FREAKED OUT. To be honest, I don't love guns. He already knows that, should he kick it before me, one of the first things I'll do (I mean AFTER the funeral and junk) is sell the guns all off ("B-b-b-ut..." he did begin, but I continued, "YOU'RE the one who claims they're an INVESTMENT"). But I definitely understand his points about how If You Outlaw Guns Only Outlaws Will Have Guns (and seriously, of all the gun crime in America, how much of it IS committed with legally-purchased and/or owned firearms? Not much. Particularly when you think how much gun crime is linked to drug crime, and hey, that's not legal either). And when, every time someone dies from a gun, people explode with their "guns are evil and people who want them to be legal are accomplices to MURDER!" well... now you're getting personal. Whether you mean to or not, you're speaking about someone important in my life. And while he certainly has his faults, he's NOT the sort of person you believe him to be, and... well, let's just say I usually have to avoid social media after a shooting.
But #YesAllWomen-- could it be? People were actually getting to the ROOT of the problem, talking about the MOTIVATIONS of the shooter, trying to fix THAT? I saw this tweet that darnit I can't find now, but it was to highlight the irony of the conservative talking heads who would say "Don't try to make this about gun control!" after every shooting, but now when people are making it about misogyny instead they're like "uhhh... let's talk about gun control!" Heh, I thought. Almost that. ALMOST because anybody doing that switcheroo because they didn't want to talk about misogyny IS missing the point, but, hey, I was one of the people balking at the usual ThisIsWhyWeNeedGunControl reactions after other shootings, and I'm NOT suddenly changing my tune. Because YES. Because having guns does not make someone a killer, and I think it's important to ask "So what DOES make someone a killer?" instead, and THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE WERE DOING!
"Well then... he was mentally ill!" All right. Maybe he was. SO AM I. I am a person with mental illness* who has an arsenal in her basement. But you know? It's the weirdest thing, but I'm not inclined to killing sprees.
So could it be that there are attitudes and prejudices in the very fabric of our society that can make a killer? I think the very BIGness of these things, the pervasiveness of misogyny and racism and homophobia and whatever hateful attitudes drive people to murder, is what makes a lot of people uncomfortable. We don't want to talk about it, to face that these attitudes exist, because it's just too MONUMENTAL to face... and, yeah, we'd have to admit that maybe some of the bits of stone in that monument are OURS. That maybe we're complacent too often when we should be calling stuff out.*** I'm a master of, well, complacentness, and of avoiding problems because they seem too big to handle.
The other week I noticed a defense mechanism my husband and I tend to overuse in our domestic disputes: the "Yes, but" argument. "You need to stop doing this." "Yes, but you do all THESE bad things!" "Yes, but your bad things are WORSE!" And in the end, nobody changes, they just feel offended that someone so problematic could ever suggest THEY were the one with the problems. Struck me that this is how most political arguments work, too. "You're wrong about this!" "Yes, but YOU'RE wrong about THOSE things!" "Yes, but YOU're MORE wrong!"
Defense mechanism. Because we don't want to deal with whatever problem we might have to deal with, we try to shift the attention, shift the blame, and then we end up with this insurmountable stalemate. When if we'd only focused on the specific problem in question, we might have gotten somewhere.
If there's any hope for humanity, it'll come from people who can block out the "YesBut"s long enough to focus on the real problems and work toward real solutions. It'll come from teaching our children to love and respect others as human beings and not means to our own ends or obstacles in our way. It'll come from listening and then acting.
If there's any hope for humanity, it'll come from us realizing we're all on the same side, really. We all just want what's best. So maybe we shouldn't be fighting each other so much. Maybe we should be working together.
----
*For the record, you might be aware that I tried to wean off my meds the other week. This turned out to be a massive failure.** But I consider it more of a bump in the road: I'm back on them now-- a lower dose, but still-- and the difference is immediately notable. So it's more like, Well, we've all learned something this week, and that's that Amy can live a decent and healthy life just as long as she's got a little sertraline in her system! And we all lived happily ever after.
**Note: I still was not homicidal.
***Within reason. People who see everything through their "I have to call out all the [insert pet cause] injustice in the world and I will find that injustice everywhere even if I have to dig!" glasses bug me. I was just telling @friedapaula the other day that I've decided Literary Analyis (the bane of my college career, at least until Student Teaching) is genuinely Evil, at least the way we were taught in that class-- to look at each work through a specific pre-concieved mindset, forcing it to fit into that strict worldview, instead of letting the work speak on its own (and perhaps learning something from it, yourself). There's a difference between "I thought this character was a stereotype" amid a broader critique and "THIS WORK PROVES THE PERVASIVE BIGOTRY OF THIS AUTHOR." It's like, YES, call it out, but don't let it keep you from seeing the REST of the picture!
