Margaret Fuller still Relevant in the Women’s Movement

The 19^th Century writer Margaret Fuller is relevant in the fight for women’s rights in the 21^st Century because of her ideal that the individual has a personal journey to arise a more perfect self: reflective, reliant, and active. She is most often associated with the Transcendentalist movement and wrote one of the first American feminist masterpieces (Woman In The 19^th Century). She would later in life branch out from the group to follow the very ideal of personal journey and self-reliance, moving away from literary circles and into social consciousness, yet both are significant in preserving her identity. She journeyed west in the United States to witness ill treatment of the Native Americans in 1843, made visits to the notoriously harsh Sing Sing Prison in 1844, and while in Rome partook in the 1848 Italian Revolution. The 21^st Century author, playwright, and activist Eve Ensler is a great example of a woman today who embodies Margaret Fuller’s ideals. She does not only have a literary presence that embodies self-awareness, but a social consciousness. Her work in the US, the Congo, and Bosnia, and with the recent campaign One Billion Rising, which is a global movement to end violence towards women, carries with it an active, responsible life.  

Marget Fuller and Eve Ensler have each produced groundbreaking reflective work paving the way for future artists and activists. The importance here is the notion from Transcendentalism, that reflection, particularly self-reflection, can help people achieve a truer self. Margaret Fuller was America’s first published feminist. Prior to her 1845 manifesto, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, only Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was printed in England in 1792, which some fifty years had passed between. Margaret Fuller had previously shared her pivotal ideas on multiple occasions, the first in the article "The Great Lawsuit," which appeared in the Dial (1843). Margaret Fuller was a strong advocate for self-reflection. She believed, “Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself” (102). For after she or he has begun to examine life and think, Fuller fully aware of Socrates, they will find no other choice but to expand past literary circles and take an active life of social consciousness.

Margaret Fuller ‘outlines’ her understanding that her thoughts about men and women are that both men and women are more significantly human. The social and political barrier between them is arbitrary. This profound self-examination came one hundred years before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Here Fuller states, “a stream, which is ever flowing from the heights of [her] thoughts” (112). Her vision noticed, “Man is a being of two-fold relations, to nature beneath, and intelligences above him” (112). She persists that yet only a fraction of purpose is lived in the life of any one man and the “growth of Man is twofold, masculine and feminine” (112). Her understanding of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Over Soul is one that must embrace both masculine and feminine. The whole idea of the transcendental movement was for men, along with women, to rise above the limitations society had created for them to make a more responsible mankind.

While Margaret Fuller’s masterpiece gave the academic literary world its second biggest feminist work, Ensler’s literary achievements were produced on the stage. As a survivor of childhood trauma, where her own father raped her countless times, she felt isolated and alone. Her individual power gave her the outlet to write deep personal monologues. What started as her own personal way to obtain a sense of examined life, provided women locally and then globally with a collective of confessions. Her most groundbreaking play was entitled the Vagina Monologues. Though it was first performed in 1996, it is a continually evolving performance that women have interactively participated in more than seventy countries from Argentina to Belgium, Turkey to Indonesia, Kenya to Israel, etc.

Once Ensler and Fuller reached literary acknowledgment, it wasn’t enough for them to claim notoriety. Ensler, following the footsteps of Fuller, pushes for the individual’s path for self-perfection, which actually includes this responsibility that Emerson had nurtured as well: to be aware of one’s impact on others. But unlike, the men in the American Romantic movement, Fuller picked up and went to a part of the world and remained in Italy during a highly violent time. Such men in the movement mostly talked the talk but did not step out of bounds (unless one considers being a semi-hermit on a pond and temporarily not paying taxes a radical step).

The active life required travelling outside one’s comfort zone. Only after risking a journey to uncharted territory would an individual begin to think differently. This ideal of ‘active life’ is to journey beyond one’s own personal history. Both Ensler and Fuller had exceeded this journey.  In 1843, Fuller traveled west in the United States to witness injustice in the treatment of Native American tribes such as the Ottawa and the Chippewa tribes. Her reflections on the experience appear in Summer on The Lakes, published in 1844. Just as she witnessed white women being mistreated back in New England, in Michigan she witnessed white men enforcing superiority over the natives. She stated:

The Chippewas have lately petitioned the state of Michigan, that they may be admitted as citizens; but this would be vain, unless they could be admitted, as brothers, to the heart of the white man. (199)

Instead, she witnessed traders degrading the Indians and providing them with rum mixed with red pepper and damaged tobacco.   

In her lifetime as well, Sing Sing prison was infamous in its inhumane treatment of inmates; Georgiana Bruce was in the process of reforming it when Fuller visited in 1844. There she met recovering prostitutes and she observed, “As to this, it must be considered that, as the vanity and proneness to seduction of the imprisoned women represented a general degradation in their sex” (Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 80). Since “men do not look at both sides,” their claim to criminalizing the prostitute but not the ‘vulgar man’ who creates the conditions that she lives under and pays for his way with her submission (78). Yes, prison reform was necessary in New York just as mental institutional reform was necessary, which had treated mentally ill patients as if they were prisoners. Just as the protective rights of Native Americans, rarely did the legal authority protect women in Fuller’s time from abuse, whether it were sexual, economic, or verbal. Since the legal system required reform, women like, Georgiana Bruce and others gained a powerful ally with Fuller. In Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York Tribune 1844-1846, in the introduction by Judith Mattson Bean, Bean noted that:

American women were active in reforming public institutions despite social expectations that they confine themselves to private life. During 1846-47 alone, the Tribune reported on the public activities of women such as Dorothea Dix, who was petitioning the New Jersey legislature for improved care of the insane; Abby Kelley, who was lecturing against slavery; … Although women could undertake humanitarian reforms and maintain social respectability, direct political involvement (such as lobbying) and public political argumentation was still very risky. (xvi)

Margaret Fuller “admired the risk-takers and praised them in her columns, reviewing the works of reformist women … and Fuller implicitly identifies herself with them” (xvi). Fuller knew that in order to reach a path of self-perfection legal and economic reform were necessary. But the individual, who dared to risk reform, had to transform her own personal life first. There is equally a risk in most countries in the world today outside of the United States. Fuller would have equally as much praise for women willing to dare to make reform and change than to accept an uneven path. Eve Ensler has dared to travel to Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Congo, and more for her individual commitment to her cause.

Eve Ensler traveled to Bosnia shortly after the violence of the 1990’s plagued the former Yugoslavian region. Women were raped, men were killed, and little involvement from the international world stepped in to stop the violence until years had passed. Ensler’s play Necessary Targets, actually confronts the challenges that authors and journalists must face when trying to portray the experiences of trauma that women living through wartime experience and share in confidence. Her character Zlata accuses the therapist J.S. in the play of assuming the superhero role that she must save them, without realizing this only aggrandizes the therapist. The real hero must assume an anonymous role; as well as, each writer must have an ethical responsibility to not capitalize and break the trust of victims of violence when relaying the story in a play or any other format.  Like Margaret Fuller, who “went from the commitment to individual perfection to social reform--essentially giving up ‘Transcendentalism’ after 1845 when she left New England,” Ensler has followed that real life transcendence beyond writing circles that “concept of the 'individual's path to self-perfection'” (Altman). The literary movement of Emerson and those associated with him was vital in Fuller’s influential growth, but Fuller, as mentioned prior, had to travel beyond to prefect her own life.   

The 21^st Century socially conscious individual comes to the realization that this message that Fuller expressed has gone far since Margaret’s time but it still has got a distance to go. Ensler’s current movement, if it is considered a movement, has attracted interests from socially conscious individuals not only in the United States, but in places where the living conditions of men and women are still deeply underdeveloped: Congo, India, Afghanistan, and more. On February 14th, Eve Ensler has pushed the campaign for One Billion Rising, where the global fact claimed by the campaign is that at this time one out of every three women in the world today has been either beaten or raped in her lifetime. On V-Day, women and men since the opening year of the movement, 2013, have come out into public space to communally dance to express the global need to end violence against women: from honor killings in Pakistan to female genital mutilation in Uganda to Japanese school girls raped by U.S. soldiers in Okinawa near the military base, the list of atrocities is endless. Those who partook in the V-Day events were inspired by the amount of people willing to stand up. For example, in Mutare, Zimbabwe, Nyasha Dhalndhara noted how the experience impacted her own life:

Being part of the OBR coordinating team made me feel like I was a part of something big, something important and something necessary. I was overwhelmed by the turn out at Odzi. Young mothers brought their children along and some came with their husbands, their brothers and their friends. As a young person, this to me was a point to note, young men gathering together with their wives, their sisters and their girlfriends to speak against violence against women and girls. Men are often the perpetrators of violence against women and girls but part of the Odzi male population came to rise with us, to demand justice for us and this to me was a priceless revelation. I bowed when they read their pledge to stop raping and abusing women and girls and start protecting and respecting them. (Onebillionrising.org)

Women in countless nations and cultures saw grass-root involvement, as Nyasha Dhalndhara had, and were empowered to rise up. Such echoes are the lessons that Margaret Fuller had pressed in her lifetime, which still have relevance in today’s movement to make a better society for the continual reachable future. This ongoing commitment to women’s emancipation requires constant endurance. In Fuller’s lifetime, women in America, predominantly white women in association, were in subordinate and submissive legal and social relations with power controlling males. This has now changed, white women have exceeded far beyond Fuller’s expectations, yet the dominance of power still excludes women of developing nations, minority women in the United States, and opportunities that the rich have that the low-income women do not. Often when economic limitations hold large groups of people back, violence onto others becomes an easy escape; and often this tends to target women the most statistically.  

Fuller argued, “As this whole [society] has one soul and one body, any injury or obstruction to a part, or to the meanest member, affects the whole. Men can never be perfectly happy or virtuous, till all men are so” (Woman In the Nineteenth Century, 112). The obstructions of man over women are fully covered in her inclusion in this limitation of society and achieving happiness if women are not treated equally or just. In light, Eve Ensler’s campaign takes the words here to even more open space than the text of a page. She and the countless women involved leading the way of One Billion Rising have organized global activity. Women on V-day as well as men who support ending obstructions to human rights are physically putting their bodies out on the streets across districts in India, where families are getting fed up about the rise in rape and lack of legal justice to protect victims and the lack of punishment to those who commit the crimes; people are out in the city centers and squares from San Francisco to Washington DC, New York to London; from the Philippines to the Congo, Peru, Guyana, Hungary, and more. By using synchronized dancing in numbers individuals involved in the rising movement to end violence are using a universal form of cultural tradition. All cultures embrace music and dance, and rather than embracing war and using a violent word such as war. The use of Valentines Day, where the use of ‘love not war’ goes beyond, or transcends the human condition, this is uniting rather than dividing.

  In many ways using the day of Valentine’s to reclaim what is now a consumer holiday, the reinventing the Western notion of going out and buying chocolates, flowers, and other materialistic goods for one individual partner is an attempt by those who celebrate V-Day in an activist approach, exceeds past one’s own personal circle with the use of public dance; this can be even more embracing for an individual’s soul. The self-reliant woman stands up for her self and stands out by going to a public forum, as Ensler addresses, for the first time in many cases to feel solidarity with other individuals eager to transcend the current conditions of society. This is empowering.

The notion that everyone can love is in part the 19^th Century’s humanist’s hope. While Margaret Fuller had been included in Emerson and Thoreau’s canon, as true today too, economic inequalities discouraged women from seeking an equal gain. Economic opportunity was a significant key and still is in the emancipation of women’s rights (and minority rights). At one point in her essay, Fuller stated that, “We only ask of men to remove arbitrary barriers” (114). Arbitrary barriers limited all women and all races other than wealthy white men in the United States in 1845. This separation has led to resentment and white men claiming they were better over others, so they had the right to judge and even impose violent restraint. However, Fuller confronts this false claim with, “Ye cannot believe it, men; but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you, is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves” (38). Love, Fuller confesses, as like any relations between two people requires mutual respect, and mutual opportunity. This stems to the importance of mutual economic opportunity.  

Resentment between the sexes has historically been imbalanced by the type of work that men and women were able to gain access to. In the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller was often adamant about “I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers” (115). She persists to note eagerness for women to be locksmiths, carpenters, sea captains, and more than just what was culturally limiting if not considered ‘proper’. She sternly insists that a country that claims freedom and equality must also provide that economic freedom to women too; otherwise, no one is free. She rallies:

Women of my country! … Women who share the nature of Mrs. Hutchinson, Lady Russell, and the mothers of our revolution: have you nothing to do with this? You see the men, how they are willing to sell shamelessly, the happiness of countless generations of fellow creatures, the honor of their country, and their immortal souls, for money market and political power. (110)

The market and the political power that controlled the market has changed in two hundred years, because now with the globalized interconnected market more foreign powers have raised the stakes other than just one’s from white male dominant cultures.  However, the ability to spread that wealth to the lowest economies, and the women in the poorest nations, is still blocked by barriers. Yet since Margaret Fuller’s time, other than the Queen of England, women have taken leadership roles in the highest offices in numerous nations. Unfortunately, the United States has not yet seen a female president. This is one occupation that has not reached the activism Fuller had anticipated.

Economic barriers continue to limit women’s opportunity as well as men’s. In a recent interview promoting V-Day activities, Eve Ensler was on Democracy Now, with host Amy Goodman, and fellow activist Kimberle Crenshaw, co-founder of the African American Policy Forum, and professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University. When asked about what was so important about the One Billion Rising movement, especially at this time, Crenshaw states that organized groups are “finally linking many of the movements around domestic violence and violence against women, in general, to a global understanding that these are risks that women face around the world as a group” (Democracy Now). Though Fuller does not address violence towards women, the violence that is often taken against women involves the lack of equality between the sexes, the ‘arbitrary barrier’ for the other to notice the full human in the female half. Economic opportunity has been a key player in gaining mutual respect. Violence is more predominant in low-income communities and nations; yet Goodman reiterates that even wealthy and white-collar women face sexual harassment, rape, and resentment.

In more clear terms, flashing forward to the future that Margaret Fuller had anticipated, women of certain backgrounds at least in the United States in the 21^st Century have succeeded in every occupational opportunity but the equal pay and respect for their energies in such fields are still a significant obstacle. Firstly, wage equality is still far off in the United States. Only certain countries in Europe have women’s pay gap been nearly eliminated such as Belguim, Denmark, and the Netherlands. According to a recent speech by President Obama women in America on average only make .77 cents for every $1.00 that men make. On Democracy Now, Kimberle Crenshaw goes even further in detail to make clear that for even though Obama addressed a basic gap:

He talks about the economic marginality of women. But if you were to really ask where do women of color show up, women of color make—African-American women of color make .66 cents for a dollar that a white man makes, Latinas .56 cents. You didn’t hear that when he talked about women, and you didn’t hear it when he talked about men of color. (Crenshaw)

With such knowledge about the current facts that are economically limiting, Margaret Fuller would say that Americans have not yet reached equality. Her emphasis that souls regardless of gender or race should be treated one to one; the economic barrier indeed limits transcendental options. The future that Margaret Fuller stressed for has not yet been achieved, but is getting closer in grasp.  

There are transcendental rewards to the One Billion Rising movement. The One Billion Rising campaign is just part of the growing action. Towards the end of the Woman in the Nineteenth Century, like Goethe to man’s position in life, who Fuller admired, Fuller disentangles the misconceptions of men in power of her day who used religion to limit women but not man; she says, “in the metamorphoses of life, the soul assumes the form, first of man, then of woman, and takes the chances, and reaps the benefit of either lot. Why then, say some, lay such emphasis on the rights or needs of woman? What she wins, not as woman, will come to her as man” (118). If all gains and successes of mankind have assisted in human progress, then by limiting one gender would limit all of man’s potential. Fuller wants to make clear to those in her time, and those still reading today, that if one soul is one soul, don’t limit the body!  In other words, on the One Billion Rising website continually, updates and postings reflect social networks ability to gather solidarity; one of these postings was a quote tweeted on Twitter by a young eleven year old Afghan girl, which stated: “You won’t allow me to go to school. I won’t become a doctor. Remember this; One day you will be sick.” Women in the US and in developing nations are making strides or challenging unnecessary barriers that are economically and politically limiting overall human progress. A young female doctor in Afghanistan, or even in New York, can save lives.

While some Americans believe that women’s equality has been achieved and the gains are all present here in the US far exceeds countries, like Afghanistan or the Congo, or Iraq or Cambodia; others know better that this is only still a limited concept. In the Winter/Spring Edition 2014 of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem, a contemporary of Ensler, entitles her riveting contribution as “Our Revolution Has Just Begun.” Economically, she states, “this country still profiteers on the underpaid or unpaid work of females, comes near the bottom of modern democracies in electing women to political office and is at the bottom when it comes to childcare or family-friendly work policies.” The goal of equality is not yet here:

For a modern democracy, and yet we don’t have some form of national child-care system. … We are an advanced country that saddles its college students with debt at the exact time when they should be most free to explore. Also, women pay the same tuition as men, yet are paid an average of $1 million less over their lifetimes, making it harder to repay those loans. (Steinem, Ms. 2014)

Margaret Fuller would have been engaged and eager to be a part of the current voices trying to wake up the masses of society too willing to accept rather than refuse the contemporary condition. At times in Fuller’s life, she was discouraged to see so many women willing to accept the repressive model of society.

Eve Ensler, like Kimberle Crenshaw and Gloria Steinem, is not the only 21^st Century woman to break the grounds and risk stepping beyond the acceptable place that women have been confined to. Internationally, women that even Margaret Fuller would take notice of would be: Nobel laureates Shirin Ebadi of Iran, and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, the infamous female doctor in Somalia, Hawa Abdi, are just some of the growing risk takers to push back at the arbitrary barriers and take risks across the globe daily. Margaret Fuller had her own contemporaries fighting for human rights as well: Harriet Tubman, Sojourn Truth, and Dorothea Dix.  Though the task that Fuller had dreamt about is still far from reach, leaders with real drive and motivation have used their self-reliance and Over Soul to bring about change as best as they can. Social consciousness is prevalent, even if the mainstream media is not promoting the positive light.

As long as one person is exploited physically, economically, or spiritually; then as Fuller spoke, this obstruction limits all men in the 19^th Century and still today in the 21^st Century. The One Billion Rising campaign is a movement to have the revolution without violence but with physical movement, like dance; public spaces filled with hundreds and even thousands of women and men alike stepping out to exceed the current conditions of the times. This kind of courage is necessary. This transcendental life beyond the mere literary circle is a continuous challenge. It requires continuous endurance and support. After Fuller’s life had tragically been lost at sea, her words lived on. So the literary tradition is also significant to preserve her essence.

 Margaret went to Europe and actively got involved in the Italian Revolution of 1848 as a war correspondent and took charge of a hospital. Her willingness to go into difficult situations during her lifetime set an example for women today, like Eve Ensler, who has in her own life carried forward into heated territory. The parallels of Fuller and Ensler are significant, as well as Fuller’s principles during her time about the occupation of women, the emancipation of the individual soul.  In Ensler’s most recent memoir In The Body of The World, she ‘traces many paths of reconnection’: living through her own childhood trauma of violence, living through her chemo treatments and overcoming cancer, and working close at hand with women who continue to survive and endure the horrific life Congo has provided women. She spent significant time in 2010 working with UNICEF and locals to create a safe-haven for women, but just before the project was complete, “Cancer threw me through the window of my dissociation into the center of my body’s crisis … All the work I was doing in conflict zones” would have to temporarily halt until she could “Sav[e] my own life” (7, 30). Once she got cured, Ensler got just as active again and continued work in the Congo and campaigned for the One Billion Rising. She reflected on her trauma, found a higher purpose, and got involved. This is a courageous task, and yet everyone has inner potential to strive for it.

This is why Margaret Fuller is still relevant in the fight for women’s rights in the 21^st Century because of her ideal that the individual has a personal journey to arise a more perfect self: reflective, reliant, and active. On parallel, Eve Ensler ends her newest memoir with: “We are the people of the second wind … be part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can’t help rising. Rising. Rising. Rising.”

Sources:

           

Fuller, Margaret. “Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings”

 Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994.

Ensler, Eve. “In The Body of The World”.

Picador, New York, 2013.

 Goodman, Amy. "One Billion Rising: Eve Ensler & Kimberle Crenshaw on Global Movement to End Violence Against Women." Democracy Now! N.p., 03 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

           

            Bean, Judith Mattson and Joel Myerson. “Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New York Tribune 1844-1846” Columbia University Press, New York, 2000

Dhalndhara, Nyasha. “Rising: STILL I RISE.”

OneBillionRising.org. 12 Mar. 2014. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.

            Steinem, Gloria. “Our Revolution Has Just Begun”

MS. Magazine. Winter/Spring 2014, Washington DC, February, 2014

            

Obama's Accountability: No Syria Involvement

Hold Obama accountable for his words. He says, in regards to Syria, that "we cannot allow a leader of a country to use chemical weapons on hundreds of children." So why does he allow the chemical company, Monsanto, to continue to poison millions of children in America and overseas everyday? Why Syria?  Why did he use no voice in Darfur, Congo, and Somalia, which have been regions of mass killings under his watch. Obama wants to hold Assad accountable, but he does not hold George Bush and Dick Cheney, or even himself accountable with drone strikes and use of Lockheed Martin uranium tipped bombs that continue to kill in countries after the wars' end with cancer causing depletion of soil and radiation.

Until the US uses weapons that do not kill, the US should not get involved. No intervention is without 'special interests'! If laughing-gas and ecstasy were sprayed on war torn regions that would be a better solution.

Zizek, Kristeva, Hooks, and Understanding the Connecticut Shooting

In American neighborhoods, those quiet peaceful neighborhoods, where common folk are continually shocked by the horror of single acts of deep cruelty, the lessons learned are easily forgotten and placed on the list of little murders by those not directly affected. The recent grotesque acts in a Newtown, Connecticut school must force us not to forget but to delve into the deeper social issues inflicting America. Perhaps theorizing with Slavoj Zizek, Julia Kristeva, and Bell Hooks can awaken this surprise for some but not all. Most would rather move on and forget.

In the 1971 film ‘Little Murders’ with actors Donald Sutherland, Eliot Gould, and Alan Arkin; the film depicts a society on the brink of chaos. Human values seem nearly nihilistic, and on a daily basis unsolved murders take innocent lives, never following any 'pattern'. In the French philosophers’, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari’s, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ the deep analysis, nearly intentionally incomprehensible at times, dissects the nature of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: In the extreme late-Capitalistic societies, such as the United States, humans have become so alienated from one another that they can no longer relate or connect in a socially interactive community. Due to economics and technology, the human mind has discarded certain necessary traits that progressively allow people to interact in a healthy way. This can result at times where those outcast alienated individuals take out their psychosis in psychopathic ways. Schizophrenia is a loose term associated with numerous mental health illnesses. Only in countries so advanced do individuals of certain economic upbringings have the luxury to manifest a psychological neuroticism, be heavily medicated, or lose the moral capacity at the slightest market instability.

The instability pattern in the Connecticut shooting, the Columbine shooting, the Virginia Tech shooting, the Batman premier shooting, the Arizona congress woman shooting, and recent other similar atrocities reflect individuals quite often who are not from poverty stricken families, or from Third World communities, or low-income minority families. These all ‘male’, typically white but not always, acts of aggression represent individuals from bourgeois middle-class and have chosen no healthy outlets to externalize their internal psychosis. Unlike the recent community organized protests in developing nations, where frustrated individuals come together to protest their governments, like in Egypt, Tunisia, Thailand, and Chile in the past few years; in late-Capitalist nations, there rarely is any deeper sense of community until tragedy or hurricane occur; but then within a short time passes, the alienation returns. So most likely until the deeper failures of economic imbalance and social bankruptcy are addressed, more singular acts of violence may continue. It is very likely to continue since most people refrain from tackling the deeper systematic failures of inclusion. Rather than addressing the core of social failures, the superficial tactics of high lobbied politicians reflect a real failure of irresponsible leadership.  Americans cannot wait for political leaders to address the issues but need to take a citizen’s role of speaking out and speaking with one another on all levels.

Several years ago, when breaking news covered a series of individual acts of cruelty in China, when grown men frustrated and lonely went into schools and hospitals shooting or stabbing children and strangers, Americans were mortified and looked at China failing to socially address the lack of support services for depressed and mentally ill individuals. American media claimed it was due to a lack of freedom. Yet in America where the right to choose is usually determined via consumer interests, this mirror is equally violent, as seen recently in Connecticut. When angered and frustrated individuals do not have support and constant inclusion, the pattern reflects that they take their anger out at weaker or those individuals who cannot protect themselves, like children; this is often similar to the bully-syndrome, where a bully tends to bully because he cannot stand up to those stronger than himself exploiting him, so he takes it out on those who he feels he can overwhelm. This is a failure beyond the self. There is a larger systematic failure in the Capitalist society that inevitably creates a society of Haves and Have-nots (China in the 21^st Century is a capitalist society). The United States is a late-Capitalist society struggling to address what is socially lacking that no matter how many products one consumes the material gain won’t address the social lack.

In Slavoj Zizek’s ‘The Ticklish Subject’, the Slovenian philosopher tackles the underlying problem between the ‘real, the symbolic, and the lack’. The danger of normalcy as he puts it, is that those who are essentially claiming to be ‘normal’ will not step away from their own selves to realize that the act of madness in one isolated individual is a representative failure of what ‘normal’ includes. Rather than the ability to think hard about community values, individuals will blame others rather than deduce a discord with what is overall lacking. The second consequence that Julia Kristeva theorizes in her understanding of societies failure to revolt together in the 21^st Century for a more inclusive system is that the “I” is isolated. Her analysis notices that there is an erosion in the capacity to rebel as a “sign of national depression” similar to “what the individual feels in isolation” (Intimate Revolt). Tina Chanter reflects on Kristeva’s awareness of the ‘weakness of law and the absence of responsibility’: “As this claim makes clear, ‘the new maladies of the soul’ is not a retreat from the tasks of social transformation but precisely a demonstration of the psychic consequences of such a retreat.” America has clearly escaped responsibility from social accountability in the Corporate practice of big business, to the Government failures protecting public education, to the War Industrial Complex, to lack of prison reform and gun-control laws, and this passes over to simple failures of parents’ lacking the responsibility in giving necessary guidance to their own children while they sit glued to their cell phones and drop the child for endless hours in front of the television or computer. 

           

For Bell Hooks in her essay ‘Talking Back’, talking back meant daring to disagree from ‘normal’ acceptance, speaking when one is not being spoken to as a courageous act, and sometimes just having an opinion (Hooks). When people fear going deep and talking about the personal, “We have to go that deep”; this overcoming of pain and degradation that Hooks talks about is our struggle, a struggle of memory against forgetting (Hooks). A dialogue is necessary, not only locally, but also internationally. If the crimes of those who of low-income tend to be minor thefts from drugs, car robberies, mugging, and individual alley shoot outs, and the crimes of isolated middle-class alienated young men are to take guns to public areas and shoot at random multiple people, the crimes of the rich involve large segments of populations like U.S. led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fracking oil in the central United States, or the closing of a General Motors factory in Flint, Michigan. The pattern of acceptance of ‘normalcy’ is out of control and social accountability is absent.

A necessary dialogue is long overdue. The pain that American’s feel is also uniquely connected to the pain that the Chinese feel. When American clothes and dolls, like Barbie, are manufactured in Chinese factories, the exploitation at home is directly connected to the exploitation abroad. When protest and revolt occur in the Middle East, their pain and frustration is directly connected to the pain and frustrations Americans feel, and at an imbalance. When Americans are frustrated that the price of gasoline is getting higher and they cannot drive their cars. The frustration of those in the Middle East is ten-fold because our unaccountable corporations and government have supported ruthless dictators for decade after decade. The oil giants of Exxon and Mobile are greedy enough to manipulate the American system for so long conditioning the belief that oil is a necessity to the American way of life. But this is directly connected to the frustration and pain in the Middle East not having a genuine outlet for democratic values. Such absence of social accountability leads to increases in fundamentalism.

The false ‘normalcy’ that is so expected of fuel, clothes, style, and technology is the very ‘lacking’ that comes from the overvaluing economic principles and devaluing moral social values, and this creates alienation. The pain at home is uniquely connected to the pain abroad. There is a common failure.  While the pain abroad can collectively turn out and organize revolt, it seems that in the extreme capitalist/consumer nations such as the United States, the system alienates so many individuals that occasionally and what appears to be a growing concern is that certain, mostly male characters cannot connect with their fellow human beings, in an almost social autism, resulting in acts of unjustified irresponsible violence in public space, as seen in Connecticut this week. Americans must stop the political shallow discourse and delve into discussing the systems overall failure, or these sorts of acts (little murders) will continue.  

Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Gloria Anzaldua, and Nawal el Saadawi: On Political Shallowness and One-Dimensionality worth Shattering:

The gaffe of Mitt Romney for president, at an all-rich benefit event, said that 47% of the nation is not worth caring about. Truth is, in a have and have-not society, the Capital system does not provide for all.

Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse would agree that beyond the bourgeois ad nauseam, “boredom in politics may set the self-focused individual free from making a stance,” where the false democracy of limiting votes to two corporate controlled parties, still hoodwinks the masses into apathy or fetish for brand name parties. “A mass alienated from deep natural concerns, but occupying the consciousness and pre-consciousness with every manner of excitement, news, popular culture, sport, emulation, expenditure, and mechanical manipulation” (Goodman).  Paul Goodman later admits that the ability of parties and governments to accomplish any positive good is slim to none.

One online video on Yesmagazine.org recently reflected that all politicians should be required to wear labels like NASCAR drivers, to reflect the truth of which corporations, donors and lobbyists pay them top dollar. “I cannot lead or easily be led, and I am dubious about the ability of parties and governments to accomplish any positive good” (Goodman).

The real wealth and power in the United States is associated, still to this day, with corporations and families tied to the Robber Barons during the earliest years in the 20^th Century, who boomed to new heights after World War II: the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fords, the Mellons, the DuPonts, as well as the Wallmart families, those behind Bank of America and Chase, the friends of the Bush family, and those behind Halliburton, General Electric, Monsanto, and Bechtel. Each of these elites is tied to oil, natural resources, chemicals, finances, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods.

Hollywood does not have value power, nor does the elected official. Hollywood needs the current system as much as others because it provides the base for a never tired living vicarious audience. Big business reigns! Of course, Microsoft, and the Internet industries provide means to share information. But this new form of technology, still recent in the length of historic clout, has a two-way direction. One of threat to those in power and freedom of connectivity between alienated individuals, but also it could lead to dependency on the natural resources to make the technology and with stricter and stricter rules to control individual sharing capabilities. “This means of communication, available to all,” now has a growing lack in engaging people in controversial issues beyond the screen. Distracted by games, videos, and couch potato passivity, it is hard to move past the length of the power chord.

In light of Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man”, the most advanced areas of industrial society “exhibit throughout these two features, a trend towards consummation of technological rationality and intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions” (Marcuse).    

Promoted by politicians and media, this One-Dimensional thought process is constructed by the political needs of special interests that convince the individual into a belief system that corporate needs are actually individual needs. As the old advertisement stated: “What is good for General Motors is good for America!” This sort of chime echoes today in Vice-President Joe Biden’s chant, “General Motors is Alive, and Osama Bin Laden is Dead!”

Controlled modes of thought and behavior become linked to no longer production, but consumption. No matter how much an alienated individual spends, it will not fill up the hole that is missing in a spiritually empty world under a capitalist mantra.

The thought police under Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Edgar Hoover’s America are fairly undifferentiated. Many people believe that times have drastically changed. But now that limited freedom has been gained, the gas chamber is the open environment that Monsanto, BP Oil, and DuPont pollute; the chains and the walls are restricted to mind control of manufactured consent; television, movies, and popular magazine trends are the image police, and media has no longer a journalistic responsibility, but a profit motive to boot.

The flavor and favor of the One-Dimensional world limits the definition of beauty and success; technical and administrative skills favored over mental skills; and this masterly fashion limits quality experience to masses of office spaces distracted with semi-satisfied machines, or sales-people, manual laborers, or construction workers beating out hours of work for works sake. Work, work, work, work, and if he or she has too much time on his or her hands, then give them more superficial distractions: sporting, shopping, accessorizing, and one-dimensional entertaining. Fluff can set you free and yet all it really does is perpetuate the acceptance of an affluent society unaware of its dependencies on overseas labor in China, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc, Oil from the Middle East, immigrant labor at home, natural resource usurped from Africa, South America, or Asia; and a garbage bin big enough to dump all the leftovers, which is usually poor nations or poor neighborhoods having to choose between “poverty and poison”.

Tracy Chapman once sang, “Give them drugs and give them candy; Make them think that they are happy …  But if they start to question … Bang, Bang, Bang, Shoot them down.”

Angela Davis connects directly the relationship between minorities, immigrants, and the civil rights movement to the greater global international direction socially and economically; and this divergence is due to the dislocation/severed limbs between democracy and capitalism. The two ideologies do not go hand in hand. The limbo of today’s dilemmas and the future solutions are blotchily unforeseeable, except for the immediate drift towards catastrophe and collision. 

The 47% that Romney cancels out are not only those Americans, who make $10,000.00 a year or less but are also veterans, elderly, citizens with disabilities and predominantly minorities. Many are too busy working to actually find the time to vote. Many are convinced that neither party will do any thing to help the greater community, with good reason to believe this. As well, Third Party candidates are always naively easily cancelled out. There are many who do not know enough to make a stand as well as those who are unemployed, unemployable, outsiders, outcastes or other cultures.

In a letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to Erich Fromm about Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” she summarizes, “Marcuse seems preoccupied with the idea that an advanced industrial society has replaced ontology with technology … we (individuals) have lost our power (according to him) of ‘negative thinking’ and have become so much a part of the status quo that” they are a ‘technicality’ rather than an opposition, who are easily swallowed up in minor modes of protest …” When capable the modes of “Zen, Existentialism, and Beat ways of life …  like other such modes of protest, are no longer contradictory” but have been absorbed into the status quo (Dunayevskaya). These modes of protest are no longer negating the status quo but have now become a ceremonial part of behavior practice. Such modes are now merely fashionable and are harmless like Punk, Rap, Graffiti, and Skate Boards.

While Raya Dunayevskaya until her death still believed in the ‘proletarian revolution’, Herbert Marcuse, had long given up on the Marxist notion. He equated that the blue-collar worker, the white-collar worker, and the average Joe had now been so absorbed into the consumer system that the working class had lost its ability to revolt in the previous capacity that Marx had anticipated. Voting seems just another mechanical chore, even though less than one hundred years ago women and minorities were strictly prohibited in accessing such rights.       

In Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell’s intro on Dunayevskaya’s correspondences with Marcuse and Erich Fromm, they note the differences between Marcuse and Dunayevskaya: “for Dunayevskaya, the creative role of labor is the key to all else” and for Marcuse, “interprets creativity ‘outside of labor’, as central to the post-capitalist society.”   In summing, one will either have creativity in their choice of work, or one will find creativity in his or her life outside of work. The debate comes to terms with the fact that human daily activities cannot fully abolish the need for labor, but it can be a means and not an end to self-development only if it leads to intellectual growth not just consumptive material growth.

If Marxists wanted a revolution of laborers over CEO’s and business elite, the post-revolution would have put the power over work in the worker’s hands; but for Marcuse, this is not enough if we do not redefine the ideal meaning of ‘work’. As for Anarchist-Intellectuals, such as Paul Goodman, they do not believe this type of revolution that Marxists hope for would lead to a healthier future under communism but instead a decline in actual freedom. Evidence is seen in the social evolution in Stalin and Mao’s grip over revolutionary power; leaving only single dictatorial voices over what is acceptable or not.

Goals of most historic Anarchist-Intellectuals, such as Har Dayal of India and Ricardo Flores of Mexico were of the “objective to not just reform government, but to leave government as unnecessary and only nominal” because if individuals have been educated enough to be ‘responsible and inclusive’ in decision making, governance would not be necessary (which a great many at the top of the greed list fail to learn) (Har Dayal). Our system is not self-improving but self-declining because of a failure in responsible leadership. The hierarchy of power is unnatural and willing to sacrifice the mass to save those at the top tier. 

Many critical workers realize that for the most part, “people who actually perform a function usually best know how it should be done.” Most employed individuals can admit that far more than they need, a boss is unnecessary. When the job is being performed, the limited micro-management the better, so as to improve self-efficiency; an ‘honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.’ The illusionary ‘busy’ work is not fooling anybody. It even does little to relieve job anxiety.

In similar alignment with Marcuse, Paul Goodman’s summation in “Drawing the Line” reflects that, “an enormous amount of effort from people in our society is used to create a synthetic demand.” Advertisers, politicians, and those in commodities “caught up in the profit system,” make you believe that you need more materials than you actually do need, and their salaries are based on hoodwinking the masses to believe this synthetic demand is natural (Goodman). This behavior is quite irresponsible and self-seeking. This artificial stimulation leads to personal egotism, and is a buffer to the ‘one-dimensional’ reality seen today at work, at home, or in social circles.

Herbert Read, who also has a great essay book entitled “To Hell With Culture”, commented on Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man”. Read stated that “Marcuse had moved to reconcile that originality and spontaneity and all the creative aspects of our human nature have been reduced in all its varieties of temperament and desire into one universal system of thought and behavior”. He notes that Marcuse does not claim to solve this problem, “but by presenting the alternatives in clear and critical terms, he makes the choice inevitable to every socially responsible individual … that we realize that the choice is now between the life and death of our civilization” (Read).

Though Marcuse does not claim to solve the problem, other intellectuals since then have pushed on how we can activate past the dilemma. Angela Davis in a 1995 interview with Lisa Lowe reflected on her experience with Herbert Marcuse during the 1960’s, and though he was in his 70’s at the time, the elderly activist participated in helping the youth movement. In the interview, Davis states, “The Seduction of the ‘One-Dimensional Society’ can be resisted (and still can be). He not only theorized these developments but he actively participated in mobilizations both in the US and in Europe. Working so closely with him at the time, I learned that while teaching and agitation were two very different practices, students need to be assured that politics and intellectual life are not two entirely separate modes of existence. I learned that I did not have to leave political activism behind to be an effective teacher” (Angela Davis).

Paul Goodman in agreement with Angela Davis also noted that “if anything is to be accomplished, it must be accomplished through continual pressure … Wiser, more compassionate people must continue to educate those who surround them.”    

Nawal el Saadawi and Gloria Anzaldua go even further. One-Dimensionality can be resisted. Nawal el Saadawi, in an essay entitled “Women and the Poor”, suggests: “we need unity and solidarity between men and women who resist global injustice at the local level as well as the international level. But we need a movement that is progressive, not backward, which seeks unity in diversity, by breaking down barriers built on discrimination (by gender, class, race, religion…)” and she emphasizes that we need to “Unveil the Mind”. Unveiling the Mind must expose the contradictions of both the economic and cultural order now controlled by corporate interests. Locally, we are controlled by the status quo. Globally, we are controlled by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (Saadawi).   

As with the act of unveiling, Gloria Anzaldua has invoked the image of a ‘Nagual’, a spiritual shape-shifter that goes ‘in-between’ spaces. Such terminology from her essay “Haciendo Caras, Una Entrada” where the masks that we wear (or veils) have driven ‘a wedge between our intersubjective personhood’; after “years of wearing masks, we may merely be just a series of roles” or merely just one-dimensional. Anzaldua suggests breaking down into fragments, creating space between the single mold, which as with any shattered piece “provides space” between the broken shards, and we must crack the masks. In our “self-reflexivity and in our active participation with the issues that confront us, whether it be through writing, front-line activism, or individual self-development, we are uncovering the interfaces” (uncovering pieces that came out from the shattering) (Anzaldua).

‘Uncovering our interfaces’ or ‘unveiling our minds’ resist one-dimensionality.  The ‘new mestiza’ that Gloria Anzaldua mentions is a person who inhabits multiple worlds due to gender, sexuality, color, race, class, bodies, spirituality, and other realities. Such a provocative alternative will allow the responsible individual to find “the guts and adrenaline that horrific suffering and anger, evoked by some of the shattered pieces, catapult us into” that acknowledges history rather than ignores history (Anzaldua). “These pieces are not only about survival strategies, they are survival strategies.” Anzaldua notes that dwelling on terms that cliché ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ is a way of avoiding serious dismantling, not only of racism but also the one-dimensionality that trivializes our independent histories. “Inherent in the creative act is a spiritual, psychic component – one of spiritual excavation” that requires ‘body, soul, mind and spirit’. 

While the election nonsense reflects the superficial politics that whitewash depth of a clearer democratic void, real politics deals with shattering the One-Dimensional thought process that has limited the American society for far too long. Voices of resistance, such as Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, and Nawal el Saadawi continued and have gone beyond the realms Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Paul Goodman had attempted to reach due to each woman’s unique creative ability and layerage of personal history. This is a quality that the 47% in deed have but need to embrace. Marcuse and Goodman started the discourse, but those who picked up the single fold that followed gave reason to shatter the process of one-dimensionality even beyond. Resistance is necessary, and activism in teaching is a required responsibility.  

Uranium, AIDS, War or Uranium Aids War

Farfetched or Not so Far...

Uranium Kills! In a previous post I mentioned Winona LaDuke’s call for ‘Cyclical Thinking’, where natural flows and cycles create birth and rebirth. If negative acts occur, the cycle will bring back in unknown ways additional returns. The purpose of this essay is to look at ‘unknowns’ or ‘known-but-not-open-to-the common-ear’ and attempt to connect abstract dots with recent information I had stumbled upon. It is a talking out loud to see if farfetched equations are actually not so far fetched. Can it make sense? Is it already known but not spoken about?

AIDS (Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome), Cancer, and War are some of the most atrocious killers of innocent people across the globe. One of the scariest weapons today is a Nuclear Weapon. Back one hundred years ago, neither AIDS, Cancer, or threats from nuclear weapons or even nuclear power were very foreseeable to the crisis they have come to today.

It is clear that radiation causes cancer. Large amounts of radiation kills and studies regarding the after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 have shown direct evidence that nuclear fallouts can significantly lead to cancers, immune deficiency, leukemia, and other deadly diseases. Scientists, doctors, and researchers, such as Vladimir Chernousenko and Jay M Gould, have recorded their findings regarding wide-spread impacts to public health not just in the immediate area around Chernobyl but groups of populations in neighboring areas in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and within a radius where wind currents and water flows.  

The US and NATO bombings of the Balkans have had similar findings from the conflicts in the 1990’s. The uranium from the bombs dropped in Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia have resulted in a rarely spoken in the media human cancer epidemic and an environmental disaster that will continue decades after the actual conflict had ended.  Reports from doctors such as Doctor Slavko Zdrale have noted specific types of cancers in locals, and European and American soldiers since. Similar findings are occurring in Iraq.

Nuclear Power is dependent on uranium. This is true with the Chernobyl disaster. But also, the War Industrial Complex in the United States and NATO are dependent on uranium for missiles, bombs and other weapons that companies such as Lockheed and Martin produce with uranium.  

Uranium is a by-product of gold. Corporations since the beginning of the 20^th Century have been mining uranium. Nuclear Power industries need uranium to thrive, just as much as the Nuclear Weapon industry. For most purposes, they are one in the same. The earliest mining of uranium was off of the Native American reservations and out of Sub-Saharan Africa.

In Africa, John Gunther has recorded in his book Inside Africa, that Edgar Edouard Sengier observed Belgian uranium mines in the Congo particularly at the key time of World War II, and due to the Belgian’s abhorred relations to the Germans at the time sold radioactive uranium to the United States just before the US used the uranium to make the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. The Belgian company, Union Minicere, had been pulling uranium out of the Congo in areas of Kambove and Katanga throughout the colonial occupation of Africa.

At the same time that the Belgian’s were mining uranium out of the Congo, the apartheid South African government and corporations were profiting on sales to the US military with mines in South Africa and current day Namibia. Mines most likely existed in neighboring Botswana as well. Throughout the 20^th Century, the resources for nuclear weapons, weapons, and nuclear power were being plundered from the African continent. However, the other key region of the world where uranium was being pulled from the environment was in areas allotted to Native American tribes in the United States. Winona LaDuke and Paula Gunn Allen mention the private and military interests in native territories or alongside of native reservations that led to eventually significant statistics of health crimes to the populations.

New Mexico was where the US military first tested the atomic bomb. The Laguna Pueblo had noticed the US government mining uranium in their areas around the late 1930’s. The Anaconda Company’s Jackpile Mine lasted until 1981. Since the discovery of uranium in native territories the environmental damage and health hazards to the local communities have increased significantly. Pulmonary cancers have been linked highly with uranium miners, recorded in research by Joseph Wagonner, Ariel Schurgin, and Thomas C Hollacher.

Not only did the mining of uranium lead to environment and health depletion, but the disposal of Nuclear Waste after uranium is used for nuclear power and weapons led to and continues to lead to some major hazardous regions of the United States. In Nevada, as Winona LaDuke has reported on, the Yucca Mountain is the largest nuclear waste dump in the continental US, where at least 109 nuclear plants have shipped toxic waste to be buried deep below the surface. However, since the birth of the waste dumpsite, the Shoshone Native American tribe has had major fatalities due to related diseases due to the radioactive mountain.

On the US controlled island of Saint Lawrence, between Alaska and Russia, which was a 1952 military base, abandoned in the 1970’s, the Yup’ik Eskimos have had major health problems and fatalities due to the remains abandoned and still not cleaned-up by the US military. The former base continues to pollute the island and the ocean waters that surround it. Even the Navajo reservation near the first testing of the atomic bomb, around the Crown Point Area, has recorded since the 1970’s major health problems due to the irresponsible activities.

Japan’s 2011 earthquake triggering the nuclear fall-out is another key example why nuclear power should not be considered as a clean energy source regardless of media-advertisement.

Immediate results of uranium related activities, whether simple excavation in mines, testing weapons, dropping weapons during war time, or disposing of nuclear waste from power plants, has enormously damaged the environment and attributed to major cancer related diseases. But that is not all.

The mystery behind how the AIDS epidemic in Africa began may be more related to the uranium than we can rationally connect. An Abstract concept, in deed, but not impossible; before cancelling out the absurdity, one must map it out. The largest region plundered of uranium in Sub-Saharan Africa is from the Congo through Angola, Namibia, Botswana, to South Africa. The largest population exposed to AIDS is in deed the same region.   

High levels of critical thinking leads one to ask – Did high doses of radiation from uranium exposure in the mines in Southern Africa, lead to the secret behind how AIDS began in Africa? Radiologist specialists Sternglass and Scheer have considered the potential link.

But first, to build a parallel, lets analyze the involvement of radiation that led to the rise in Hantavirus in the United States. Hantavirus is a deadly disease when humans are in contact with rodent feces. According to the US Army Medical Research Institute, Connie Schmaljohn states, “HPS was first described in 1993 when a cluster of cases of adult fatal respiratory distress of unknown origin occurred in the Four Corners region of the United States (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah). The unexpected finding that sera from patients reacted with Hantaviral antigens was quickly followed by the genetic identification of a novel Hantavirus in patients' tissues and in rodents trapped near patients' homes” (Schmaljohn). Like AIDS, Hantavirus first appeared in the public by unknown origins.  

The leaking of toxic materials into the soil, Paula Gunn Allen notes, created a radioactive hazard. At first slightly unnoticed, except in isolated cases, the outbreak led to the growing awareness that Hantavirus was indeed in existence. Some reports believed that the virus came about when rodents, mice and rats, ate contaminated materials in the soil and water. Radioactive material has been recorded to appear even in areas congested with mushrooms, as seen in areas like the Balkans on mountainsides adjacent to areas bombed during the conflict in the 1990’s. The toxic chemicals from uranium weapons biologically cycle through the environment and nature attempts to mutate the waste, which is one reason locals in areas along mountains are recommended to not eat certain mushrooms. If mushrooms are natures way of recycling toxins, it is possible to connect that not all animals, such as rodents, will be as affected by toxic waste as humans would be. Hence, rats and mice that carry Hantavirus, which appeared in areas like New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, trekked through the very areas where there was nuclear waste and uranium depleted soil, and can possibly carry a deadly disease to humans but not be at harm.

Yes, absurd to connect the details in such a way. But areas heavily mined by local populations in southern Africa could have been exposed to uranium’s harmful after-effects without awareness and then the exposure could have mutated in the body, followed with spreading the new virus to others they came in contact with.  If this is true, then it could very easily be true for some people to say that ‘the White man did bring AIDS to Africa’. Industry’s excessive greed to mine uranium out of the continent during the colonial period and today parallels the rise in AIDS. AIDS emerged in the public eye in the early 1980’s. Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome, like the effects of chemotherapy radiation, begins by depleting the human body of its immune system. Let’s come back to this thought…

The rates of HIV in Russia and Eastern Europe have significantly increased since 2001. Is there a correlation between the Chernobyl catastrophe and the increase, regardless to the increase in drug use, sexual relationship standards and the lack of social health institutions that vanished after the end of the Cold War? Maybe, or maybe not, but if the environment has depleted their immune systems, the environment may have led to the bodies inability to fight off the virus.

Perhaps as Hantavirus passes toxic exposure from soil to rodent to man, AIDS bypasses the rodent and is a connection of toxic exposure passed from soil to human to human.

The connection with uranium and AIDS from the research from Brown University of Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Dr. Jens Scheer are tied with the similar destruction of the immune system and mutations due to radiation exposure. Other doctors such as David S. Greer and Lawrence S. Rifkin were quoted as early as 1985, in an LA Times and New York Times matching articles, stating the similarities between the effects of nuclear fallout and AIDS: "Since large numbers of the survivors of nuclear war can be expected to have immunologic deficits like those in individuals with AIDS, a marked increase in the incidence of AIDS and AIDS-related diseases should be anticipated" in the event of such a war, the report said. "Epidemics . . . are likely in the months and years following a nuclear attack."

In her 1985, LA Times news article Marlene Simons stated that David S Greer’s findings reflected that “diseases likely to occur after such an attack include tuberculosis, leprosy, pneumonia, legionnaire's disease and cancer, the report said, as well as the illnesses most commonly associated with AIDS, Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer, and Pneumocystis carinii, a respiratory infection” (Simons).  

Dr. Greer was quoted saying, “The abnormalities of the immune system found in AIDS patients are marked by an "absolute depression" of these "helper" T-cells. Basically, these "helpers" direct other immune-system cells to attack invaders such as cells of tumors, disease-causing bacteria and viruses.”

Cancer rates in the world are at a record high and will only increase as long as the technologies that we use to power society is profit-driven and not health-driven. Cancer is directly connected to exposure to radiation whether one can pinpoint which direct exposure triggered the rise in depletion of health. Uranium has been directly or can be directly connected to major disasters that used weapons or enriched materials, such as Chernobyl and NATO bombings in the Balkans and Iraq.

Why is AIDS quickly discounted in the connection? I’m extrapolating, thinking out loud, maybe there is some level of correlation. The truth is that what the public has been informed or exposed to about the roots of AIDS is limited and small. In the future, all the knowledge about AIDS today will be looked at as primitive and all our assumptions will be clarified, perhaps one hundred years from now. Just look at our knowledge of diseases today compared to one hundred years back. 

But Uranium still kills. It seems most people do not even understand what uranium even consists of. But the sales are political and controversial.  Even as of today, September 14, 2012 in ‘Uranium Investment News’, the United Arab Emirates Nuclear Program was granted funding while the Iran Standoff escalates, the Australian Government remains silent on its own Uranium Mining efforts, in Canada, outside of the Athabasca Basin, the Kivalliq Energy Corporation is advancing Northern Canada’s Highest Grade Uranium Project, and in India the protests towards the opening of the Koodankulam nuclear power plant has been mostly ignored by the government, reflecting little concern for public distrust of claims that it is safe or inclusive to the greater populations health and future.

The Failure of the Self in the Consumer World: American Culture Exposed

In the wishful spirit of Mother Jones, Ida B Wells, Emma Goldman, Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, and Lolita Lebron; these are individuals we should ‘draw our sustenance from’, but we don’t. Who is the ‘we’? Specifically, those citizens residing in the lines of the globalized economic system accepted by most governments in the United Nations, regardless of free volition.

Politically, as in context, why do so many Americans still think that America was great under Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidency? Just recently the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie claimed, “Let’s make America great again!”  Yet when was he believing America was great and for whom? The answer is Never, if greatness comes at the expense of so many: foreign and domestic. Intentional amnesia misses clear claims to US wealth: genocide to Native Americans, Slavery, atrocious working conditions before the Labor Movement domestically, and continually abroad, supportive dictators for oil, resources, and much more. Oh, but so many say it is not our problem what happens overseas, but it is our problem. We created those problems. How does it make Iraqi’s feel that we’ve already forgotten what our nation has collectively done to them?

Standing at a bar, I see the masquerade. I see it in our movies and on the streets. Our characters are empty, settling for image rather than depth. Herbert Marcuse was correct to note that the way the self exists in America is mostly one-dimensional. So how best can we create a sense of self, when it has been flattened of edges, waves, spirit, resistance, and sustenance?

Toni Cade Bambara, notes in her essay, ‘Deep Sight and Rescue Missions’ that “the less children know, the easier it’ll be for them to fit in and make their way, seemed to be the thinking of half the household. They lobbied for lobotomy, in other words, convinced that ignorance was the prime prerequisite for assimilation, and assimilation was the preferred path to progress” (Bambara). In contrast, while walking in Harlem the other day, I saw a shirt on an elder African-American woman that stated: “Danger: I am intelligent.” Why do so many people fear intelligence? Critical thinking skills are key for individuals when separating the self from a mindless existence of consumption.

Winona LaDuke believes in ‘Cyclical Thinking’, which is common to most indigenous groups or cultures, and is an understanding that “the world (time, and all parts of the natural order, including moon, tides, women, lives, and seasons) flows in cycles. Within this understanding is a clear sense of birth and rebirth and a knowledge that what one does today will affect one in the future!” (LaDuke). This absence appears in the daily actions nurtured in contemporary postmodern America. Instead, our society nurtures that tomorrow doesn’t matter unless “I enjoy first, today for my self.”

The postmodern American Self does not think cyclically. The modern American surprisingly does not like to think, does not want to think, and is nurtured via technology and media to not. “Let somebody else solve the problems (why not vote for a janitor rather than a politician to clean up our mess).” This lack of thinking should not be confused with the teachings of Zen Buddhism, where the mind is ideally supposed to free itself in meditation. We are not all following the goals of Zen by zoning-out the world with headphones, cell phones, smart phones, and I-phones.

Though there is a scarcity of women recorded in classic Zen literature, as Grace Schireson notes in her book ‘Zen Women’; Moshan Liaoran, one of the earliest Zen women in historic Buddhism, taught that, “the Peak is not revealed … I am not pointing to myself, my position, or my ability. To understand the peak, the essence of my teaching, you need to penetrate your own confusion, and whatever has covered this peak from your view. I have no need to show off to you, to point to this, the peak, but you may uncover my teachings by seeing through your own delusions” (Schireson).

It is not even just delusions but the ability to get away from self-focused thoughts. The American culture has embraced the ‘virtue of selfishness’. This obedience to make the world revolve around the I rather than the reverse makes it extremely challenging for the material projected self of what-one-has and what-one-does-not- have-yet to think about other worlds and other I’s, adhering to each one’s own Napoleon complex.  This is a crisis, which is cyclical and will be short sighted. This is as close to a lobotomy from reality as one can get locked behind self-seeking technology. This will come back to us in unseen ways in the near future.

On the same front, one of the earliest French novelists, rarely acknowledged in the literary canon, was Francoise De Graffigny, who lived in 1747, and her novel ‘Letters from a Peruvian Woman’ represented an Incan princess kidnapped by the Spanish during the conquest of Peru. In an English translation, her confessions acknowledge, “When one single object draws all our thoughts, events only interest us through the relations we find them to have with the object … Time like Space is known only by its limits. Our ideas are equally lost when confronted with constant uniformity of one or the other.” If individuals today cannot associate objects, events, and history with their own personal self, they cannot comprehend meaning for them. When the self is intentionally limited to a consumer level, the expectations for them to bring far ranging details for a higher purpose outside of self-gain, is even lower.

Individuals are allowing the culture to funnel the choices for a subjective self rather than looking beyond to a higher Zen, cyclical self, or whatever deeper level one can name for that reference. The Hungarian Marxist Agnes Heller reflects on the idea of the self as well. “Kierkegaard once said that if you do not choose yourself, you let others choose for you.” Individuals born in the ‘consumer’ world are a ‘bundle of empty possibilities’. Heller reflects that the self is the ‘idiosyncrasy of the interpretation’ he or she has with the human world, and this world according to a narcissist is one of emptiness, which will remain empty as long as he or she is solely self-focused causing the ‘self’ to be merely on its own: useless.

Agnes Heller emphasizes in her essay, ‘Can Everyday Life be Endangered?’ that “the Newborn is certainly not like a tabula rasa … everyone is thrown into a concrete network of social regulations by the accident of birth. Culture takes care of transforming this accident, perceived as organic embedded-ness, into fate or providence. Both social regulations and genetic uniqueness are therefore prior to human experience”(Heller). If this bundle of empty possibilities does not go beyond the self in the consumer world regardless of class, race, or gender, he or she will remain empty (and not in the Zen way).

In the globalized world of economic dependencies and interconnected markets, ‘Why is it essential that the American remain self-reliant?’ The Laguna Pueblo activist, Paula Gunn Allen, answers her own question regarding why the American self can go on being community-less, without a place to belong, without a past to remember, or indifferent to all of the above. The American culture was built upon a separation of the self from the circle of nature clinging to a loneliness that reasserts man’s power over nature. Why do we cling to loneliness? Gunn Allen notes, “there is something that can be done, there is a way around the destruction” that perpetuates more destruction foreign and domestic, “but it requires giving up America’s real love: loneliness.” Such chants of affluent children to exemplify this loneliness are ‘I want my own car’, ‘I want my own room’, ‘I want my own cell phone,’ and ‘I want my own way to block out the rest of the world.” I am not aware that I am connected to the rest of the world.

Paula Gunn Allen notes that we are ‘idolized for singular determination’ and overall  “American society substitutes love of the family, comrade, village, community, and tribe for the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual.” Many have taken the messages of 19^th Century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau far beyond their original intent. In Gunn Allen’s book ‘Off the Reservation’ she projects that the real reason American corporate elite feared and still fear socialism and communism is because it requires cooperating with others, and sharing … “It seems fairly obvious from this that a society intent on eradicating theft in all its forms must eradicate ‘civilization’. Cooperativeness, the willingness to share goods and land, is not possible in a basically selfish framework” (Gunn Allen). 

In parallel to Paula Gun Allen’s awareness of the American self, the philosopher Julia Kristeva pulls to the forefront that now beyond the US border and within, “21^st Century Globalization hopes that passions will be reduced under the two fold effect of Nasdaq economic well-being and Prozac’s biological well-being” (Kristeva). This leads to a stunted-self of ‘consumption’, economics, and pharmaceutical bliss. When reduced to this sort of universal, true individual potential is sacrificed to emptiness and buffed up with egotistical cosmetic and psychological cover-up. Democracy under these conditions will not lead to communalism but ignorant pawns voting for puppets that benefit the few elite.

Outside of the privileged and outside much of the lobotomized masses, one sees America as an “imposed financial, economic, and cultural oligarchy that is liberal in its inspiration but risks excluding an important dimension of human liberty. Other civilizations have other visions of human freedom. They also need to be heard in this globalized world and to be allowed to add their own corrections, through diversity, to this new global vision.” … At present, instead of this liberty, humanity is betraying itself in a process of increasing technical and robotically uniformitarianism (Julia Kristeva, ‘Hatred and Forgiveness’). Limiting humanities opportunity to be more whole, more complex, and more multi-dimensional stunts sustenance and ignores cyclical growth. This fragile system is in danger of progressing to a more violent conflict foreign and domestic. Can the ‘self’ afford to remain shallow, or must it find an outlet to go deeper and beyond what pays the bills and feeds the greedy?

Susan George tries to practically answer this question economically and structurally in her book ‘Whose Crisis, Whose Future’. She lays out how the regime of neoliberal globalization keeps the public in prison without the needs of actual prison walls but through financial spheres of coercion both politically and socially. Those with power use the tools to divide the selves. They give wealth to a status group and occasionally gift a few lucky individuals with affluence. They feed the status quo with patriotic election confetti so that the masses can one-dimensionally decide which puppet on the ballot will target interests for the next four years to divert attention or simply to build up public apathy.

Susan George cannot see a big bang, a ‘once-for-all end to our present economic system’, or a revolution. Instead, she sees an “ongoing process of transformation fuelled by constant public pressure” with constant voicing from larger selves who go beyond the individual self for a cooperative social context. She doesn’t believe that “violence can provide a lasting solution or advance human emancipation, but” she fears it could overtake us unless we act quickly enough to reduce the glaring injustices in the present global and national interrelated conditions.

After voices like Julia Kristeva, Susan George, Paula Allen Gunn, Winona LaDuke and Agnes Heller, et al, make empowering analysis, specifically female intelligence that is stronger than the reflections of the male leadership that overrides government and executive boards; why are such voices dangerously being ignored? The ‘virtue of the selfish’ is not qualitative. It is an obedient emptiness. The flaw so apparent at this time of those who control the economic, political, and subjective landscape is that they are running out of ideas fast and they don’t want to hear from intelligent voices beyond their capacity and who state the obvious future that they have no power in. The corporate elites are running out of ideas, this is evident with the current global stagnation and unrest. They are also aware that there are less areas of the globe to bully. They are shortsighted and fail to use natural cyclical knowledge.  The self must seek sustenance from the healthier teachers that nurture a higher personal growth not one of emptiness, limited politics, and economic malnutrition.