The Serpent's Wisdom

I haven't thought for a while about the ethics of taking, but it's on my mind today. A couple of connected developments this week:

• Zerlina Maxwell, a feminist writer, made the comment to Sean Hannity that maybe we should put more energy into telling men not to rape. Hannity retorts that such an approach is useless because "criminals won't listen." Since appearing on the show, Maxwell has faced a wave of death threats and other violent, angry responses.


• A couple of high school football players are convicted of rape, setting off a wave of commentary in the media expressing sympathy for... those two poor rapists whose lives are now ruined. The survivor gets death threats; two girls were arrested just today for threatening to kill her. Her identity has of course been revealed by the press, despite guidelines meant to prevent this.

By now most of you have probably heard of "rape culture," which is what happens when you combine the "abuser planet" phenomenon with misogyny. Our cultural narrative inherently sides with the bully, with the abuser. They are the one whose lives and thoughts are clear to us, whose justifications we buy into without question. "Look what she drove me to do!" "She was asking for it." "She's responsible too." Say any of these things and people will nod knowingly. Say them and you automatically recruit at least half of all observers into co-conspirators. "She's just saying it for the sympathy" (only true if by "sympathy" you mean death threats).

The ethics of taking have something to say about this, and provide a counter-narrative. As I described it before, "this ethic would require us to consider what the costs are of taking anything that we feel free to take." Even if overtly offered, because offering is not always an act of free will. I originally applied it to resources, but it could just as easily apply to our relationships with other human beings.

Mark Morford has me thinking this morning about the pull of temptation. It is a very old moral dilemma; the defining dialectic of Christian (and perhaps Judeo-Christo-Islamic) society; the worldly vs. the pure, participation in the 'world' versus the path of virtue and holiness.

I do not see the world this way, though the culture around me does, and this creates a dissonance. For me, the dilemma is between privilege and lack, and the gap created by people who act with disregard to the ethics of taking. I've described this before, but put simply, my assertion is that we have an ethical obligation to consider the cost of taking something, even something that appears to be freely available to us or willingly offered.

Consider, for example, a couple where the female partner does more of the housework than the male partner. How does this common pattern come to be? In my experience when a man and woman live together as a couple they fall into this pattern without it ever being discussed. And all the while the woman's resentment builds slowly at the fact that she is doing more than her fair share around the house until it erupts into argument, at which point the man pleads innocence. "I never asked you to do all that," he might say. And it's probably true, on the face of it, that he did not specifically ask her to do everything she does.

The system of ethics we are taught in the United States tells us it is wrong to take what does not belong to us. However, it is okay without reservation to take what is due to us. And it is quite amazing when you contemplate it how much the average US citizen considers his or her due. Even better to take that which is offered to us or freely available.

In movies and on TV we see 'noble yet primitive' Indians giving thanks when they hunt and kill. There are so many things that could be said about this, but what is relevant to this post is that this strikes me as a relic of awareness that not all people have the same ethics of taking as we are taught in the US. There is in this the tacit admission that, well, yeah, it would probably be better to consider at least for a moment the animals we kill and eat, but, we've moved beyond such quaint spiritual values. We are a nation of 'the world.'

This brings me back to the point I was making at the outset: the dialectic between 'the worldly' and 'the virtuous.' Christian virtue is often presented as a package deal (you're either in or out, no in-between) and once a person has already decided they are not going to participate, then it becomes that much easier to dismiss the 'loftier' parts of it, especially in the absence of anyone to call them out. "You're a better person than me," someone might say, before shrugging and taking what is their 'due.'

When you say, "Don't take someone for granted," it is understood that this is generally a crappy thing to do. Or "Be respectful or considerate," it is understood that these are generally good things to do. But they are shunted off as virtue, as a detached abstract value that can be easily and safely shelved (though maybe with the occasional vague abstract sense of guilt about it), rather than considered as actual ethical obligations.

The difference between a spiritual virtue and an ethical obligation is that the latter does not go away because you decide not to adhere to a religious belief. Ethical obligations reflect the material consequences of actions, and the fact that humans are smart enough to see them in advance much of the time.

Behold the architecture of privilege.

It is privilege not to consider what something costs. Only that which has a price tag has cost, right? How very convenient it is that expenditure of effort, or even more invisibly, silent sacrifice, are not viewed as things of "cost," because there is no one to stick a monetary price tag on them. There are those who dismiss, with a smirk even, the hidden cost of performing tasks, because pain, fatigue, resentment, what are these, they are ephemeral, they are unseen, keep them unseen and give me my due.

So, going back to my example of the couple above, while the male partner may not have specifically asked his gf/wife to do more of the household stuff than he does, he also didn't object or say anything when she did. Since he materially benefited from it, he was by my perspective ethically obligated to consider what it means to accept the gift of her labor. We could get into things like, maybe her standards are higher than his, unreasonably high, etc., but this is an aside from the larger issue because this goes way beyond household chores. It concerns the conduct of humankind as a whole.

It goes to things like humankind eating a plentiful species into extinction, or strip mining whole mountain ranges, or dumping so much trash there's a continent of floating plastic in the ocean. This is not driven, organized evil; simply the collective result of a million decisions made by individuals with little or no thought given to the ethics of taking what can be taken. Just a few pesky nags like me complaining, and we are easily enough ignored. Whether or not we could have known, or even should have known, that such things can result from our collective decisions, we can't afford as a species to forever react in hindsight to consequences. We're smarter than that.

Mea culpa.

Every once in a while I see something that just stuns me, and I can barely form a coherent response.

This is an example. To put it simply, virtually all growth in US prosperity in the last 25 years has been enjoyed by white households. A pattern like this cannot happen in a land where opportunity is truly free and open to all.

In examining data from 1984 to 2007, Brandeis's Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that the average white family now has accumulated $95,000 more in total wealth than the average African-American family. One quarter of African-American families, the report notes, currently have no financial assets to protect themselves from financial ruin.

The report's authors argue that, through a mixture of policy mistakes and discrimination, most of the wealth during that period flowed into the hands of white families.

In a study published last year, the University of California, Berkeley's Emmanuel Saez found that income inequality in the U.S. had hit an all-time high in 2007. But the Brandeis study points to a "broken chain of achievement" among African-Americans that, even at relatively moderate levels of income, creates large disparities.

"By 2007, the average middle income white household accumulated $74,000," the report's authors note, "whereas average high income African Americans owned only $18,000."

Firedoglake posts a report today that BoA and Citi have been buying up more toxic assets in anticipation of Geithner's unveiling of the Troubled Assets Relief Program.

Recall, the idea behind that plan was that large banks were in trouble because they owned too many toxic assets and looked as though they were, ha ha, if you can believe it, insolvent. And so we the people, moved by the touching stories of the poor, poor bankers, found it in our hearts to scrape together a few of our hard-earned dollars and lend them a helping hand. The first round of bailouts were bundles of cash, no strings attached; government accountants do not even know what the banks did with that money. The second round of bailouts are taking the form of the TARP, a new public bank created to buy these toxic assets so they no longer burden the private banks' balance sheets.

So who could blame them if they treated our largesse as an opportunity to earn a fast buck at our expense. That's right, they are using cash from the first round of bailouts to snatch up toxic assets from other banks in order to sell them to US at a profit during the second round of bailouts.

Ha ha, aren't the scoundrels cute! They are robbing us in broad daylight, looking us in the eye and grinning while doing it. Can we cut off their heads yet? Or, as Douglas Rushkoff argues, shouldn't we just let it die (h/t jimkeller)?

ETA. Glenn Greenwald, who is far more eloquent than i will ever be, described in cutting detail precisely how this game works. To paraphrase Germaine Greer, the poor and middle class have very little idea of how much the rich hate them.

The goal of meta-neo-inquiry is to answer, as well as possible, the question: "What is going on here, and what is the most just way to respond?"

Response is an indispensable element because meta-neo- ethics demands more emphasis on right action than on right words or right belief. It's not what you say or feel, it's what you do that matters. I can forgive errant words if your actions put you on the side of conscience.

A lot of the time the answer is pretty straightforward. Someone is beating up someone else; the most just way to respond is to stop the fight and find out why it started. Someone stole someone else's car; the most just way to respond is to recover the car and return it to its owner.

Sometimes though the answer is not straightforward at all, often because the truth has been occluded.

Discourse tends to be dominated by those in power; and so where conscience leads us into opposition with the power paradigm (on those fronts where the people in power are committing injustices and warping the cultural discourse to legitimize or cover it up), discourse itself becomes territory to be fought over.

Dissidents are kept off-balance by having even their very language pulled out from under them like a rug. One generation of dissidents comes up with a way to vocalize what is happening to them and what is wrong with their condition; it's an organic process which starts with art and fashion, or other kinds of consciousness raising. Political changes are demanded, and a few concessions are made. But by the time the next generation comes along, when it comes time to pass on this knowledge, all of the groovy terms and images they came up with to communicate their dissent have been misappropriated and commodified by the power paradigm. They've been rendered useless; their meaning has decayed.

It is fair to ask, of every text you encounter, what is the author's agenda? As time passes it becomes harder and harder to answer this question, because one's agenda in writing a text is a response to the culture to which she belongs. Cultures change but texts tend not to. So any text older than, say, 40 or 50 years, can easily be subverted by the power paradigm and people can be educated to read it a certain way; afterwards, one requires a specialized awareness of historical context to have any hope of recreating the original agenda of any text, especially if the text had any degree of subversiveness to it.

My contention is that this line of inquiry will demonstrate that many spontaneous movements over the centuries -- whether political, religious, philosophical, or artistic -- can be demonstrated to have their origin in subversion against the injustice of the power paradigm. The products of a "culture industry" established by the power paradigm itself tend not to endure because they carry remarkably little meaning to begin with, and most of us carry an innate recognition of that even if our consciousness has not been raised.

The American Indian Movement yesterday launched a new, interesting discourse on authority and colonialism, in declaring their intention to dissolve the treaties between the Lakota nation and the United States of America and seek international recognition as a soveriegn nation.

I have to confess, i read about what happened yesterday with a great deal of joy, but also a considerable amount of worry. The AIM is not well regarded by the US federal government and, assuming the feds don't just ignore this completely, they are likely to find themselves being designated a terrorist organization.

If that happens, any US citizen who expresses support for their cause would be considered by the federal government to be a terrorist sympathizer. Let that sink in for a moment.

Consider these two different articles describing yesterday's event:

( Read more... )

Here's what i want to draw my attention to, because it's essential to how the world and the US federal government are going to respond to this. The first article describes the Lakota delegation as a collection of freedom-seeking activists who pointedly do not represent the official tribal governments. The second article characterizes the delegation as a collection of Lakota tribal leaders, and treats their declaration as if it has official force.

So, what does this mean? Essentially the move is being done by a collection of influential activists who are denouncing the authority of their official tribal governments and claiming for themselves the authority to negotiate with the United Nations on behalf of the Lakota people.

Can they do that?

Well, that's a hell of a question, isn't it?

Who has the right to speak 'on behalf of' someone else? Well ideally, someone can only speak for you if you have individually granted them that authority. But functionally it's just not possible to get individual assent from every single person.

I'm not familiar enough with the AIM or with Russell Means and his allies to know how much popular backing and authority they have within the Lakota nation. I think, though, that they are acting on their own and counting on widespread popular support for their actions within the Lakota nation: a sort of after-the-fact delegation of authority from the populace to speak for them. The underlying chance they're taking is that a significant number of Lakota Indians will even notice it. So whether or not Means & co. can claim to speak for the Lakota people will become clear over time.

In the meantime, it may be said that they perceive a need to speak out, even without that official, on-paper authority which we all pretend comes from democratic elections. They perceive that they live under an unjust hegemony and feel driven by conscience to speak out against it and to seek allies, to seek like-minded people who have the position and authority to give assistance. As such, they're taking a chance that in claiming authority before the fact it will materialize after the fact when a 'critical mass' of people act as though they have it.

Which is why AIM is seeking the assistance and recognition of the new South American Superpower.

In any case, isn't this basically what a prophet does? I mean, setting aside religious and spiritual dimensions, a prophet is basically someone who speaks on our behalf before the rest of us even know that a thing needs to be said. I'm not saying Russell Means & co. are prophets (you can each be the judge of that), but i am saying that we don't always know who is and who isn't a prophet until after the fact.

Several years ago, Thay Hanh implanted a thought in my mind while i was reading one of his books (probably Living Buddha, Living Christ). It is one of those ideas that, once it sinks in and you apply it, can change your life.

In the Buddhist perspective, attachment is the source of sorrow, because when you get attached to things, you cannot easily adjust when things (as they do) change.

Anyway, Thay Hanh, on the ethics of long-term relationships, wrote that in his school of thought people are taught to treat their significant others as if they are honored houseguests.

The notable thing about the way we treat houseguests, is that we do not place any obligations on them, outside of the common obligations we have as human beings to be decent to one another. And not only that, but we give them a place of priority in our lives while at the same time reserving a sense of our own space.

It's such a very different way of viewing relationships from what we are taught in American society that i have had to turn this idea over in my head many times over the years since. More than any other thing i encountered in his writings, this thought stood out and grabbed my attention.

The underlying basis of this teaching is that fundamentally we choose how we treat people. In America (as, i guess, in many cultures) we often try to disguise the less savory things we do to one another by dressing them up in feelings. "I hit you because i got so angry i just couldn't help it." Well, point of fact, you can help it, because there are a lot of people you wouldn't hit no matter how angry you get, and if you can help it then, you can help it when you're around your partner.

I first read Thay Hanh's treatment of this subject at the time my marriage was ending, and it had a profound impact on the way i viewed the whole relationship, and what i wanted to do moving forward.

For one thing, i was profoundly disappointed in the way i had acted over the years. This is a recurring theme in my life, and it is a difficult part of endeavoring to be a better person: facing my missteps, especially where they have harmed people i care about; then finding a way to live with that, which begins with ensuring that i never do it again (whatever the harmful "it" happens to be).

But it also informed the way i felt i wanted to define my relationships moving forward. For one thing, i am not eager to blend my money, my personal space, my identity with another person ever again. My wife and i, for example, have separate bank accounts, separate bedrooms, separate beds, we don't know one another's passwords, and we like it that way.

The people i love are honored guests in my life. That means they are under no obligation to make themselves available for anything: not for sex, not for affection, not for household chores, not for letting me into their personal space, not for keeping things the way they are.

And as i write this, i am smarting from the pain of having to acknowledge how far outside of these ethics my actions have been recently. If i had been living by the full implications of this ethic, i would not have been caught off-guard when the emotional landscape of my life shifted as it did recently. And i write this not by way of apology, but by way of working things through thoroughly enough that i do not ever commit this wrong again.

What i have learned recently is that even if you approach a relationship from this perspective, it applies not only at the outset of the relationship but each and every moment anew. The emotional landscape of one's life is not permanent.

For someone who is polyamorous, that could mean for example when your significant other starts a new relationship, and suddenly is less available than they were before. They do not owe you the difference. Every bit of affection or attention one receives in a relationship is a gift freely offered, which can be withdrawn at any moment free of blame or guilt. In other words, it does not matter the reason why it is withdrawn. If/when a gift of this nature is withdrawn, one's response should be gratitude that it was given in the first place, not frustration that it has been withdrawn. Such a gift cannot be owned or expected, cannot be yoked with obligation - that road leads to abuse and mistreatment.

Note that one cannot avoid this dilemma by being monogamous, because partners can take up new passtimes or make new friends, and, similarly, they do not owe the difference in what energy they make available to their spouse.

Boston's Big Dig. The NYC steam pipes. And now a freaking highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Forget terrorists. I'm afraid of our crumbling infrastructure. Each of us is far more likely to be killed by collapsing bridges, falling ceiling panels, or exploding steam pipes than any terrorist.

Let's go further back and include the Katrina response in this, because it, too, reflects a similar lack of focus.

And, let's expand outwards and include ethylene glycol in toothpaste and melamine in pet food. Because all of these things are connected by a central theme... which is, ironically, the lack of anything resembling a common focus or vision.

We don't have any kind of meaningful common focus in our decision-making as a society. So many of the quandaries we're in -- from global warming to the oceans dying to resource depletion -- happen because millions of developers, politicians, investors, and laborers are each doing our own thing, with little or no regard to anything resembling a big picture.

We're winging it, and we can't do that anymore. Luck runs out.

Part of this problem has been described in economic discourse as the Tragedy of the Commons. But beyond the obvious difficulties of overuse and depletion, these problems are a tangible result of the dearth of meaningful discourse regarding economic problems and solutions.

Politics has become an advertising-driven enterprise. Campaign consultants talk about their candidate's image as a "branding" concern, and they judge the success of their efforts by what kind of emotions people have when they think of their client. They focus-group test sound-bites and slogans and key phrases which are designed to worm their way into your brain and install an emotional pushbutton so you respond the proper way when they press it. Meaning is driven from the process because meaning is unpredictable. If any candidate comes along who says something really meaningful, it could throw the whole scheme off, and everyone's jobs in the campaign-industrial complex would be threatened. The consultants, whose job it is to win elections, not solve society's problems, distrust meaning. And the media, of course, plays right along, encouraging this trend and helpfully marginalizing any candidate who threatens to bring in too much meaningful discussion. Because for them, too, meaning is dangerous.

This sounds like an abstract problem, but it isn't because people are dying as a result of this, and those of us who haven't been killed by it are seeing our quality of life be affected.

"Boring" things like routine maintenance and food inspections and disaster preparation -- you know, the stuff that should be a no-brainer -- gets de-funded and de-prioritized because it's easier to get a photo op standing in front of something new, bigger, shinier. The result is mile after mile after mile of empty shopping centers, brownfields, urban blight, crappy schools, decaying neighborhoods.

This isn't a call for a political solution, BTW. This problem can develop in a Communist nation (cf. Chernobyl) just as easily as it can happen in a capitalist nation. The real issue is lack of involvement. Lack of discourse. Lack of contemplation and consideration.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

At Boston Pride i tabled for the Network La Red for a couple of hours. A Latino fellow came by at one point and said he’s against domestic violence too — and hinted (i don’t remember his exact words) that he was obliquely referring to INS raids and similar anti-Latino actions of the US Government.

But it’s all connected, really. Oppression of a minority by a government is much the same thing on a bigger scale. The mechanisms in prevailing ideologies and institutions which make it easier for someone to get away with battering their partner also enable and justify official racist violence. These webs of abuse interweave, for example when a woman is brought into the United States as a domestic worker and then turned into a sex slave; the people holding her threaten to reveal her undocumented status to the INS as a way to keep her compliant.

Personal, first-hand experience can be unreliable; but it’s also the only thing we have that cannot be taken away from us. The messiness of our lives under oppression, the various survival strategies which “coincidentally” do not fit on religious moralistic laundry lists, make it more difficult for anyone to sympathize with us. That we live in a society that teaches us to compare other peoples’ lives to ideological checklists makes it easier for us to stay divided as well.

Understanding the way the world works, the way our laws and doctrines and “common sense” and logic and language have been constructed in order to maintain privilege for those who have it, is an important part of working for justice. But, just as “upholding the law” is taught to us as the way we know justice has been done, upholding ideology is taught to us as the way we know we’re right.

Which is why it’s significant and subversive to say “the personal is political.” Those of us who live, inconveniently and untidily enough, outside the lines like a stray crayon mark can give direct personal testimony to the wrongness (or at least incompleteness) of an ideology. This is true even when the ideology is radical; and the results can be disastrous for the unity of the radical community.

For example, during the 1970’s and 1980’s a prevailing ideology throughout much of the feminist movement was that “women are good and nurturing while men are bad and abusive.” (For the record, it’s worth noting as an aside that Andrea Dworkin, often cited as a gender essentialist, took a lot of grief for taking a vocal public position opposed to the idea of “natural female superiority”.)

In that climate, women who came forward seeking shelter because they were being abused by their lesbian partners were quite often silenced. Battered women’s shelters had been set up on a “female victim, male abuser” model and women who had been beaten by women were inconvenient and unwelcome.  When they did gain admittance to shelters they had to deal with homophobia from staff and other survivors.

Lesbian abusers, like battering husbands, used prevailing misogyny to frighten their partners. But they could use the threat of outing to keep their victim in line. They could use their partner’s lack of knowledge about lesbianism to keep them in the dark about the abusive nature of their relationship (”This is what lesbian love is like,” etc.) They knew, too, that their partners would not find sympathy within the women’s shelter network. Ideology, institution, and abuse woven together in a web keeping women down — and the experience from the survivor’s point of view is quite similar whether their batterer is a man or a woman.

Lesbian (and gay) abuse survivors were also silenced by the gay and lesbian activist community, seeking to establish an image of our community as “clean and upright.” They were afraid that seeing us discuss things like gay or lesbian partner abuse would place ammo in the hands of homophobes. Abuse survivors would just have to “take one for the team.”

Now, fortunately, there is some recognition of the issue, and movement in some areas, even though it is still largely uphill.

The thing is, anyone who silences another person on the basis of a prevailing ideology is doing the work of domination. Why is not as important as what. That is a part of what we are saying when we say the personal is political.

I think we should make it a kind of radical oath that we must resolve to hear what people say about their experience before ideology. It’s hard — it’s very hard. I see myself violating this all the time.

The Epoch Times is a newspaper which was founded primarily to report on human rights abuses in China. I have on my desk here at work a copy of a similar paper which was handed to me a few months ago in Harvard Square, carrying a story about the Chinese government basically farming dissidents for their organs -- rounding them up, carving them up while they are still alive, and putting their organs on the transplant market.

Excuse me, i don't mean to speak out of line, but didn't we, as a species, decide that we wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing the last time a government rounded people up and farm-cannibalized them? Every now and then some government or other will make a statement about this, but so far not a damn thing has been done about it.

And i don't know what to say to the people who stand on the street trying to hand these newspapers out to people who, for the most part, don't want to be confronted with it. It's truly chilling to know that you can stand on a streetcorner all day and talk openly about terrifying crimes going on against thousands of people right now, here's the evidence, and few will even care to listen, and fewer still will do anything about it.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of girls have had their developing breasts ironed by their parents to keep them from growing. This is ostensibly to protect them. The city of Bangalore in India is considering a law that would forbid many employers from scheduling women to work at night. This is ostensibly to protect them.

Elsewhere in the world, the Virginia Citizens Defense League organized a gun giveaway to pointedly spit in the eye of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who complains that people are buying guns in Virginia, where laws are lax and enforcement of them even laxer, in order to commit crimes in New York City. Gun control may or may not be the answer, but the message is clear: for trying to stem violence at the source, you get ridiculed.

At the source -- that is the key to what i am getting at with all of these things, the thread that connects them all. No one ever wants to talk about what is wrong with bullies and abusers; instead the attention goes on the victims, the survivors, or the potential victims. For example, the most popular answer to widespread gun violence in the US is to propose that more people get guns, so they can have standoffs with would-be gun criminals. Perhaps that may even work.

But what troubles me about this approach is that it leaves completely unquestioned the observation that people buy weapons and commit crimes with them. Try to address the problem from that angle, and people get furious. Why is the most popular solution to take thuggery for granted and meet thugs at their level, rather than try to change them?

Many cities in the US have a shelter system for battered women. These operate on shoestring budgets because abuse survivors are not a social priority. But this system is frustrating and disheartening because everything falls on the survivor. The abuser almost always gets off scot-free. The survivor often loses everything, including whatever social standing they had. After seeing this happen to one survivor after another, after seeing one abuser after another getting away with it and facing no consequences whatsoever, it becomes really disheartening. Is this truly a world where someone can beat a person they claim to love and no one will do a goddamned thing about it?

"But, Sabrina, the prisons are overflowing. We do hold thugs accountable." Yes, prisons are overflowing, but to what extent does this actually address or fix the problem? This subject demands its own series of journal entries actually, particularly the extent to which the prison system is itself a form of institutional bullying, and the extent to which crime survivors feel bullied by the justice system. Suffice it to say for this entry that the justice system and the prison-industrial complex takes for granted the existence of thugs and bullies.

Our justice system examines individual events as if they occur in a vacuum, excluding social and economic factors from consideration as much as possible. The goal of the court proceeding is to establish guilt or innocence with regards to single isolated incidents, with everything else being deemed irrelevant. The bigger questions of social environment are thus kept out, are never scrutinized; a verdict is reached, someone is imprisoned or goes free, and justice is said to be served. Court proceedings are part of the enforcement of laws which have been crafted to call attention to some forms of bullying while legitimizing other forms or creating loopholes for abusers.

And this criticism is not meant to say that we shouldn't examine individual events and seek accountability in such cases, but to say that this is not all there is to justice. We are leaving out the biggest part. Instead of addressing the systemic problems in society that cause and perpetuate abuse, our edifices of justice play whack-a-mole and, as often as not, whack survivors instead of perps. It is a reaction, not a response.

Not only are we accustomed to treating thugs as "inhuman others," we are unaccustomed to thinking of injustice as something that permeates a society. Catch the bad guy and you're done, right?

Lasting justice will require sustained focus and interest on thugs themselves, why they do what they do, and how they play on our fears in order to avoid scrutiny and accountability. It will require every single person to look inside themselves and face what they do not want to face -- the piece of them that sympathizes with bullies and sees their point of view as normal or even normative. It will require sustained scrutiny of our institutions for encroachment by abusers and their sympathizers. It will require facing head-on the culture of fear that keeps each one of us scrambling for our own survival instead of seeing the interconnected threads of injustice. It will require keeping some of the focus on the big picture, to recognize when our pursuit of injustice on the small scale has made it possible for some to get away with injustices on a bigger scale because no one was looking.

But most of all, we have to start expecting better from thugs and bullies. If we resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be bullies, we enable them.