A New Year

Atlas, Way to the Deep Meadow, First Day of Childwinter, 525 M.E.:  This year, 525 of the Modern Era, will be the Year of Domination.

"We will dominate the streets," Donald Trump promised in 2020 at the height of the Georgia Floyd and related protests. To prove his point, he had peaceful protestors tear-gassed in D.C. and then posed for a  photo op in front of a church holding up a bible, now the iconic image of a white Christian nationalist crusade. Now, he's been reelected and has far fewer guardrails and safeguards surrounding him. 

“To be a man is to dominate others,” wrote Ben Tarnoff in the New York Review of Books. Masculine domination is the trait that allowed Elon Musk take over control of the U.S. government. It's present in Israel's continued genocide in Gaza, in Vladimir Putin’s unabated brutalization of Ukraine, in American women once again being forced to bear children against their will.

Tarnoff wrote that as a boy he learned that "masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it."

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power, the poet Mary Oliver once wrote. We will be known as a culture "that tried to vanquish insecurity for the few and cared little for the penury of the many. We will be known as a culture that taught and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity. And they will say that this structure was held together politically, which it was, and they will say also that our politics was no more than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of the heart, and that the heart, in those days, was small, and hard, and full of meanness."

How should we respond to this meanness, this hard-heartedness, this domineering masculine control? Feminist writer Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me and inventor of the term, "mansplaining," said "This might seem like a subtle difference, but it's an important one: you can wish harm to your opponents, or you can wish they cease to be able to harm. I like to think a lot of what I hope for is the latter if I cheer chaos and setbacks and scandals."

A lot of quotes today, I know and apologize, but I've been exposed to a lot of podcasts and memes the past few weeks and one quote led to the next, and so on.  I hope but can't guarantee that this trend will extend into the new year.