✡ Let me start by saying rape is terrible and I often think it should be punished by death. I am not normally a death penalty supporter, but rape just seems so overwhelmingly wrong and perhaps worse than murder, because the victim has to endure. Having spoken to rape and beating victims there are often deep scars that are painful to observe and I can only imagine enduring them is a million times as painful.
With that, I was listening to NPR this morning and hear about the case in Richmond, CA where a girl was gang raped in her school. This is beyond terrible.
The thing I am reacting to, and want to express here is this quote, which caused me to have a conversation with the radio and Ellie:
“The dehumanizing actions of these young men, and I stress ‘young men,’ is frightening,” he said. “Where has their humanity gone?” A lot of people in Richmond are asking the same question — even the cops.
Well, let us ponder this for a moment. Where has humanity gone? Specifically, where has “their” humanity gone. I will react to both separately.
The use of their insinuates that this speaker doesn’t see a relation between himself and the rapists. This is in fact the issue! If people were able to see themselves more holistically as “one” then the need for a course correction in our nation would seem less foreign and abstract. Sometimes I really want to hand out copies of Locke and Rousseau for people to read so they can reacquaint themselves with the notion of a collective nation not based in tribal urges. We, yes we, need to address our lost humanity.
The rest is a common topic for me.
How can we expect kids, with less shaped sense of self, to be immune from the foaming right wing rhetoric of hate that vilifies the other via dehumanization? How can we expect our kids to think treating people as equal humans as normative when we legislate discrimination thereby clearly teaching them some people are less than others? How can we expect them to understand that all people are equal, unless they are Muslims who instead of being respected should be invaded and eliminated by the 100,000s? How can we expect our kids to value human life when we send them constant daily (hourly?) signals that this value doesn’t matter? I can go on and on with examples of how bankers reinforce this notion by growing rich on the backs of the multitudes, how capitalism, unfettered, uses humans as the raw materiel of growth, and of course I can rant for hours about how the misinterpretation of the teaching of Jesus are used to fuel and fan dehumanizing hatred every hour of every day in this nation and around the world. I could also tell you how the Catholic Church reinforces the notion that women are property thought the marital vows, the projects it invests in and the treatment of nuns versus priests.
In the end, are we at all surprised where our humanity has gone?
I am not in the least. It take work to reverse the erosion of civil entropy and most of us are just pretty fucking lazy.
I would like to think that this thought would cross the quoted man’s mind and maybe others in his community so that they can address the internal root causes of dehumanization around themselves.