Plutonia wrote:
I’m going to go back again to my experience with Native’s because their difficulties are so localized, so stark and so recent, that it is easy to see that their plight has been engineered by an external agency – a microcosm of our own situation, if you will:
A few years ago my very good friend had her third baby. She was living with her partner on an Indian Reservation (their history is different here in Canada than is the US) and his children from a previous relationship. With the new baby there were eight children in all. I went and spent a few weeks with them to do what I could to help out. One day when all the children had been fed and the laundry was done and the sun was shining, my friend took me out onto her front yard, baby in her arms, and pointed out to me all the houses where the sex offenders lived. I can't remember the number now but it was a lot. Here she is, caring for all these children, the threat to them as close by as just across the street. Even knowing what I knew, I was shocked. The thing is, all those people were her partner's relatives. Literally uncles, aunts and cousins. They all had been horrifically abused in Residential School. She didn’t have the luxury of distance, emotional or otherwise. Those that acted out their trauma within the community weren't cast out; they were recognized as wounded, in need of help and supervision, a dangerous but present part of the "us" of their whole community. What they were was done to them by an outside agency which meant to destroy them and over which they had no control and everyone knew and acknowledged it. What it meant in real-time was living with pain, collectively and individually.
See?
I do. That's admirable, if it works. And I honor the beauty and courage of the human spirit under extreme duress that it represents, whether it works or not, to be honest. Because nothing works perfectly. In a way, it's DIY identity politics, minus the jargon, which is totally the best kind, imo.
It doesn't make what was done and continues to be done to that community right, though. People should not have to accept and rise above the horrors that were visited on them by powers to whom their lives were worth less than those of their housepets and livestock. I just object to that on principle.
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Still....As far as coming up with a model for constructive accommodation of the cycle of abuse that commonly afflicts very poor and/or outcast communities, you could sure as hell do worse and I doubt that you could do better. That's very impressive. To what cultural (or, I don't know [
OTHER, AS APPROPRIATE] traditions/factors/whatevers do you attribute it?
Because I know women (and children, and men) in the Bronx to whom all the same basic criteria apply: They're part of a multi-generational community of traumatized children of traumatized children or traumatized children. The women who are also mothers with children in the home are often, if not usually, reliant on an extended-family network of support that also supports a relative or two who sexually abused them. Everyone in that support-network accepts the people in it as they are because they're their people, none of them have or have even known another option. It's important to the moms to protect their children from sexual abuse, especially their daughters. They say so. And they mean it. Those little girls usually end up getting abused anyway, though.
For a number of reasons. Because the whole burden of protecting them falls on the moms, who are sexual abuse survivors living in a community that accepts their abusers, which affects their judgment. Because nobody knows any other reality or customs than the ones they were born into and raised with. And also....Well. The short version would be: Because women with children are the most fixed and stable householders in an urban ghetto, typically, due to the quirks of federal and state assistance for the poor.
So there tends to be a certain amount of serial transient occupancy of the home by men who either aren't family or aren't the fathers of some of the children. And those men also grew up in an environment in which sexual abuse was endemic, as witnesses to it, at least. Sometimes victims, too, I guess, though I don't know. Little boys get physically abused as a matter of course in that world, but it's pretty homophobic. The sexual abusers of little boys, if any, are not therefore accepted as what they are by the community. So they wouldn't be visible, necessarily. And certainly not to me. Female children get sexually abused as the norm there, though. It's recognized as an evil to be avoided at all costs and not even a little bit socially sanctioned in formal terms. But in practice, it just keeps on hapnpening.
Real poverty is hell, in the same way war is. In short. People are still people, in all their beautiful and not-so-beautiful variety, even in hell. But environmental influences are a lot more forceful than one tends to give them credit for being. The ones to which one is oneself subject, I mean. It's much easier to see when you're a tourist in someone else's environment, figuratively speaking.
Anyway. Any thoughts about wherein the distinction lies?
