Anthony Weiner - and the rest of us.

Anthony Weiner got busted exploiting young women. They are often preyed upon by men who are plagued with an endless quest to staunch their insecurity and loneliness. Lots of guys are derailed by the illusion of comfort or pleasure or just numbness. This society purposefully and increasingly entwines sex with the hard-wired need for human closeness. It sells. But despite the ads, sex is just one possible (potentially lovely) means to closeness, not the only means.

Men are set up to be “on their own” from very early on, male babies are held far less than female babies. It’s harsh, and the accumulating isolation leaves men sitting ducks for anything that looks like an offer of reprieve from the feelings of loneliness. The problem is from long ago and can’t be solved without looking at the conditions that created it. That early loss of connection can only be grieved. Guys are asked to go it alone at a too tender age and they go it alone ever after. And the desperate pull to quench that isolation with a counterfeit fix isn’t easily resisted– “maybe this time I’ll get it right”, “maybe this one will end this ache”.

Women are set up to take care of every human problem. We want to salve the world -or we make a rigid decision not to. But still we are vulnerable to giving our all without regard for our own real interests - we don’t take ourselves into account in our mission to care for others. The task is linked with what we’ve been told is our only worth. Survival of the human race demands that we erase ourselves.

I have been thinking it would be good for men and women to try not to exploit one another where we are vulnerable to being “used”. Men have one version of self-sacrifice (like, cannon fodder in wars) and women have another (like, centuries of unpaid, unacknowledged labor as moms and caregivers). Women are trained (hurt really) into trying to make men feel better – at all costs. And since we have no institutional power we often try to absorb it through our connections to men of influence. Men will do anything to feel even the pretense of closeness (hence prostitution – you don’t believe the woman actually likes you, but “it will do”). Men are deluded thinking they can live with that ruse and they lose all integrity pretending it doesn’t damage real humans who are female.

We live in a society that gives us very few options for closeness. We grow up in this confusion and then try to find a partner. Then all that past loneliness is supposed to magically vanish and be solved by our true love. And when it isn’t we despair: we give up on closeness or hunt for someone who will make the bad feelings go away.

So as Anthony Weiner leaves the scene, we lose one of our best fighters for health care and his family is embarrassed. But really, in our culture, it just means that everyone else will go further underground, hiding the places we feel lost and alone: trying to mend a societal problem with private solutions.

But what happens to our hope that people get to love each other fully and openly? And why is it that adult human closeness is presumed to require sex almost exclusively? And how do we think about sex if it is sometimes part of the equation in trying to find each other? Is there another option than letting it all be reduced to a sound bite, a joke, or a self-righteous punch line?

It is past time to stop the exploitation of women by men, to stop allowing boys to grow up so isolated that they self-destruct and/or destroy others, and to stop blaming one another for our common struggles around the human need for closeness. We need to start finding ways to make it possible for all of us to admit how we each got separated from one another and do the work necessary to make that different.

- K Webster

City goes to Court Over Charter Schools

City goes to Court Over Charter Schools

"...Complaints have been raised from Harlem to Coney Island as charter schools increasingly share buildings with public schools in an attempt by the city to maximize existing space rather than build new schools. But the teachers union, the NAACP and some parents accuse the city of violating a new state law that says co-locations involving charters must be equitable..."

K's Response Jun. 21 2011 09:52 AM:

There are large questions in this issue. Key to me is whose ethos is will run our schools. What are our goals as a community when we say we will “educate”? How do we fund experiments and who gets to run those experiments?

The problem isn’t just what happens to everyone else who isn’t in a well-funded charter school. But whose ethos drives schools? A few wealthy philanthropists? A board of hedge fund guys? How does that involvement not end up affecting the model for “success” in a school?

I have learned to think of education as learning what we need to know to have the lives we want. That requires a certain amount of autonomy from the dictates of corporate or other narrow interests. How do we have schools that don’t just become an extension of the world-view of the moneyed few?

The charter vs. public school once again divides and conquers parents and communities who are trying to fight for their children. Many of us have limited resources to wage that battle. Ruthless competition has wound up being the major message: lotteries that decide whether you “make it” or not.

But all parents have a vested interest in all schools being good places to for our children to find their own thinking about this life. All of society has that same investment. But if corporations are shielded from paying their taxes, allowed off-shore dodges and then given a free hand in our schools to invest their “profits” as they please while the poorly funded public schools are strangled by the lack of adequate resources- how does this move us forward as an open society?

Corporations have already become persons according to this Supreme Court. Now they want to mold our children. Not acceptable. I’d rather they pay their taxes and let the teachers, principals, parents and students who have been in the trenches of poorly funded education tell them what to do with the cash. We may agree on some things, disagree on others, but definitely, money should not do the deciding.