BEAR BY BEAR

Human beings think with their bodies in very complex and mostly unconscious ways.  The most powerful mechanisms underlying rationality reach down to the cell level.  For instance, what the incredible neuroscience now possible can tell us.  This was in “Nature Communications":  “The scientists discovered two types of neurons that they found particularly interesting: one that tells the brain food is present, and one that tells the brain whether it’s hungry. But the brain seemed to tamp down the activity of those neurons when food was absent as a way of conserving energy.”  http://www.nature.com/ncomms/index.html  This study used snails after lettuce, but it certainly suggests interesting cellular and molecular workings that are probably also in humans.

Maybe explanations of animal perceptions seem to some people to suggest that humans are just animals, to diminish God’s participation in the world, making animals seem too much like machines.  But other people feel that animals ARE like machines and anything that makes them seem human-like interferes with decisions.  They should have no special status or fantasy souls.

Of all the groups trying to understand and resolve problems with grizzly bears, the ones I greet with the most skepticism are the humane societies because those are the groups I know best, having worked with them in the national urban context.  They are where the money is but where it goes not enough people “knows.”  It doesn’t go to the animals.  

Aside from supporting the institution -- as it raises more money to support the institution -- humane societies often become cults for individuals, some deserving and others not.  We used to joke that “Fund for Animals” was for just one animal: Cleveland Amory, their founder and leader until his death.  He insisted on only the best luxuries in his own life.  His family was privileged and he moved in the “highest” circles of society so it was his normal.  He loved sensational journalism and found vivid causes from wild burros to the Sea Shepherds.  His following and profits were huge.

From up close and personal, the Humane Society of the United States is a platform for a zealot with no limits, Wayne Pacelle.  He would not like you to realize how many humane societies there are, such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or the American Humane Association, which protects children as well as animals.  Investigate these people carefully before sending them money.  Local is better.  And realize that some animal control operations are more humane than the humane societies purport to be.

From one angle groups that address grizzlies use the same template as the humane societies formed for domestic animals, especially pets.  The ASPCA was founded by Henry Bergh responding to the abuse of work horses before there were automobiles.  Part of humane society work is teaching people what IS abuse of animals and part of it is responding to cruel and neglectful people.  It’s all about individuating the animals, so they have names and stories, and there are sentimental themes about adoption: “forever homes” and so on.  Some run shelters, some enforce laws on a contract basis for governmental bodies, and the Oregon Humane Society has a pet cemetery.

Bart and Doug Seuss

I’m not taking a moral point of view about cats or grizzlies or whatever. I just want to point out that dealing with the animals is quite different from dealing with their terrain, their habitat, but the latter may be more effective.  Vital Ground, which evolved out of the most personified of bears, Bart, keeps its dignity by making that choice.  Specifically, knowing the importance of large uninterrupted spaces of land in order to keep individual bears in breeding relationship to save the species, they locate and buy the little patches of land that interrupt free circulation of bears and help join adjacent parks, wildernesses, and protective private land.  

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society takes the same kind of focus, not for the individual bear, but for the species as an indicator of habitat ecology health and as an umbrella species.  Bears are at the top of the food chain and travel the farthest (close to wolves) so if something goes wrong with them, the whole webwork of life has got to have something wrong with it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgEuO7xvozY   Bear troubles reflect problems with land status.

When dealing with bears as individuals, one enters some powerful behavior loops wired into every mammal from the beginning.  I’m talking about sex, death, conflict, food, protecting babies (all species), agony and attachment.  (Some people are powerfully attached to agony, which seems counter-intuitive but is well-documented.)  These elemental triggers are survival level.

The Oregon Humane Society in Portland is independent of government though they once had the contract to enforce leash law, license dogs (dog licensing is a form of rabies control), and respond to cruelty.  Two women at OHS did their public relations and the three of us were friends, often lunching together to swap ideas.  I’d be the only one in uniform.  Zizi (her real name) was a classic movie star blonde, competent and socially prominent.  You know how much movie stars and their pets go together.  (I’m including Trigger and Silver: cowboys love their horses.)  My bosses (not Mike Burgwin but the management higher up) so badly wanted me to be like Zizi, because they figured that would distract the public and glamorize their own image by association.  They were right.  But I’m not the type.

There was a second woman, smaller, darker, and far more shadowed.  Her private life was dramatic, all about abusive men.  She often had bruises.  When she was trusting, she spoke about the ecstatic bond of violence and said she envied the antelope its intense final moments in the jaws of a leopard clamped on its throat.  Most people react with repugnance and turn away, so we never really learn about it or how much it is part of being human.  The paleo-pushers tend to stick to diet.  

Prostitutes (especially the children who do survival sexwork) know that abuse, even to the point of death, is often part of a “sexual” transaction.  Cops and social workers know how addictive are the molecular circuits energized by danger and the fantasy of finally being redeemed by love.  You could call it Timothy Treadwell syndrome.

Empathy with near-death of the helpless, whether victims of ebola, a refugee child drowned, a child being dragged around a gorilla enclosure, or a tortured puppy, makes us want to see and participate second-hand.  Part of it is wanting to the rescuer and part of it is a kind of affiliation with an overwhelming, uncontrollable force.  Charismatic megamammals with names and stories grab us physically, not with muscles but with molecular surges we call emotion.  Adrenaline, serotonin, auto-highs.  We are far more likely to write checks and make laws about such climax events than we are to spend the same amounts on habitat or land protection or even practical defence measures like electric fences.

The current investigators and protectors who work against the abuse of humans tell us that one in six men has been sexually attacked as a child.  The figures on women are only slightly different.  Consequences to the kind of people who form our culture, our choices and assumptions, are sublimated into how we relate to animals, most of it deeply unconscious.  

If you can tap into some of that — say “Bambi” or “The Biography of a Grizzly” or “Black Beauty” — you’ll have a powerful public response, maybe worth a lot of money.  Rational logic has nothing to do with it.  “Finding Nemo” is another example, even though it was a cartoon.  When people told me they loved the movie, I’d ask them how a child/fish whose mother died, who couldn’t find home, who was always in danger, who was finally trapped by the ultimate threat — a dentist! —could be appealing to watch.  Their eyes would wiggle back and forth in that “tell” meaning “this does not compute.”  Brain-blank.

The same dynamics apply strongly to bears, who are often presented as cubs.  Bears as maternal, bears as monsters, bears as mysterious sleepers, bears as lovers, humans that cross the species barrier, humans who mother cubs, dictators who bare-chested ride flying brown bears — this is all the stuff of myth and emotion. 

Putin knows the Russian love of bears.

It would be stupid to try to suppress or discount such ineffable but gripping mythic dimensions of being human.  But it is smart to ADD the rational, the logical, the research-based knowledge that can keep the balance and prevent deaths.

CHILDREN ARE A CULTURAL FETISH

Zuni fetish

Porn is a cultural fetish.  A fetish is something that makes your underconsciousness turn your autonomic neural system (emotions) on hard, pun or no pun.  The trigger could have been built in, could have been acquired by conditioning (the association of two things until one causes the other), or possibly by some single intense event.  It could be naturally biological or so unnatural as to be incredible and possibly funny, like having a great rush of emotion at the sight of a kitchen spatula, because someone used one to spank you.

The primary fetish of our culture is children.  Therefore, they are the object of our porn.  Like our autonomic system, it works by opposed pairs:  we have one intense flush of emotion when our children do well, excel at sports or school, attract praise for their presentation . . . and an opposite flush of emotion for miserable discarded delinquents who do disgusting things, esp. if they are our sons and daughters.  The revulsion is so strong that some beat their children, unable to tolerate any bad reflection on them whether social criticism or a breach in their authority.  (The opposite of love is not hate, for love and hate are intertwined in human emotion.  The opposite is indifference.  Or cold rage, not connected to the hot part of the autonomic system.) 

In the public world, the hot haters of children insist that authorities confine bad children, punish them, and in some places kill them. (In the slums of Buenos Aires it is estimated that 57 have been simply shot by the police.  In Missoula a man shot dead a student for being in his garage.)  The cold haters of children enslave them as soldiers or laborers.  Or defund any system that would protect, feed, and educate them. 

Individuals at the mercy of their own autonomic emotional systems may confuse nurture with sex, begin as kissing and end as fucking.  This essay has as bookends two stories.  One is the report of a man whose father beat him.  The father would begin in the conventional cultural way of a whipping, but at some point his eyes changed and he went “amuck”, out of control, frenzied, and nothing would stop him except the boy becoming comatose and he himself becoming exhausted.  This was not just hot but molten.

The other story was told by a trick who had paid a young boy to let him suck the boy off.  He was in the middle of the act, stopped to take a breath, happened to look up, and saw that the boy, with tears streaming down his face, was sucking his own thumb.  The trick stopped and never again abused small boys.  He had not understood that they had feelings and that they didn’t like what was done to them.  In both of these stories the men were treating boys as fetishes, not as real human beings. 

According to Webster, “a fetish is a strong and unusual need or desire for something;  a need or desire for an object, body part, or activity for sexual excitement; an object that is believed to have magical powers.”

If one looks around, there are innocent signs of child-worship.  Some of my Halloween visitors were wearing costumes that must have cost fifty dollars -- maybe more -- and this is a small, modest, farming community.  Somehow people find money to send kids to Washington, DC on school trips, or to incredibly expensive universities, and buy them cars when they are barely old enough to be legal drivers.  In the local high schools where I taught briefly, the kids controlled the teachers, insisting that lessons had to be “fun” and conform to their expectations of what should be taught, which they mostly got from TV series.

The underconsciousness (which I am using as a Freudian might use “subconscious” or "unconscious") is pre-literate, notoriously hard to understand and more felt than thought.  Freud himself, three-piece-suit patriarch that he was, feared his unconscious and should have, though he couldn’t manage it enough to stop his cigar fetish and resulting cocaine fetish that ended his life.  Very bad example of what to do.  Color me Jung.

You can feel a fetish if you stop and consider.  Very much like the signs of a flight/fight/freeze autonomic reaction: the blood supply engorges some things and drains others, certain chemicals rush out of their manufacturing organs, consciousness changes to hyperalert and contradictorily shuts out everything that is not crucial to action.  If there is no escape at all, one’s mind goes to dissociation, like the mouse hypnotized by the snake.  Great danger, intense desire, hard-earned triumph, assurance of high status are all triggers.  Scary movies on Halloween.  Driving cars fast late at night on bad roads.

It’s become conventional for desirable material goods to be described as pornographic:  house porn, food porn, clothes porn.   They’re really fetishes.  I feel it when I leaf through my little collection of books about fine houses.  They’re in several categories: the New Age hand-made houses of California; the fine glass/stone/log/corten-roof lodges in the Montana mountains.  But also Mary Emmerling’s cottages where furnishings are often recycled or repurposed and color schemes are the key. In my birth family, houses were a fetish, our safety and unity, because of the long deprivation of homesteading and farming.  We are emotional about the places we’ve lived.

 Mary Emmerling house vignette

Children are not a fetish of mine partly because of awareness of their consciousness.  I cannot see them as objects, I do not see pregnancy as redemption or status (our culture wants to), and I saw that to my parents children were a burden.  I also resented any person who EVER made me into an object.  I will NOT be controlled (I can be persuaded), and therefore must be cautious around people for whom control is a prompter of violence.  Like children.

Emotional desire, controlled by the autonomic system and other underconsciousness, is the key to survival and drives all action, including this writing.  But it feels as though it is from outside, like a movie or a sexy person or a magnificent kitchen.  In fact, all desire and therefore all porn/fetishes are from the internal response, but the promise to be able to call out desire and satisfy it with “meaning” (which always goes back to the promise of survival, if only in thought) is a commodity and therefore creates a market.  It literally pays to keep us all throbbing and engorged with desire.

But we become habituated.  The word “fuck” is used so much it’s meaningless.  Nudity is no shock.  But making something rare, illegal, and dangerous will restore value.  The FBI and their “stings” make that obvious.  Otherwise, why would anyone without a seriously damaged psyche consider a pre-adolescent child a sex object?  

The child-like Marilyn is reading James Joyce.

When it comes to porn, the law has a problem.  Since the real phenomenon is in the individual underconsciousness, it cannot be defined with bright lines as the boundaries of a useful law must be laid out.  This “I know it when I see it” conviction of judges is only based on what triggers them, mostly old white conservative men whose only escape is golf and whiskey, much the same demographic as legislators.  As more women and minorities enter the arena, the definition of porn begins to change.  Invasion of personal space, laws that reinforce poverty while enriching the law-makers, persecution of the stigmatized, treating children as street vermin will be the new illegalities.

It’s not hard to understand why children are our American fetish: all the wrong people produce them as though they were puppies, the cost of simply giving birth naturally is impossibly high, supporting a family takes two incomes so that there is no time to spend with kids unless it’s meant to improve the family prospects for the future, like transporting them to lessons and sports.  Daily we see images and stories of children lost, suffering, misused, destroyed and fear for our own children.  If they go wrong, we will be held legally responsible, and many of them are angry with us -- but we don’t know why.  The answer is not sex -- it’s talk.  THEIR talk.  As though they were actual people.

CRUISING IDEAS

Some assumptions simply are not true.  But I can find confirmation in media reports and formal “papers” of at least the following:

Not all homeless kids are impossible to handle or mentally ill.  Some are.

Not every kid who has been sexually abused becomes a sexual abuser.  A few do.  It’s the ones who sing “I’m depraved on account a’ I’m deprived” who produce the illusion.  But there IS truth to it -- just not universal.

Not every family is destructive, neglectful, violent, or chaotic.  Too many are.  And it has a lot to do with poverty.

Not every single-parent family with only a mom is dysfunctional -- they just are a lot harder and take more energy.  Same for military families, 2 career families, single-parent families with only a dad, and so on.

Not every baby is born out of wedlock.  Last year 42% were.  In the US.  All social categories.

Not every male is sexually harassed/abused/raped/violently raped to the point of death.  At least one in six is somewhere on that continuum.

Not every girl on a campus is sexually harassed, abused, raped while drunk and unconscious, killed in an act of sexual violence.  At least one in eight is.  Many more than that just clam up and take it.  

So how do we know?  Sometimes there are pretty reliable studies but you could probably challenge everything above if you were looking for exact figures.  Those of us who live near or on Indian Reservations, whether or not we are Indian, realize that there is a LOT of violence and much of it is against women and most of it is mixed with drug and alcohol abuse, esp. the latter.  Ask any Tribal Cop.  Try to get figures?  Impossible.  The victims suck it up.  They hide.  They scatter.  They trust no one.  Today a cashier in my bank, female with a brother who is a deputy sheriff, told me that there were deputy sheriffs she knew of who stalked young women enough to creep the girls out, including her daughter.  She said now those rats had been pushed out, moved on.  I wonder.

Plenty of deprived kids -- hated, beaten, raped, starved, tethered and caged -- still manage to become decent human beings.  Some have help and some don’t.  They have to think of it, know what it is they’re trying for, have some examples (“modeling”).

How many people keep in mind that the whole LBGTQX thing has so many letters because they are so assorted?  It’s a rainbow -- not a checkerboard.  A recently arrived minister in Montana declared there was no race problem in the prisons here -- because all she knew in the big city was black and white -- to her, red was invisible.

So, the varieties of “gay” include  (I sorta clumped ‘em):

1.  People who sexually desire other people of the same gender who are also gay.

2.  People who sexually desire other people of their own gender who are straight.

3.  People who are vanilla in all ways except sexual desire.

4.  People who don’t feel as though they are the right gender: their bodies don’t match their psyches.  They may want surgery to be consistent.

5.  People who are fine with being their gender but don’t fit the way their culture assigns gender traits and roles.  (Girls who want to be scientists, boys who want to dance ballet; tough tomboys, quiet library gents.)

6.  People who like to dress up as the opposite gender.

7.  People who just like sex and don’t particularly care which gender the hole might be.

8.  People who were forced into same sex performance (prison, isolation) and got used to it.

9.  People who would just as soon take care of matters themselves.

10.  Paraphilias: displaced preferences, fetishes.

11.  People who conflate sex with violence, control, mastery, domination, pain with them only dishing it out, never being hurt themselves.

12.  People who long to be hurt, controlled, dominated.

13.  People who just want to watch.

Sex is a force, not an object.  A verb, a tide, a wind, a process.  NOT a “thing” that stays the same.  In fact, the human race only persists because sex is a force that adapts, that sneaks through the cracks, an opportunistic irresistibility.  It cannot be managed by force without snuffing out people.  It is often cleverly disguised as something else.  That's called sublimation.

Not all gays are pedophiles.

Not all gays who are pedophiles want sex with little children or babies.  There are KINDS of pedophilia.  It means “love of children” and doesn’t necessarily have to be twisted or inappropriate or damaging.

Adolescents of any gender may be okay with relationships with their preferred gender with age differences.  Much older people might be okay or not.  (Older means access to “adult” things like booze and big money.)

Adolescents want to be responsible for their own sex lives but may be unable to protect themselves from predators.  Sometimes they don’t survive.

Criminal laws are decided by cultures.  They have the power to imprison and thus impose their standards.  Like any other difference across boundaries, those who identify and enforce laws can use that to their profit.  Power means the ability to break laws and to use exemptions for bribes.  Every culture pretends their way is the only way to go, because they figure if people know there are other ways, they won’t conform.  They’re right.

This North American culture expects sex to define identity, success, wealth, worthiness -- why else would a college student, son of a movie director, shoot girls dead for not “putting out.”  Boys can be shot for the same reason -- not usually by girls.  

In our culture sex is attached to appearance, not to capacity for intimacy.

Violence is worse when it’s intimate.  

Intimacy is worse if there’s no consent.

Violence is worst if it’s intimate, there is no consent, and it’s a family member.

Being blood related is not the same as being attached, bonded, protective and protected.  Genetics means nothing if the emotional relationship is missing.  The Western fascination with “blood” (really meaning genetics) is because ownership, entitlement, and governance are linked to genetically-based inheritance.  It's a way of keeping order.

Economic and/or political forces push people into certain roles and behaviors.  If there are a number of people in a category, it is possible to speak of them as a group and give them a name, particularly if the category is based on power, sex or religion.  So people who were attracted to a life of strict self-discipline, celibacy, simplicity, and devotion which they expressed ecstatically in a communal context, became “Quakers” because they quaked.  It was a pejorative name, meant to be mocking, which they claimed for themselves.  Now it is a name that has lost its negative overtones and is a rather large complex of people who have developed variations and subgroups from the original root.  In some ways, assuming that a “name” means a real entity is totally misleading.  Names “create” entities that are fantasies.

The term “gay” seems to be something like that.  At first a term about a carefree attitude, then prostitutes, then an endorsement of hedonism, then slipping into a euphemism -- first used evidently by Gertrude Stein in regard to female pursuits -- then to wildly carefree males, with a scornful sub-category by kids that means stupid or weak.  But in recent decades it was politicized in something like the way “black is beautiful” became a rallying statement.  (But how black do you have to be to be beautiful?)  

Gay was a cry of freedom and letters kept being added until there was a “rainbow.”  It was a defense, and a demand.  The connection to human hard-wired desire preference or body identity was subsumed by the demand to set one's own terms  in the face of culturally imposed rules and expectations.

So far, no one has really analyzed the relationship of gay to heterosexual “Pick Up Culture” as has been shockingly claimed and illustrated by media dealing with the recent shooting of women who scorned a Pick Up Artist with a pretty face and an ugly attitude.  Pick Up Culture asserts that all women should go to bed with any man who asks, an amazing reversal of the old “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” male psychologist’s claim that he would go to bed with any woman who wanted sex from him because he had counseled so many neglected and ignored women.  (And that was BEFORE Viagra!)  PUC claims the idea from men-on-men sex -- that could be musical chairs because no one could get pregnant -- but then came AIDS and death.

Recently I watched a film that was supposed to be about recreating a section cut out of a movie called “Cruising.”  Then I watched “Cruising” -- they’re both on Netflix.  And I watched the voice-over version by the writer/director, who claimed he had the brilliant idea of attaching an ordinary murder mystery to the leather bar scene in Manhattan and exploiting the whole connection until it became a public conviction.  He named it, he said -- not “leather bars” but “leather bar murders,” as an inevitable entailment of cruising.   He claimed that he filmed extensively in real leather bars (imagine that!) but that the footage was mysteriously lost, but they re-enacted it, but then that disappeared, too.  His assertion was that most of the men in the leather bars, so costumed and menacing, were in fact bored young professionals who never went much farther than a little pinch and tickle, letting their butts hang out, etc.  Maybe so.  Any statistics?  Standard deviation?

High class homosexuals, thanks to so many witty playwrights and novelists, have had an image of being Oscar Wilde if not Ambrose Bierce -- insightful, elite and acid.  They are a genre.  The leather stuff came in via the bikers, Marlon Brando and the Wild Ones.  The two attitudes -- when rightly-blended -- were fire and gasoline.  Nevertheless, they were as much a sales platform as a lifestyle, and as always the buyer should beware.

DISSOCIATION, AVOIDANCE, HYPERAROUSAL

It’s what -- sixty years? -- since Kinsey asked men about their sex lives and rocked everyone with the news that many of them had sex with other men? This in a time when they were well-advised not to admit it? And now we’re barely getting around to surveying children about whether they’ve ever been sexually abused. They have. In such high proportions -- a third admitted it which means many unadmitted or even unrecognized or repressed victims-- that we’re rocked all over again. And yet why are we surprised when our whole culture mixes sex, power, money, ownership over and over. Now even JonBenet Ramsey’s father is saying maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to dress a little child up like a seductive grown woman and put her on display. Ya think?

Now the research has gotten far enough along to identify three traumatic consequences of sexual abuse for both boys and girls. These consequences re-impose the trauma over and over.

(1) highly distressing intrusive thoughts of the sexual abuse,

(2) avoidance of thoughts, emotions, and situations related to the abuse,

(3) hyperarousal.

Pretty understandable even in terms of ordinary trauma, but with the added element of sex, stakes go up because so much of our idea of morality is bound to sex of any sort. We don’t worry about the morality of money or even about the morality of killing civilians in war, but sex is to us more powerful than religion, indeed it has become a religion with priests of its own. Not that differently than in the most backward shiria law countries who kill girls to rid themselves of dishonor.

In fact, I would say that our whole culture is showing these same three symptoms. To review:

(1) highly distressing intrusive thoughts of sexual abuse,

(2) avoidance of thoughts, emotions, and situations related to abuse,

(3) hyperarousal.

Check out the plots of our media, take a look at our newspapers or the behavior of politicians as zealously reported, listen to the imaginary life of right wing radio hate-mongers. They use the abusive language, they describe and exaggerate behavior, they express distress and scorn, but all the time in the midst of their obsession they insist that we should repress (avoid) such thoughts, emotions, and situations. Good counselors know that repression is a great way to remain attached while pretending not to be. Hyperarousal -- yes, I’m surprised that so many of them need viagra since they so easily rise to rage. But most of them are old men.

These intrusions, often thoughts (eg, self-blame, self-loathing) are then avoided through:

dissociation,

substance use,

or other avoidant-coping strategies.

“This avoidant stance, in sexual situations, can be hazardous as it interferes with the ability to confront risk, negotiate safer sex, and assert safety behaviors. Hyperarousal, chronic activation of the alarm response, interferes with the person’s ability to distinguish safe from unsafe situations. In sexual situations, the symptoms of hyperarousal impede the ability to make accurate and realistic sexual risk appraisals. This may lead to a loss of self-efficacy (or other important social or cognitive variables integral to self-care), as one doubts one’s ability to identify risk or one’s ability take steps to offset it.” (J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 59, Number 4, April 1, 2012 www.jaids.com | 331Editorial J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 59, Number 4, April 1, 2012)

Erik Erikson wrote two books that speculated about how some individuals can be representative of their times: “Young Man Luther” and “Gandhi’s Truth.” If a person can epitomize patterns in the culture, why can’t a culture personify the structure of individuals? Are we not now in a period that doubts its self-efficacy, it’s ability to take care of itself? Don’t our politicians doubt our ability to identify risk and take steps to offset it? Don’t we go back and forth between being obsessed with sex and trying to deny every trace of it?

What are the traumas that threw us into this? Pretty clear that 9/ll was a double-phallic cataclysm, two towers destroyed by two airliner jets in a from-nowhere coup. What about the spectacle of a president who got his semen on a dress whose owner flaunted it on television? What about the neglectful and confused destruction of a major, even iconic, city, New Orleans with its promises of blue-hot nights? But maybe it started with the twentieth century wars, for which some of those old men are nostalgic. They were important then.

Looking at these events in such a “high culture” way is a little fanciful but no more so than post-modern thought. In fact, maybe it IS post-modern thought. But it has no particular value unless it suggests some way to address it. Dissociation (a changed consciousness that eliminates awareness of the problem) and substance abuse are rampant but seem ineffective. Projection is the one we like the best -- it’s all the fault of the “other.”

The usual ways of addressing trauma include talking -- which can mean testifying about what happened, which requires a convincingly protected place where the talking can happen. (A court setting is hardly safe but stories written under a pseudonym might work. Or the Internet.) Art is a kind of “talking,” an expression of emotion that resolves the pressure and, given the acquisition of skill, can provide a healing sense of accomplishment. (Our schools are eliminating the arts.)

What about the content of the secrets? Research is demanded because it has become clear that our assumptions are wrong. What we think is true and happening is only a comforting fantasy that describes a set of forces and practices that don’t exist anymore, if they ever did. Family, dependable jobs, homes, retirement funds, investment.

Supply of basic needs (housing, food, medicines) is woefully lacking for too many people in this culture. It’s not uncommon for a troubled family to choose one person among them, often a child or maybe a woman or the darkest person, to be the scapegoat, heap them with blame for whatever happens, and throw them out. The whole culture does this, identifying children to send into the labyrinth where the minotaurs of combat, commerce, and cupidity lurk. We make sure the young have no guiding thread, no map, no GPS, by underfunding schools and indulging in as many wild theories about education as we have about diet.

Young people run from us. Who can blame them? Why are we surprised?

TIME IS THE CHALICE

Like whole cultures, individual human beings have crises that can’t be resolved without a major transformation, a move to a new frame of reference. In the best of all possible worlds, this is an evolution rather than a personal revolution, and one moves to a new understanding that accommodates the new facts of life without too much grief. On a planet where the populations have been stirred with a stick and have viewed the planet from outer space where they can’t even be detected except for the damage they’ve caused, many of us have a LOT of mazeway resynthesizing to do.

A mazeway formed in a child’s mind, especially one trapped in an impossible situation, is probably the hardest to reframe later on. A neglected, abused child is ALWAYS going to see the world as hostile. It’s deep as the marrow in their bones. Even tougher to reassure are children who have had a loved and protected life for a while, but then were betrayed and abandoned by parents. Even if it was because the adults were killed in a car accident, how can the child ever believe it won’t happen again? (And it might.)

If a beloved parent or role model suddenly demands something painful and against all the previous rules, what can a child do? Run away? Then what? Where do they go? Some abused children aren’t even old enough to walk. The only escape is death. They are spared the suffering of the child raised with love to the point of awareness, then thrown into hell. A kid with enough inner resources can harden up beyond the possibility of anyone being able to reach him -- or her -- ever. If that protecting shell is broken, madness and suicide can follow.

More likely, and more luckily, they’ll look around for Someone who will let them attach. They’ll call that love. “Do this for me,” says the Someone and they do. “If you love me,” and they do love the Someone. They feel they really do. “Don’t trust anyone else,” and they don’t. Never tell. Never tell. NEVER. NEVER. If the evidence of another betrayal mounts up, if that attachment becomes a punishment, the result is a crackup or a zombie.

But usually the shift is not so dramatic. The not-so-traumatized person goes along, does the stuff, finds it’s empty, then one day stumbles across an idea or situation so electric and vital that -- well, their mental mazeway is resynthesized. Sometimes it’s a bushwhack, sometimes it’s a search. If they’ve got the guts for it, if they can stand the shaman’s ordeal. . . real life begins. More often the person finds some kind of way to pretend nothing has changed, that they cannot escape, that this IS the world. Other people aren’t likely to believe their change anyway.

Or maybe they set expectations for themselves at such a high level (be a charismatic leader who changes the world, a prophet, a towering black angel, the Great American Novel, the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the MacArthur) that no one could achieve those things and so they are excused by themselves, because of the impossibility of it all. (Even if they did make it up themselves.) Another strategy is to hang out with lesser folks: make sure you’re the only one with an education, the only one with the real skills, the adult among the children, the professor with the students, the preacher with a congregation. Or maybe resort to uproar, staging some kind of crisis by picking a fight or doing something forbidden, thereby confusing and emotionalizing everything. For neglected girls (and very occasionally boys) a strategy is to have a baby in order to give it what they feel they have missed. The trouble is that they have missed more than they know: like practical skills. Once the infant begins to be a separate person, they resort to the treatment they knew in their own childhood.

There’s no shape to a damaged child’s efforts. They sprawl and wander unless there’s a safe place. Then they can stop and think, whether it’s a therapist’s office, an AA meeting, a church group, or a proper sweat lodge. If things get really bad -- maybe a drug withdrawal on top of the rest or a systemic infection -- they will need one or more persons to be with them, not just for moral support or to fetch and clean, but to form a human container, an embrace, which is the most molten chalice of all so long as it belongs to the contained one.

The idea of the molten chalice is to provide a container which is also a safe defense that can be re-cast and re-shaped to fit the re-newal of the person inside. A person is a process. The only failure is to stop trying, but even that can be a good thing: to stop. Drop the defenses and let the world come in. Give up the control. Give up the pre-conceptions. Expose yourself -- oh, yes, EXPOSE yourself -- and let the shadows speak to the moon. Stop being the puppet master and let the puppet sleep. It’s a shaman’s way. Some need drugs. Others only need -- well, maybe nothing. That nacreous half-moon in an afternoon sky, suddenly cleared of rain.

I was thinking about all this last night, the need for deconstruction to make way for rebirth and the necessary courage. The last dream I had before waking was about walking into an aspen grove in fall -- yellow leaves, a little chilly -- on a path. (This is near the beginning of a novel I work on.)

Then I see in the brush a boy’s detached leg, the tennis shoe and denim pants leg torn off with the bloody white knob head of the femur sticking out. I walk towards it and see a pile of people -- not a lot, maybe a dozen, bloodied and torn. A family. A young woman is looking at me.

I hear the grizz. I turn slowly and walk back on the path, trying to be calm. I smell the grizz, hear her in the brush. She’s not coming towards me. Maybe. My hair is on end. The world is brilliant in its colors, intricate in its design, deeply meaningful without words. Adrenaline is the most jolting drug of all. It reveals why we are here, even as death grips us by the back of the neck. We are here to participate. That’s all. No guarantees. No expectations. No fabulous goals of heroism. Be here now. Time embraces you, embraces us all. Death is just part of the process. It is Time that holds the chalice to our lips.

CONSCIOUSNESS

Plains Indians did not evolve to handle alcohol.  Their most basic genome is Asian and did not evolve where people routinely drank alcohol of some kind with all meals as Europeans have.  This is not a lot different from lack of immunity to smallpox.  One’s body develops in a context and if the element, whatever it might be, isn’t there, then the body doesn’t learn what to do with it.  That’s genes.  

The memes were not there either.  Indians drank like frat boys.  Too much, too fast, to the point of passing out.  Drinking happened someplace where the law wouldn’t come knocking because Indians drank illegally, which added that delicious element of evading authority.  But the physiological consequences were more major than for some Northern European redneck, whether he drank beer in a bar or scotch at home. Indians had the kind of allergy that promotes addiction, like lead poisoning.  One friend who went to college a teetotaller in the late Fifties, was held down so alcohol could be forced into him, and was hooked from then on.  White people will be skeptical.  Think heroin.

I was startled when I read the local newspapers from right after WWII and the Korean War.  Quarter-page ads in the Browning paper made that Hugh Hefner pitch for being upper-class in the Brit style: wearing a smoking jacket in a wing chair at a warm hearth where a classy dog snored.  Sipping something expensive from a cut glass decanter.  The captions made it plain that this was the way successful men were.  My family was very much WCTU until they began to be prosperous.  Then there was wine on their table.  Advertising works.  So do genes.  We’ve got new alcoholics, some from grade school years.  And we’re not Native American.

Drugs and Indians were a little more familiar.  The SW peyote vision groups were very patterned, very contained, and in a religious context.  In Central and South America the use of atahuasca and the like were also consumed in a religious context, guided by an experienced overseer.  Marijuana is a mostly peaceful substance, accepted enough that young NA professionals who picked up the habit in college continue it to alleviate the stress of trying to be a success.  I’ve never known an Indian who admitted to using LSD, which surprises me, though I don’t know why they’d tell me.  Tobacco and coffee are accepted drugs everywhere in the West.  Kids everywhere huff glue and solvents.   The real killers, the real violence promoters, are speed, cocaine, and meth -- brain rotters, behavior exploders, body eaters. I was in Saskatoon when meth first hit the town and a policeman told me that it meant that what were formerly drinking parties had become brawls that caused serious injury and death, but there was no way to prosecute because no witness/participant was sane enough to give an accurate account of what happened.

Though much of this amounts to money-making substance abuse, Plains Indians have always been interested in the management of their own consciousness through dreams, both the regular kind and the vision quests triggered by isolation and starvation, maybe dehydration.  The mountains near here and the Sweetgrass Hills are seeded with dream beds where someone made themselves a little man-sized fence to lie down in while they meditated and waited for a vision.  These are near-Tibetan practices.  I should think they would work against violence, promoting self-control under stress.  But they could be preparation for courage as warriors.

The ordeal way of addressing consciousness, like the Sun Lodge vows to put skewers through the chest and back muscles and dance against a taut rope until they tear free, is a different kind of self-challenge.  I’m suspicious of it, because it seems to me like showing off, trying to get power, self-abuse.

The ultimate self-violence is suicide, often by hanging, sometimes in jail where it was thought by jailers that all means had been removed.  Kids play with blacking out themselves and each other by shutting down the blood supply in their necks.  Suicide is rage and despair -- one often sets off others.  I would like to see statistics on how many men who assault women later commit suicide.  In modern institutionalized society, it is so often female nurses and teachers who must control male children that some men become deeply misogynist.  That’s aside from the shame of the man who beats up his wife when he’s drunk or high.  I’m not talking about alley people.

Here’s a crucial insight:  both sex and violence are ways of creating internal drugs that cannot be controlled by either medical therapy or legal intervention.  Testosterone and adrenaline are well-known molecules that intertwine in subtle but potent ways.  Testosterone is the I-love-sex drug, but it is also the I’m-not-afraid-of-anything drug.  It gives energy and courage, even creativity.  Adrenaline is speed, rallying the body to do more, sharpening the senses, causing people who share danger to bond.  Some of the internal drugs will damp down these internally produced molecules, so that formerly dynamic men will shrug, sleep, let opportunity pass them by, never rise to challenges or threats.  Others will amp everything up. 

A human being is in a sense a retort, a beaker, the container for molecular bodily reactions that can overwhelm rationality.  Thus, we need to think about an ethical structure and a social setting that provide safeguards.  Otherwise too many people become suicide bombers that explode their own families.  Dramatic words, but a sharper scalpel than the hammer of good-versus-bad used by many people.  

How do we teach people to self-monitor?  How do we empower neighbors and intimates to intervene and then give them ideas about how to do it?  What laws help and which rehabilitation schemes can we support instead of prisons where the chemicals bubble all day and night?

Maybe it’s better not to tell rez stories about this subject, so I’ll say I lived in low-rent apartments in Portland so I’d have more money for books.  Across the hall lived a Japanese man with no furniture except his sleeping bag.  He was a cocaine dealer but a pot user.  Gentle but drifty, he would knock on the apartment door at 3AM to let me know my cat had had enough of nightlife and wanted to come in.  He meant to get a real job -- sometime.

In the apartment below me was a single woman with a small boy.  She had acquired a boy friend who was younger, desperate for money, and only there because he had no place to go.  He was not good to the boy, though the woman let him stay because he was her babysitter.  He was dealing cocaine as well.  One day I heard him shout, “I’m going to kill you!”  It sounded desperate.  I went down there and knocked on the door.  Everything went quiet.  The woman answered.  Over her shoulder I said to the man (I was bigger then he was.), “I’ll give you twenty minutes to clear out.  If you’re not gone by then, I’m calling the police.”  He made the deadline.  The boy always grinned at me after that.  The woman was angry but the boy was her future.  Mine, too.  But I didn’t offer to babysit.

THE STENCH OF STIGMA

Yesterday “Here and Now” on the radio  had a story about the girl who was so bullied and stigmatized that she committed suicide.  She struck back after her death by leaving video tapes of what happened.  The persecuting girls, who made their attacks on the Internet, inadvertently provided more evidence and have been formally convicted in court.  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/05/06/bullying-massachusetts-court

I often send comments to this radio program, partly because Robin Young is an intelligent and responsive person who weighs ideas carefully and partly because they often choose issues I relate to.  In this case it is bullying and stigma more than the issue of suicide, though suicide is HIGHLY and SPECIFICALLY stigmatized as a sin by the Catholic church and punished by exclusion from the church’s ceremonies after death.  Presumably also punished by condemnation to hell.  That is, suicide is more punished by the Catholic hierarchy than sexual abuse by priests who infect their victims with HIV because the church forbids condoms. 

Leaving that aside, the management of stigma seems a crucial issue in a time when many people are in mixtures of society without much confidence about who is in and who is out.  The sociologists and psychologists and biologists are hurrying to explain how deeply embedded in evolution this is.  One of the early experiments consisted of painting a crow white, whereupon the other crows ostracized and attacked it.  This was part of the effort to remove stigma from dark people.  But it ended up stigmatizing racists, at least for many of us.  It’s just harder to identify racists who’s not wearing a sheet.  Until they open their mouths.

Stigma is attached to a person who seems to embody something that the group finds non-conforming, whether or not it’s really “bad” or “wrong.”  It is often mindless, so now good priests are having to bear the stigma of bad priests.  Our advertising society tries to stigmatize things in order to sell us the “cures.”  Stinking, being fat, being old, being clumsy, being inarticulate, being “foreign,” being stupid, being sexually non-conforming to the rigidly prescribed formula of the media (sometimes stigmatizing even celibacy or faithfulness to committed marriage), and a host of other real and invented conditions from lack of fashion sense to conviction of murder --  all can cause stigma to be attached to someone.

The point of stigma is that then it is legitimate for others to persecute them without rebuke.  We find it funny to ridicule stigmatized people.  Snatching a cigarette out of someone’s mouth, yelling at young women entering an abortion clinic, throwing paint on a fur coat, and accusing the president of being a foreigner are all seemingly justified to some people.  The stigmatized might be labeled diseased or filthy.  Stigmatizing is a way of controlling people you don’t like, excluding them from power or significance.  Even exterminating them.   It is also a way of inflating the “stigmatator,” getting them the attention and -- from some people -- approval they need.

I find myself judging people in categories.  Sometimes I see a story about bad behavior, look at the name of the person, and think-before-I-think,  “Oh, no wonder.  No surprise.”  In the Thirties two families were given false names:  “the Jukes and the Kalikaks.”   Social-worker-type literature described them as everything stigmatized:  no education, always unemployed, tumble-down houses, dirty kids in rags, alcoholism, abuse, crime.  No one wanted to be the Jukes or the Kalikaks.  It was a way of enforcing assimilation in a time of immigration and limited resources.  In Valier it often drives things like the appearance of the town or the keeping chickens or horses.  Criticism is framed as the stigmatized person failing to attract business.

I find myself sitting with the Jukes and the Kallikaks on a voluntary basis.   When I went to kindergarten, I was enrolled late in the fall and a little bit young (October birthday).  I had no social skills because our neighborhood had no other kids at the time.  (I had two younger brothers.)  The class had formed into its patterns and didn’t want to make room or figure out how to fit me in.  In the next few grades I was sometimes the target of bullying because I was such a klutz on the playground.  I was near-sighted but no one had figured it out.  Reading was my preoccupation so instead of learning the class rules of how-to-be, I was busy conforming to “Anne of Green Gables.”  Yup.  Red hair.  Stigma.  High school came to the rescue when I discovered dramatics and never looked back after that.  I used my imagination to sympathize with the stigmatized.

But it could have gone the other way.  I could have become one of those nervous people who is always trying to fit in, please others, earn a place in society.  I did buy into one strategy:  hitching onto an outstanding person.  Mixed success.  Part of the mixture is the pleasing sensation of helping someone you love, which can wander over into a slightly more dubious category:  “do-gooder.”  This can earn you either prestige credits or -- in the eyes of those who are having “good” done to them -- stigma stinker status.  A reputation for self-righteousness.

I suppose that’s part of the reason people will not step in with schoolyard bullies.  They feel it will stigmatize them -- they might be attacked next.  So I welcome the idea that one way to address bullying is to energize and honor interventions.  Often it only takes one person to turn the tide.  Not that there isn’t a price.

I rode the bus to work in Portland, usually crowded.  I had a bad back at the time and really suffered if I had to stand.  On this morning there was one seat empty though many were standing.  Occupying the seat next to the window was a down-and-outer nodding and ragged.  I assumed, “Oh, people think they’re too good to sit by him.”  So I sat by him.  Standing people raised their eyebrows.  The ride was only ten minutes, which was lucky.  This guy had (ahem) “filled his pants.”  I spent the whole ten minutes debating how stubborn to be, while the people around me watched with amusement to see which way I would go.  Actually I got off a couple of stops early, hoping the walk would blow off the stench.  But I can’t really quite blow off the guy.  I still wonder what I could have done, but he wasn’t even conscious.  Help would have had to be involuntary on his part -- maybe involving police.