Patriarchy

As I continue to work through the whole god-guns-government culture being tied to home education (and vice versa) I found this cultural commentary:

Egalitarianism and Homeschooling-

One Member’s Personal Story by Karen Till

. . .The homeschool community is a culture, religion—to some a cult—in itself. I loved many aspects but certain things were hard to understand. For example, many people thought women should dress very modestly and with head coverings. Definitely the more “earthy” you were the better: grind your own grain, natural foods, bake your own bread.

Many also believed that couples should let God plan their family – and I mean no interference on your part—because it showed you had more faith. Moms should stay at home while dads provided for the family. All of these were what proved you were a godly woman. Of course, you needed to do this all with great delight and in an organized fashion.

I began to have difficulty with this culture as our children got older and their gender roles began to be more defined. . .I started to feel pressure about how my kids behaved and what they wore. We were not a family that believed that girls must wear dresses, but many of our friends did.

UPDATE - CNN story just posted here, with full transcript of statement.
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Still watching the live news conference on CNN and thinking it should be required viewing in every school worldwide -- that is, if we do mean to create and preserve real environments that sustain human life by right instead of might.

"Fighting back was simply not an option."
When one is "not equipped for a fight" and reason fails in the face of unhearing, blinded, singleminded Borg-like purpose with superior numbers and ammunition, then Reason itself becomes an unreasonable response forcibly redefined against your will, becoming not an academic exercise but a raw first-rung survival skill, a matter of figuring out who is fit to survive and what it will take.

"We realized that our efforts to reason with these people were not making any headway. Nor were we able to calm some of the individuals down.
It was at this point that we realized that had we resisted there would have been a major fight, one we could not have won, with consequences that would have had major strategic impact. We made a conscious decision to not engage the Iranians and do as they asked.

And even that kind of Raw Reason falters without intelligence, sound information for making wise decisions, and being allowed untwisted, unmanipulated communication within one's one group of fellows and with the real world. Reason stripped, blindfolded and shoved up against the wall to hear the sound of guns being cocked.

My college-loving book and culture nut daughter blogs, too. Writes rings around me already, to be honest, and certainly around the unhoned writer and thinker I was at her age!

She gave me permission to crosspost her latest work here. It's true I thought Liza, Lorraine, moiv and CaLiberal (who I keep wanting to call Callie!) would especially like it, but also I want her POV accessible here at Culture Kitchen, because I hope it will speak to a larger progressive audience in the too-often-unheard voice of young feminism, from the direct line of fire in the culture wars.

RUMINATIONS ON OLIVE OIL
Standing in line at a fancy grocery store, I spotted a display among many :
EXTRA EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL! It proclaimed.

Excuse me? I thought. Extra extra? Isn’t that a little unnecessary?

That is to say, I never really understood the concept of Extra Virgin Olive Oil to begin with. Is it made from olives that aren’t allowed to touch other olives? Are they modestly shielded from life’s elements by tarps?

And Extra Extra Virgin Olives - what on earth does that entail?

Or does the “virgin” refer to the oil itself? Has it never been mixed with another oil, commingling and developing new, brassy flavors? I certainly hope not, one takes for granted when one buys olive oil that it is, in fact, olive oil, and not some other hybrid. But then it seems that they shouldn’t have to bellow about its virginity so explicitly.

Editor's Note:
Promoted and post-dated by liza; who says this one is an instant classic and a serious must read.

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So, I had a conversation with Stinkapee. She wanted to know why the British had enslaved Black Africans, our ancestors and dragged them over here to work. I gave her a simple answer. I told her that they probably had Dursleys for parents.

I was talking to my counsellor when I realized that I was more accurate than I realized. The "parents" of the British, the influential people that Western historians would probably say came before the British were the Romans who invaded that tiny island way back when it was just a collection of warring tribes.

Does this sound familiar?

So, the ancestors of the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, umm...there might be others, were just there minding their own business, painting themselves blue, having yearly rituals in the honour of the earth goddess, trying to jostle for better land, more food, fertile wimmin...of course this is a gross over simplification...

When along came the Romans sweeping across Europe, dominating, harming, "civilizing", everything in their wake as they stretched the boundaries of their state's reach.

These, warlike, patriarchal, dominating, authoritarian, violent people came with their values, spread not just their architecture, their styles of governance, their language (Romance languages), their official religion (eventually christianity was imposed by the Romans), but also spread extreme emotional dysfunction.

So Standardized School is the opposite of World-Class Education,
not its divine incarnation?
Good then.
Let's hear no more about the necessary sacrifice of consigning all children to one-dimensional forehand factories for high-priced, high-stakes stamping into quality-controlled widgets, by has-been and never-were corporate charismatics and labor union drones.

Do you know what words of advice inspire the greatest players in the world as they enter Centre Court for Wimbledon, to show what they know and can do?

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same”-
“If” by Rudyard Kipling.

IF we inscribed this on every standardized test booklet for every child our Congressional Coaches promise never to leave behind languishing in the locker room, IF we took it to heart ourselves, then we still might not win 'em all but maybe we could stop feeling like such losers?

I've long called test score mania (in both triumph and disaster) the two-edged sword, but "two-edged imposter" could work even better, might at least shut up the most rigid standard skunks -- clever fellow Kipling.

We've all heard, "hate the sin, love the sinner." But what happens when you hate the sinner, and the sinner is the self? Where does that hatred go? Enmity spills outward. When I imagine the souls of such people, I see clouds of toxic coal dust, leaking from their pores. But I also see wounded children cowering, waiting to be rescued from the darkness. It makes me sad and angry. It makes me wish that I could reach out and have a discussion with that person in which peace would be the result.

But it has ever been so. It has taken me many of my almost 43 years on this planet to quit trying to rescue people. I can feel for them, sympathize with them, but I cannot nurture the proverbial viper in my bosom.
I spend a lot of time thinking about self-hatred. My own, of course, which I cop to on a regular basis. Although I must say, I've done more to learn to love myself in the past five years than I had done previously. I think that it's about a 80/20 split these days (which makes me a good candidate for the Church of 80% Sincerity. That other 20 percent, well, that quasimodal part, she shows up on some days, and I just try to love her. What else can I do? She's part of me. I remember that this is her, too.

All right, some of you may be wondering. When is she going to get to the fucking point? I do have one. It's about self-hating women, especially those who inhabit the conservative think tank known as "Concerned Women for America." I know that I should just stay away from the place. It gives me the heebie-jeebies when I'm there, sort of like wandering around inside those catacombs where the walls are made of bones. A reminder of human frailty, but just macabre and perverse and something faintly sinister about all of it.

The new Carnival of the Feminists is up at I See Invisible People. Go stroll the Midway, ride the roller coaster, eat some cotton candy. You'll feel smarter by the time you're done, I swear.