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"It takes a village to raise a child"; "Ongoing crisis in masculinity" What do you think?

Jackson Katz argues that widespread violence in American society, including the tragic school shootings in Littleton, Colorado, Jonesboro, Arkansas, and elsewhere, needs to be understood as part of an ongoing crisis in masculinity. Tough Guise is the first educational video geared toward college and high school students to systematically examine the relationship between pop-cultural imagery and the social construction of masculine identities in the U.S. at the dawn of the 21st century.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9632437500432634#

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Comment by Randy Chatterjee on March 3, 2011 at 12:36pm: This is a well-made and convincing film about the Western/American cultural obsession with power and the use of interpersonal violence to assert it.

As long as bullying--an early stage in power assertion--is tolerated, let alone rewarded in our social and political culture, we are doomed to a repeated and escalating cycle of violence in our future. Our political leaders and governments both model and reinforce bullying, and one needs to look no further for proof than the continued predation against First Nations persons, racial discrimination, sexism, and even municipal "urban renewal" and "growth" strategies that drive people from their homes and destroy established and supportive communities.

Our "strong" leaders who push these projects--including our own community- and earth-destroying road-building of the Gateway project, the demolition of the 260 homes of lower-income Vancouver families at Little Mountain, and the bulldozing of hundreds of local businesses to enrich a global engineering conglomerate that was the RAV-line project--are somehow re-elected.

In fact, our media praises them for their "vision" and "perseverence" against opposition, and our justice system defends this predation both through exclusiveness--the poor have little access to the law according to the Supreme Court Chief Justice--and its defense of "Statutory Authority," the presumed and false right of government to punish some for the benefit of others, even when our Common Law itself is suborned.

These bullies are elected and reinforced by both men and women; and our children, both boys and girls are watching. They are taking notes, and these "notes" are being indelibly printed into their minds and mindsets, not only to be repeated but escalated by the passage of time and the process of "maturation."

Violence is indeed connected with the masculine ethos, and boys and men respond most tragically to its social, political, and economic lure. However, violence is a social phenomenon that relies on the tolerance and even support of all of us, men and women.

When is bullying anyone ever ok?

Society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable. We ALL lose when any vulnerable person suffers at the hands of another. Anyone.

This is not about gender, but humanity, and we are all guilty for allowing it to exist, to grow, and to escalate, until mass murder rises to genocide, genocide to terrorism, terrorism to civil war, civil war to world war, and world war to nuclear Armageddon. The Doomsday Clock stands at six minutes to midnight.

I want my children to live a full and safe life, not trapped in a series of predations by the strong or self-appointed elites in our society, and not cut short by thermonuclear annihilation.

Six minutes to midnight.

And we will not set this clock back by bombing Iran, or anyone... as is currently done every hour of every day by the strong against the vulnerable, most often the rich West against the poor in the "Less Developed" world...and sometimes by the vulnerable in defiance.

Six minutes to midnight.

Watch this film to learn how it all starts.