There are people in this country who will riot over ‘racial’ profiling.  There are groups that will picket our Embassy or representative federal government building because they feel their “rights” are being infringed.  Entire nations will shut down newspapers or other publications because of a freaking comic. 

The Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy began after twelve editorial cartoons, most of which depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad, were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 2005-09-30. The newspaper announced that this publication was an attempt to contribute to the debate regarding criticism of Islam and self-censorship. Danish Muslim organizations, who objected to the depictions, responded by holding public protests attempting to raise awareness of Jyllands-Posten's publication.

But the world lies quiet when Islamic women are abused.

In the United States we demand separation of church and state (As if anyone alive today descended from the founding families has a clue what that really means.) and we turn a blind eye to the abuses of businessmen and women in developing nations.

The authorities usually launch crackdowns before the hot summer months when women like to wear lighter clothing such as calf-length pants and brightly colored scarves pushed back to expose plenty of hair.

But enforcement of strict moral codes governing women's dress became more strict since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad swept to power in 2005 with the backing of conservative clerics and the Basij religious forces who condemn such "un-Islamic" practices.

The citizens of this country have NO CLUE what it means to live in a theocracy.

We have it good in this country.  Our poor have better meals than the poor of any other nation.  Could it improve? Yes.  Is our government perfect? No. 

We spend hours each day whining about the cost of fuel.  “Why, $5 per gallon gasoline may mean I can’t go to the beach for vacation!”  Like vacation is some constitutionally given right.  It honestly hasn’t been that long ago that our grandparents didn’t take vacations.  “Gosh! I can’t eat at restaurants as much now.  I actually have to … COOK!” [GASP!] “My bills are so high!  I just can’t afford this!”  Hmmmm how much are you paying in credit card bills?  Yes, you owe that money, you have to pay it.  But it’s a sign that you have been living beyond your means and now you have to deal with it.

Lest I give the impression that I’m holier-than-thou, please rest assured, I’m struggling also.  But I’m cutting back.  I’m shutting things off when I’m not using them.  I’m using my [GASP!] clothes line, instead of my dryer.  I’m cooking on the grill to keep the heat down in the kitchen.  I traded some furniture for a 1997 model car with a thrown rod, getting a replacement engine from a salvage yard and will be getting in excess of 30 m.p.g. within a week or so. That is 10 m.p.g. better than my 2005 small truck.  Plus, I ride my motorcycle [bought for $800 two years ago] when possible, getting 65 m.p.g.

But, the masses cry that the government should do something about gas prices.  The more government involvement you demand the closer you are to living like the people of Iran.  When the government can shut your company down because it doesn’t like what you do, you have given away your rights.

        BLACK WOMEN LOOK HERE NO!

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

In dese big modern days

You allow men to put you right back pon de auction blocs

Selling you cheap cheaper dan cattle.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Our beautiful young daughters turn beauty queen.

For de sake of a few dollars

Dem parade half naked

To please people who don't give a kick about dem soul.

Beauty don't rest ina your body

It spring from within.

Now to make matters worse

A rastafarian woman catch de master's bait

And turn beauty queen.

Worse now all rastas feel proud

That one of their daughters go up de cattle stand.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Human trafficking keep you ina sex slave bondage.

Dem drug you, dem sterilise you

Dem sex you like you feel no pain

your body turn ina something anybody can use.

It use fe advertise goods from tooth paste right down to liquor.

Dem expose your nature to sell room ina expensive hotels

Exotic women, cheap sex, big money.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

You bleach up your skin

Too shame to be black.

You rather starve but you mus weave your hair

Dem turn you fool and have you doing de dirty wine till one day you pop your neck string and die

Trying to please men

Dat think say you cute.

Dem measure your legs, your wais, your breas

Dem make you wear some peak heel boots

Strutting yourself like you drunk

And tell you say you is" international fashion model".

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Since when you turn breeding machines

Fit to have baby for every man you talk to?

Sex come easy, first come first serve.

Feel no way, feel no pain.

Dis is what women fit fe do.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

What happen fe our struggle?

Remember we a fight to go forward not backward

Get an education, learn a trade, get a career

Check how many children you want

Make up a family: mother, father, children.

Raise dem to be future nation builders not criminals.

Put God ina your life,

Put some value on yourself

Stop sell yourself cheap

Remember say God choose woman to carry his children ina her belly

To raise and care and nurture.

Dat is something special.

Without it de world woulda empty.

Black women look here no!

What is dis you doing to yourselves?

Take charge of your life.

With de help of de Almighty

You can go through de whole journey.

So black women look here no

Remember say you were made queen of the world from you born.

Nobody can tell you different.

You don't need no beauty contest

To tell you say you are special. 

Black women ,Black women,Black Women!!!

You don't need no beauty contest

To tell you say you are special.

Black women look here no!

Conquer yourselves.

So, how do we help?

1. Affirmation. Permission to feel upset and victimized. What happened was wrong. She needs permission to define what happened and own it (name it for what it is). Educate about the patterns and symptoms of past abuse as they impact her life now. Educate on how abuse effects the brain (especially the amygdala's work in generalizing emotions from the past to present situations).  Yes, the brain is plastic and can be changed but it may be that triggers remain. Teach on PTSD symptoms (re-experiencing, avoidance tendencies, increased arousal). Teach that she is not alone but 40 million others also fit these criteria.
2. Explore how this impacts her experience of her earthly father and males in general (and as a result God). What reactions does she have when she thinks of words such as man/men, daddy, father, husband, etc. What did she learn about herself and men from her family, from her community, from her church, her culture? What has she come to believe? Sarah says that the danger for counselors is to try to fix it. Tell them to think differently. Have compassion
3. Healing gender images. One of the images God gives of himself is female. Sarah isn't arguing for a feminine God. However, she lists Mt 23:37, Is 51:12, Psalm 131; Acts 9:31; 1 Cor. 1; Isaiah 66:13 as images of the feminine side of God. God images himself in male AND female. Therefore, Sarah argues for starting with (not stopping with) some of the female images of God to see that he cares for her desires and needs as well. God does give maternal pictures of himself and these may be good places to start. To do this, you may have to explore what images she has of women, mothers, feminine. Healthy relationships with same sex members will help here. Once here, you will also need to heal the masculine images of the world and of God. Male is redeemable. This may take a lifetime of relationships with men, 1 at a time.
4. Grief & Redemption. Now that she is not living in denial, she will begin to grieve dashed or unfulfilled desires.  Sitting with the realization of the loss of love and men and women are fallen. This moves us to the possibility of redemption and the transforming power of Christ in men.
5. Dealing with the here and now. How does she discern her past from present. Begin re-writing her story and rewriting facts and feelings from her present perspective. This re-writing actually does change the brain and reduce traumatic fear. Counselor and counselee co-construct a new narrative and speak back into flashbacks. Her re-written story speaks into those flashbacks and in doing so mentally pictures something different. She is free to walk away from that flashback.
6.  Coping with past in constructive ways. Address the destructive means. Yes, repentance necessary but be aware of the body's impact (look up info on the Endorphin Compensation Hypothesis (ECH) as why many become addicts). Work to avoid seeing destructive patterns as only sin or only body.

Healing must also include faithfully embracing Christ and her vulnerability as a woman.

Suggested reading: Brenda Hunter's, In the Company of Women; Louis Cozolino's, The Neuroscience of human relationships.  

HANOI (AFP) - Vietnam's birth ratio has become skewed toward boys, a trend that population experts are blaming on a traditional preference for male offspring and the availability of abortion and ultrasound fetal scans.

The international ratio at birth is about 105 boys for every 100 girls, but in Vietnam -- in an echoe of trends in China and India -- the imbalance has grown to 110-100 and is as high as 120-100 in some provinces.

The "missing daughters" phenomenon, experts fear, may worsen in the current lunar Year of the Golden Pig, deemed a very auspicious time to have a son in Vietnam, a traditionally Confucian country.

Read the rest:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071101/wl_asia_afp/
vietnamsocietysexratio_071101181050

Two sexually sensational stories graced the pages of the Nashville Scene recently, although they were pitched in radically different directions. Now, if you're not from Nashville, or even if you are, there are three things you should know about the Nashville Scene. One is that it bills itself as “Nashville's alternative weekly.” The second is that its editor, Liz Garrigan, is an admitted Republican. The third is that the paper is owned by the Village Voice, which is owned by that icon of the counterculture, Rupert Murdoch. Is that enough to rust your sense of irony, or what?

The original wave of “alternative weeklies” in this country was started by a widespread, disorganized gang of political and cultural radicals who lived on the cheap to scrap together newspapers that would present a sympathetic view of the counterculture and a critical view of the establishment. Papers like the East Village Other, the Fifth Estate, and the Berkley Barb put out stories and reviews that mainstream news distorted beyond recognition, or wouldn't touch at all. Their weak spot was advertising; while they provided a forum for local community economic endeavors, their big revenue came from the record companies, and when the record companies got together and decided not to advertise in publications that referred to them as “capitalist pigs,” (which, really, does make sense from a certain point of view), most of the “underground press”collapsed in a matter of months, surviving only in bigger cities where there was enough local advertising to sustain them, and ultimately mutating into renamed, tamer versions of their wild and woolly original selves, like many of their founders and readership.

The “Nashville Scene” has no such honorable lineage. It was started in 1989 by an advertising executive and a disgruntled reporter for the Nashville Banner, a now-deceased, strongly Republican newspaper. In response to this loss of polarity, the Nashville Tennessean, formerly a crusading liberal Democratic newspaper, was sold to the Gannett chain and has since done its level best to be innocuous. And, after making a success of the Scene, with the motto “all the news that gives you fits,” frequently referring to the local establishment as “bizpigs,” and to their credit printing “the twenty-five most censored stories of the year” for many years, the Scene's local owners sold out to Mr. Murdoch, whose publications are occasionally known for challenging peoples' sexual sensibilities, but not the status quo. No more “bizpigs,” no more Project Censored.

But, as I so often say, I digress. A couple of weeks ago, the Scene put out what at first glance seemed like a National Enquirer-worthy story about an airline pilot married to a much younger woman who is serving a lifetime prison sentence. My first thought was, “Good grief! Tennessee's got the most hackable voting system in the country and it's being defended to the death by our election officials. We're in the grip of a killer drought that has been brought on in part by widespread deforestation of the state in the name of economic development, and we cut thousands of people off from public health care rather than divert money from our road building funds or raise taxes on the wealthy, and THIS is what they're featuring?”

When I read the story, I was relieved to discover that they were actually onto something good. The heinous crime, it seems, was not committed by the woman, Teresa Harris—the heinous crime was that she had been imprisoned for it when she was only there as the virtual hostage of her abusive boyfriend, forced to witness a cruel and senseless death while she feared for her own life. An incompetent defense lawyer and a zealous prosecutor sealed her fate.

Her presence at this murder was the culmination of a lifetime of sexual molestation and physical abuse by literally dozens of relatives and so-called “friends,” none of whom have ever had to take any responsibility for causing such severe damage to a child.

It was just life in small-town, lower-class America. There are millions of girls and women in this country who have suffered this kind of abuse. Abuse is not over when it's over. The repercussions are passed on through the generations. “It happened to me, so it's no big deal if it happens to my daughter. She'll get over it. It's no big deal if my sons or brothers or cousins or father do it. That's just how men are.” Most of the women who are abused, and the men who abuse them, don't end up involved in murder. They just die slow deaths....

This attitude of helplessness, of passivity in the face of personal injustice, is a poison in our society. It poisons not just relations between men and women, but all our relations—political, economic, religious. A symptom of this poisoning is hypocrisy, in which we prosecute women when they act out their abuse and alienation without paying any attention to what made them that way. Teresa Harris is one example. Another was provided by the Nashville Scene the very next week, when they featured the tale of an exotic dancer who had been busted for giving “hand jobs” to patrons of the club where she worked, but had not lost her dancer's license for this “crime.” The Scene's reporter opined that this was just awful, as well as throwing in a gratuitous mention of Nashville's private sex clubs and calling for them to be outlawed, too. I think this reporter has a problem.

Here we have the sad intersection of men so desperate for sexual release that they will pay a complete stranger $100 for the few minutes it will take her to milk them, and a woman so desperate for money that she will comply with their wishes. It's certainly not a very happy arrangement-- you can bet they don't cuddle afterwards. Now, I find both parties' behavior neurotic in the extreme, but I see no reason to criminalize the interaction. Hey, there's millions of people in bars every night of the week looking for, and getting, something like this, except that the woman doesn't come out of the experience a hundred dollars richer. Come to think of it, doing it for money makes it a lot more straightforward, y'know?

But I don't mean to devalue a serious subject. While there are brave, outrageous women sex workers who wear their chosen profession proudly, the odds are that a woman who is selling her body has suffered from the kind of abuse and molestation that put Teresa Harris at a murder scene. Criminalizing them does not heal them.

And men...we like to talk about addiction in this society, but we consistently ignore the most pervasive addiction of them all—addiction to male orgasm. Everybody just assumes that's normal, that's what sex is about, “boys will be boys.” Nobody asks whether this is one of the origins of the malaise of our culture. Hey, “Sex sells.”

Think about it. Heterosexual men go through life, blithely assuming that women are supposed to provide them with orgasms, one way or another. This objectifies a man's sex partner. That is, it turns his sex partner into the means through which he attempts to satisfy his addiction, and this creates alienation, even when two people love each other very much.

It is fair to ask at this point just how I'm defining “addiction.” My Webster's dictionary defines the word as meaning”being devoted or surrendered to something habitually or obsessively.” I think it's further in the nature of addiction that the proposed solution, whether it's orgasm or heroin or alcohol or tobacco, doesn't really fix the problem, and so another fix becomes necessary. Here, of course, we intersect with the definition of “crazy” as, “repeating the same action over and over again, expecting to get different results.” I believe the incessant male quest for orgasm fits within these parameters.

So, now what? and what does this have to do with the Green Party?

I think the facts laid out in this essay, from the crucifixion of Teresa Harris to the almost universal male selfishness that broke her, call for very specific actions, as well as an overall change of direction in our legal system.

First, we must reform our legal system so that District Attorneys can no longer build a career on the number of convictions they can get. Judges and D.A.s must be reoriented away from punishment and blame and onto the path of fact finding and appropriate action. Sending people to jail does not heal the wounded individuals who commit anti-social acts, let alone the wounded individuals who commit victimless crimes. And of course, many of those who commit so-called victimless crimes aren't wounded at all, at least until the criminal justice system puts them through the wringer.

We need to reform our whole society on the subject of sex, so that those who try and spread a rational, accepting attitude towards this basic human drive are not demonized and opposed by uptight parents and fearful clergy. It will take many, many people speaking out in many places for such a thing to happen. Our culture has relentlessly pilloried the prophets of this notion ever since Margaret Sanger first tried to disseminate information about birth control. The main lesson is that there is more enjoyment for a man in pleasuring a woman than there is in him coming, rolling over, and going to sleep. Male orgasm equals game over, everybody go home, y'know? With female orgasm, the sky's the limit!

And we need to reform our economic expectations and opportunities, so that the lifestyles of the rich and famous are seen as the shamefully self-indulgent crimes against humanity that they are, while at the same time young women have more attractive and lucrative opportunities available to them than pole dancing and hundred-dollar hand jobs. I don't see the Democrats coming up with the courage to tackle any of this.

Freud was wrong about many things, but one of the things he was right about was that peoples' sexual attitudes form the core of their personalties. Violent revolutions and non-violent revolutions alike have failed in the face of the reactionary psychology of those they intended to help. To make a real change in America, we have to begin in the hearts of our most wounded and downtrodden women, and in the hearts of the wounded and downtrodden men who hurt them. It's not going to be easy, but it's the only thing we can do.

music: Eliza Gilkyson, “The Ballad of Yvonne Johnson”

Link here and listen:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14204638&ft=1&f=1004