Preserving American Values

There has been much in the news these past few months about both the abuse of women by men, and the mistreatment of Blacks by the police. To the extent that articles about these issues examine the causes, writers blame respectively an ongoing misogynistic attitude among many men and racism within the police force.

While both of these statements are undoubtedly true, duh!, the real reason lies deeper. It lies in the insecurity of man. (See my post, “ The Root of all Abuse and Violence – Insecurity,” 1/7/2013 under Modern Man.)

The reason why so many men abuse women … whether it’s campus date rape, military sexual assault, spouse abuse, or men watching violent porn … is that it’s a way for them to exercise power. Man is raised in a way that makes him insecure. And insecure people often seek to compensate for or mask their insecurity by exercising power over those who are weaker than they are. That insecurity is the source of both misogynism and man’s need to assert power over women.  Together they create a perfect storm. The result: abuse of women.

Why do many police, regardless the city, routinely mistreat Black men in so many ways, running the gamut from verbal abuse to chokeholds and shootings? The answer again is that, in addition to Black men being looked down on or mistrusted due to racist feelings, police as men get off on exercising power over others. And they know that they can exercise that power vis a vis Blacks almost with impunity. Again, we have a perfect storm and the result is abuse.

I agree with many commentators that an important part of the answer to this deep societal problem consists of education, or better put, re-education. In the case of police, it’s relatively easy, at least in a logistic sense, because you have a captive audience that can be forced to attend classes. For men in general, that kind of approach is obviously not possible.

But even if you do re-educate police or attempt something similar with men, the obstacle to changing behavior is that their attitudinal perspective is deeply rooted; it stems from the messages they have received throughout their lives from family, peers, and the culture, regarding either women or Blacks. And that perspective can effectively be transformed only by altering the social context within which men and police exist.

How does one begin to alter the social context of racism? Since the police are to a certain extent a culture unto themselves, one can change the culture of the organization, top down. Which will certainly help many police change their perspective. But if the broader social context remains unchanged, there is still a huge obstacle.

Changing the social context of racism is an issue that has bedeviled educators and social thinkers for decades. It almost requires starting fresh, with a blank slate. Hope for this idea is found in the words of a song from South Pacific, “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,  before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught.” The point is that we aren’t born with these prejudices.

Which is why the only real hope lies in educating children and seeing that at least within the schools they are exposed to nothing but respect for those who are different from them. We can’t control what they experience at home or on the streets or even on television or on film, but we can control what they experience and are taught in school.

The same answer applies to altering the misogynistic, love/hate attitude that many men have towards women. This is nothing new. It is not a feature of our modern culture. It goes back centuries and millennia … all those years in which women were basically chattel and had no rights. My word, women weren’t even allowed to vote in the United States until 1920!

Here again we must start in the schools. Boys must be exposed to nothing but respect for girls and women, while not losing respect for themselves; they don’t have to be smarter or more successful than women to validate themselves as men.

In both cases, one must expect that this effort to educate children in ways that are opposed to what they’ve already been taught by family and culture will result in instances of children acting in inappropriate ways, with a lack of respect and even violence. Any such behavior must be dealt with in an appropriate manner, which does not exclude punishment of some sort, but punishment must be accompanied by more training because people do not change thought patterns or even behavior solely because of punishment.

So far I’ve only addressed the education aspect of solving, or better put, ameliorating, this problem. What about the underlying factor of man’s having been raised in a way that makes him insecure?

Assuming that to some degree you agree with this assessment, explained in the post I referred to earlier, you may well ask how this issue can be addressed. Once again, the answer lies in our children, If children can learn to be insecure, they can learn to be secure. Insecurity is not the natural human state; it is not how we are when born.

The difficulty in bringing about such change is that we are the result of an unending cycle of insecure people raising insecure children, who go on to become insecure parents, and on and on. To break this cycle, we must make prospective and existing parents aware of this problem and encourage them to take steps to raise happy and secure children, the first and most important of which is changing how they view themselves and thus being able to interact with their children in ways that will result in them being happy and secure.

To that end I have written a book, Raising a Happy Child. While based on Buddhist principles, the lessons it contains are applicable regardless of one’s religious affiliation or lack thereof. There should be a huge parenting outreach through churches, schools, and marriage license offices to begin orienting parents on how to raise happy, secure children.  An MSW clinician reviewer on Amazon said, “A must read for all parents.”

Raising a Happy Child is available in both softcover and eBook formats through Amazon and other online book-retailers and through your local bookstore by special order. For more information about the book as well as the Table of Contents and sample text, go to Amazon or http://www.ThePracticalBuddhist.com.