Occupy Wall Street

Say what you will about the much maligned childlovers, but I bet you they could ever be guilty of stealing 4.6 billion from federal teacher training and afterschool programs in order to re-route that tax money so that high-income taxpayers this year can spend 5.2 billion of it to "remove limits on their itemized deductions." So say what you will about childlovers, but they could never be guilty of stealing 7.6 billion dollars in your tax money--which would have gone to fund "supplemental nutrition for children in poverty," and instead spend 6.7 billion of it on "estate planning" so that the wealthiest among them can avoid "paying taxes on their estates."

The truth of the matter, of course, is that Wall Street and high finance doesn't give a damn about the country's young, unless they happen to be the sons and daughters of bankers. That is no surprise, but what is unsettling is that those who orchestrate this extraction of public resources to avoid their civic responsibilities (which would otherwise be benefiting children and schools, in this case), are still allowed to sleep soundly at night.

Better my money goes to help fund an early childhood education program for inner-city kids right here at home than become a subsidy for some CEO's second vacation home in the Dutch Antilles, but those are my priorities. They are not those shared by the "Greed is Good" gangsters running financial institutions, who believe instead that it's better a wealthy man inherits wealth than a poor child inherits food. Here be strange priorities: rich before poor; money before food; slavery before decency. Unbridled capitalism works that way.

High finance and the wealthy in general have siphoned all but the blood from the underling classes for more than thirty years, and have bought the people's government to legislate their selfishness. They mean to extract from the current generation and extort from the future ones, so that they can make out good before things fall apart. The collapse in their wake will fall on the shoulders of every child living today unless we put our society's future ahead of their next tax-exemption loophole. Dare I say, high finance is a bigger threat to more impoverished young people than drugs, gangs, and child molesters ever were.

The American people have seen the power of demonstration in Tahrir Square to overthrow one corrupt regime, and now simply want to bring the same to the one residing on Wall Street.

Men are Not Finished

Female chauvinists Hana Rosin and Dan Abrams were recently able to convince an audience that not only is the status and position of men and boys in relative decline, but that men and boys are "finished."  They represented and posed as the intellectual establishment backing the "For" position over the question "Are men finished?" and were able to win a historic percentage of converts in an Intelligence Squared debate. They carried the debate, based on polling done before and after.

So by contending that "men are finished," these two and their recent converts must either be in favor of blatant and unapologetic sexism, OR are willing to personally foot the bill to give the "weaker" side (men) more special protections and affirmative actions that "stronger" females apparently have no need for (by their own arguments). By contending that "men are finished," these self-avowed "feminists" are either dismantling the house of gender equality which has been decades in the painstaking build, OR they are simply trying to advocate for redistributing resources toward the weaker side (men) in order to achieve equality. By contending that "men are finished," our "intellectual establishment" here is either smugly giving up on boys and condemning them to lives of assured and self-prophetic under-performance and hopelessness, OR they are expressing a need to shift our resources and attention back to the "weaker class" (boys) and away from the class (girls) that doesn't appear to "need" so much attention anymore (by their own statements).

The point being, they can not have it both ways. They can not be in favor of gender equality and profess that men are finished, because to do such either solidifies them as personal advocates for promoting the interests of the "neediest" (boys and men) over that of the "well off" (girls and women), OR it solidifies them as sexist bigots, gleefully cheering on the disenchantment of a whole class of people, including every child born male who under-performs. Either they can try to humanize themselves by saying that the down-and-out men deserve "more" (which is not very feminist), or they can solidify their reputation as female chauvinists and gleefully cheer on the evisceration of all things male. There is no in between.

They may in their own mind believe that either of those positions empowers women, or that all they are doing is expressing an inevitability and simply siding with the winners, but they can also still believe they are decent people too. Neither of their beliefs make either statement true. There is a thousand mile difference between saying there are more women in college, and saying that men are an "endangered species"--whether tongue and cheek or not. Men are not a "species." Homo Sapiens is a species. It would seem people of such intellectual or academic esteem should know that. And yet, there is no surprise that Dan Abrams doesn't.

There is a thousand mile difference between talking about trends, and making bold-faced assertions about a group of people having become "finished." The former is a rational, concerned approach, seeking remedies to a real-world social ill, while the later is merely a contention toward a finality--it is a way of saying that solutions are not needed, because the problem has ceased to be a problem. In real terms, saying "boys and men need help" assumes that challenges need to be met with solutions. Saying "boys and men are finished" denies that the problem is a problem, and in so doing, denies the possibility for there ever being solutions.

One wouldn't say "this patient is finished," when all the patient needs is some active treatment to regain their health. One wouldn't condemn a student with a learning disability by calling him "finished," unless one is callous or cruel, and the same should go for those who use that terminology to talk about the well-being of men and boys. An appropriate argument could be worded "the social place of men is evolving," and be perfectly within the boundaries of reality, but no, they choose to focus on "finished," which means there is no evolution, just a dead end and a hopeless future. But let us cut to the main issue---this term "finished" is not meant to rebuild men, nor empower women, it is simply used to weaken the already weakened social resolve (of both genders), by those who have fetishized male social evisceration and humiliation. In any case, gender equality is as removed from Rosin's and Abram's minds as common decency.

Let them and their followers chase after their personal fetishes and "mother complexes" all they want, but leave the future of our boys to people with a sense of decency, please.