April 17th, 2007
automatic weapons, automatic violence
From my friend Elliott batTzedek:
“I’ve been horrified since the news broke yesterday about the slaughter at Virginia Tech. The initial reports — an armed man, targeted killings in classrooms in an engineering building — opened up the wound that is still Montreal, and the very real terror I felt going in to teach my women’s studies section the next morning in a rural Minnesota classroom with only one door in and out.
So of course I’ve been watching all the coverage, and of course it is making me nuts. Gender analysis is a foreign tongue for which the media can find no translator. And imagine how many more people might be alive today if the first killing in the dorm was not treated as only a “domestic situation.” Just have to love that one, don’t you? If a man kills a woman he knows, or in theory loves, the rest of us need not be concerned about him or his violence because, after all, it’s been domesticated. Or is that, once again, women are being killed by this abstract noun “domestic” and not by the men they know??
And then there’s this — every headline screams “largest mass murder in U.S. history” and then goes into details about the number of clips he carried and how many shots could be fired (25 rounds in 11 seconds, Hey Ho for technology). But of course this is a lie, a racist lie, in fact, one of my favorite kinds. The largest mass murder done in the U.S., also made possible by automatic weapons, was the massacre at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, when 300 Lakota people, the vast majority women and children, were forced into a valley beside Wounded Knee creek and killed within a matter of hours using the newest technology of the time, four Hotchkiss canons placed in advance on the surrounding hilltops, each capable of firing two pound explosive shells at a rate of fifty per minute.
So a chant of “Wounded Knee, Wounded Knee” keeps running through my head every time I hear or read the “news” coverage, and so I had to write this and share it. Because the truth matters. Because the racist history and basis of violence in the U.S. matters. Because, if violence is domestic, I need to be wild, and I want all of you to be wild, too.”
When is enough enough, Amerika? When are we going to stand up and say, I’ve had it? How many more women, in the US or Iraq or Palestine or Rwanda or Darfur, have to die before we’ve had enough? Kya and I were talking about this this morning and she said, “Think about the way people react when someone is driving the wrong way down a one-way street. We shout, we point and wave our arms around, we honk and flash our lights. We make a fuss. What if every time a man started getting out of hand, EVERYONE in the vicinity reacted like that? ‘You’re doing something dangerous, stop it!’”
Instead, we shrug and go about our business.
Why aren’t we in the streets? Why are we still going to our jobs like good little cogs? Why are we still making the guns and bombs, condoning their manufacture, excusing those who use them whether individually or with state sanction? Why aren’t we demanding our right to live in a safe, violence-free world? Why don’t we say to those who are promoting and profiting from all of this, we deserve to make our livings in ways that don’t contribute to suffering and death for others and we’re not going to settle for less? No more goodies for you until you STOP with the sexism, the racism, the imperialism, the VIOLENCE.
An appropriate topic of conversation today, tax day, I think. To those of you living in the U.S., did you pay your taxes? Why?
Andrea Dworkin writing about the Montreal massacre:
I think that one of the most important commitments that anyone can make to life or to feminism is to make sure that you deserve your death if you die at the hands of a misogynist, that you have done everything that he in his mind accuses you of, that every act of treason he is killing you for is one you have committed. Like many women, I have a long history of violence against me, and I say, to my increasing shame, that everyone who has hurt me is still walking around. They’re fine. Nothing has happened to them. And when I look at my own life, I think about the difference between being beaten because I didn’t clean the refrigerator and having my life threatened because I am fighting the pornographers. There is a better and a worse, and it is better to encounter anything when you have made a choice that puts you where you want to be, fighting for your own freedom and fighting for the freedom of the women around you. Feminists should remember that while we often don’t take ourselves very seriously, the men around us often do. I think that the way we can honor these women who were executed, for crimes that they may or may not have committed–which is to say, for political crimes–is to commit every crime for which they were executed, crimes against male supremacy, crimes against the right to rape, crimes against the male ownership of women, crimes against the male monopoly of public space and public discourse. We have to stop men from hurting women in everyday life, in ordinary life, in the home, in the bed, in the street, and in the engineering school. We have to take public power away from men whether they like it or not and no matter what they do. If we have to fight back with arms, then we have to fight back with arms. One way or another we have to disarm men. We have to be the women who stand between men and the women they want to hurt. We have to end the impunity of men, which is what they have, for hurting women in all the ways they systematically do hurt us.
