Eight Deadly Sins

Radical feminist Mary Daly has died. For those who care, this is one of the great quotes about her mantra:

"She took great delight in castigating the "eight deadly sins of the fathers": processions, professions, possession, aggression, obsession, assimilation, elimination and fragmentation. "Laugh out loud," she urged, "at their pompous penile processions."

As much as I admire many qualities of men and and need them in my life, I have thought of this language many times since hearing it and it reminds me to re-center myself around trust, collaboration, communication and compassion, often defined as female qualities.

What also I think of when I remember her quote is that now many, many powerful women are as guilty of those identified qualities as powerful men have often been. And, that when you see these 8 sins held at one time, they can often be found in the heads of elected officials or political party leaders bent on destroying oppositional forces.

The issue springs from perceived power over another, in my estimation. And when things do "change", the change is in who now holds power rather than the dissolution of it.

Hence the split in my head about the official political world; no, I don't want to see "my candidate" in power; I want the power to rest with the people who are affected by the situation, sitting or marching or arguing together until they can find a solution. Long term bureaucrats only assimilate and fragment the situation. Therefore, in today's political sphere my goal is to reduce the elected officials to facilitators to serve the body politic as communication channels only.
And force decision-making to be held by the citizenry, whether they like it or not.

Ask the elected to spend their time getting information to people, holding meetings daily on a myriad of subjects, making OUR city hall to be the vessel for information to be held in one place for anyone to access.

And yes, this means the citizenry must remain active and ready at all times. This means we cannot reduce issues within our complex neighborhoods or cities to personality fights but must stay focused on the larger goals of personal choice, neighbor-to-neighbor responsibility and fairly shared costs to maintain the infrastructure.

And a thoughtful conversation also has to happen, leaving the gotchas and the you are wrongs for fleeting thoughts in our head rather than added to the dialogue said out loud.