George Lakoff and Elisabeth Wehling, cognitive scientists have identified two Nation as Family metaphors: white strict father for conservative morality and nurturant parents for progressive morality. See their book entitled The Little Blue Book, chapter 20, on Family Freedom. Memorial Day is a celebration of nurturant parent morality for which many have died.
Nurturant parent progressives, especially progressive white men, are called every Memorial Day to remember the ugliness of conservatism’s hierarchy of men over women, and white over black. We are called to remember that white conservatism was the fly in the honey of pre-Civil War America. Conservatism continues to be an ugly stain on the world’s Memorial Day table cloth.
In the conservative immoral world view — white strict father governance — it’s all about conserving the world view itself. In strict father governance the strict father is THE moral AUTHORITY over the family and everyone else in the family. Mothers and children in white strict father families must OBEY the strict father’s authority. If mother and child do not obey, they must be DISCIPLINED in a cruel way, so they can “learn” to obey.
What James Dobson calls “tough love” is really cruelty, and the crueler the better. If you are making your small child cry, while reciting scripture, you’re probably a white male conservative.
The forced pregnancies of the Southern cotton plantations owned by white men and powered by black men and women, who were slaves, are the foundation of today’s constant attack on women’s human right to equality and freedom to give consent to both marriage and pregnancy laid out in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Memorial Day wasn’t a Federal holiday until 1971. It was originally called Decoration Day and first celebrated in Charleston, SC, in 1865. According to the History Channel, David Blight, professor of American history at Yale, in 1996, while researching a book on the Civil War, a library curator at Harvard, invited him to look through two boxes of unsorted material. The amazed Blight remembers reading through the material and tells this story:
“There was a file labeled ‘First Decoration Day. And inside on a piece of cardboard was a narrative handwritten by an old veteran, plus a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. That narrative told the essence of the story that I ended up telling in my book, of this march on the race track in 1865.”
White strict father ideology in pre-civil war America rejected a slave’s human rights. In the world of #LoserPOTUS5, a woman’s human right to CONSENT to pregnancy continues to be rejected. In this hideous remnant of antebellum times, only the white strict father is allowed to control the family. A woman’s right to enforce her consent by using pregnancy prevention or by ending pregnancies was a pre-civil war violation of white economics.
White conservative male legislators and some white conservative female legislators want to return us to a pre-civil war time.
Yes, it is important to remember those who fought and died to free families from corrupt white business men. It is equally important for progressives to remember “the people” for whom soldiers died — the slaves. It is especially important to remember the reason they fought — to repudiate white strict father morality.
White strict father morality is morally repugnant to all caring citizens who stand up for human rights. It is time for white progressive men to be stronger in standing up for the human rights to freedom and equality of all people, especially women, and people of color.
The twisted religion of white strict father morality / governance says that the so-called “divine mission” of pregnancy is to birth a child, or in the case of slaves, to birth a worker . The white strict father, therefore, says it is immoral to “a . . . t” the mission of giving birth. But pregnancy is only a birth mission if a woman has given her consent to such a mission. We really need to drop the term “birth control,” when what progressive women and their progressive male allies want is to recognize the woman’s equal human right to consent to pregnancy or not.
The freed slaves did not celebrate the Confederate fallen soldier, and neither should we. Memorial Day must forever be linked to empathy, the soul of democracy, citizens caring for each other, leading to greater equality, family freedom, and the end of slavery.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was created using the nurturant parent metaphor, lays out the human right to family freedom. In Article 16 the metaphor is gender neutral, both parents are co-equal branches of the family. Both persons must consent to marry. Both persons must consent to pregnancy. And the woman must be able to reject consent through the use of pregnancy prevention methods or by ending a pregnancy through safe, medical means.
When caring citizens use the “A” word for short hand to describe “ending a pregnancy,” we give respectability to the grotesqueness of white supremacy, who use their word as a weapon. When we use the “A” word, one physically strengthens the neural pathways of strict father immorality.
Now is the time for all who want social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom to embrace the nurturant parent ideals of government of, by, and for the people. We must rededicate ourselves to the weakening of white strict father ideas. To weaken strict father neural pathways and strengthen nurturing parent neural pathways we must stop using the “A” word and REFRAME the world we want — the world of family freedom.
Have a blessed Memorial Day.
#GoEmpathySurplus
