Cordite & Testosterone - Why Men Should Not Be Running the World. Cecilia Boone's Tanner
wars have.”
(More on this in Chapter 5).
2) Because men lose sight of priorities.
Many men support and avidly pursue the rights to take all and share nothing. In 2002, the company Global Crossing went bankrupt in the US leaving the bankruptcy legacy of loss for how many hundreds and thousands down the line while the CEO got $235M in stock options. $235M.
Enron executives and managers got $744M in 2001 before they went bankrupt leaving people with no pensions.
Tyco Stock Co lost $2.2M while the CEO received $80M in salary. Over three years, he made $300M and was then charged $1m for evading taxes. And he got paid all this while ruining the company. Another CEO was given a $10M severance package.
Bear Sterns went skidding down the greedy hill, but the CEO didn’t suffer.
While these individual irresponsible men who deserved to be fired and jailed were pocketing their bonanza winnings, 17% of the white families in the USA had one parent (a mother), 54% of black families had only a mother, and 28% of the Hispanic families had only a mother. And single mothers, children, and old women are the largest segment of the impoverished in North America; they can’t afford rent, health care or proper food.
Everyday we see the teenager or colored person who steals a car going to jail because thieves must be punished. If an executive or bigtime con artist steals the pension money of 10 000 old people who then live out their lives in poverty, he goes to live in Bermuda.
Nobody stops these men from taking everything and leaving nothing for the children or the mothers or the grandmothers of their children. Shame on them.
These systems would not survive if the male leaders in our patriarchy didn’t approve of them. Our governments were set up to allow these crimes to go unpunished, because they were set up by the men who had much to gain from the system.
Seriously, let’s stop tolerating the oppression, violence, and the killing. A PBS Frontline documentary on the Gulf War showed how brutal men can be with their macho long range weapons that melt the face of the enemy (the enemy–not human beings) onto the steering gear of their tanks. The Scud missile is not so clean as it blasts into fragments killing all the collateral people over a large area. Other weapons such as the Canadian-developed Supergun could stand well back of the returning flack and inflict big damage on the enemy sites. Aren’t we clever?
That is what war is about, of course, killing more of them than they kill of us. To quote General Patton (a hero) “Kill as many of them as you can and as fast as you can.” Such men become highly indignant when the young men they train to kill actually kill the wrong people. To wit, Noriega, bin Laden, the African tribesmen, Canadian, American, Russian soldiers, all soldiers–thinking of the My Lai massacre here. All soldiers are trained to kill, but don’t always kill the right evil people. The right people change, of course.
And our clever scientists keep developing bigger and better weapons–huge Bertha bombs, and dirty bombs, and smart bombs, and megamegaton bombs–all of which our military leaders never expect to fall into the hands of the enemy. How not? The US developed the atom and hydrogen bombs but other countries are not allowed to defend themselves with those same bombs–only the US and maybe the British and the French can be trusted to bomb the right people with them, yet others less trustworthy have acquired them.
Try not to look at Bosnia or Rwanda and try to forget the Ethiopian, Somalian, Sudanese, Myanmar, Iraqi and Afghanistan atrocities while you wonder if the killing will ever stop. We have to consider how to stop the killing when every major country in the world is making a lot of money off the arms trade? How can we stop the biggest bullies in the world from buying, selling, and manufacturing arms when they have the weapons to intimidate any government who might choose to stand in front of the billion dollar export/import business? In December 2011, an explosion in Kabul killed 70 plus people. The Taliban claimed it was not a Taliban attack. Who then? Someone who had a lot of money to gain from continuing the war? The arms trade answers to no one.
On January 10, 2012, a French judge determined that the missile that brought down the Rwandan President’s plane that sparked the Rwandan genocide was fired from a military camp. It was not fired by Tutsi rebels. He claims that extremist Hutus were to blame. Who hired the “extremist rebels”?
3) Because men are racist
Whatever the reason, men are usually more racist than women, and racism does not lead to peaceful coexistence, certainly not in a global world.
The male tribal urge to protect the tribe makes them suspicious of strangers or maybe in the competition for status and supremacy, they see other tribes as unknown quantities in the competition for their needs. Besides, they have seen collectively how the aboriginal tribes who treated strangers well (Canada, USA, Hawaii, Africa, Asia) were decimated for their generosity, so they recognize the need to challenge all comers.
And even when not outwardly racist, it seems much easier to kill people who look different–as apparently they don’t embrace the same sense of loss when their relatives get killed, especially people with darker skin.
4) Because men are linear thinkers.
In most cases, men are linear thinkers (artists and musicians exempted), and the linear thinker sees a world that only goes in two directions, the one they choose and the one that opposes the one they choose. There are no other possibilities.
This is important.
Men see that they are going forward and if they are not going forward, they must be going backwards. If a person isn’t on their side, on their team, then they must be on the other side; they must be the enemy.
After 9-11 in New York, President George W. Bush announced his war on terror, “You are either with us or against us.” The absolute audacity and threat in that statement is staggering.
Many men think this way; there is good or there is bad. A heterosexual is good and a homosexual is bad, not noticing that pedophiles come in both orientations. She’s a nice girl (that is, a girl who follows the rules men set out for her) or she’s a slut is the Muslim/Christian/Judeo take. If men aren’t winning, they must be losing. This is linear thinking of the very worst kind.
After the Sept 11 attacks, there was only one straight line response–retaliate. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who to retaliate against, just pick someone and beat them up. It turned out to be Afghanistan and then Iraq because they both looked like easy fights–and they both have oil or a pipeline for the oil. And Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t have any fighter jets to carry bombs across the Atlantic, and neither had the means to shoot down high-flying bombers. And the homeland wouldn’t get damaged if the war was staged half a globe away.
Karate and Kung Fu are martial arts that demonstrate the power of the single-minded, the focused energy. The laser beam demonstrates the power of a concentrated little beam of light that can be a miraculous little tool, but it can also be used as a serious weapon. So, too, can otherwise helpful useful amazing men. When single-minded in destructive pursuits, using the laser strength of a singular focus, these leaders can pursue their ideologies at all costs.
With this linear approach to life that, on the positive side, enables men to achieve marvelous feats of engineering and technology, they are, unfortunately limited in their ability to see the full spectrum of possibilities and options. Most men are unable to see the whole picture, to see the kids in the foreground, the house and school behind them, the tree-covered hills bright in the clean air in the distance. They see a red Ferrari with a blonde woman at the wheel driving along the road in the middle distance–that’s all they see.
We would do well to look at the motivators of men to understand what makes them do what they do, as we do in chapter 2; then much of what we see in the world is more understandable.
Leadership requires the wisdom that comes from both sides of humanity, the male and the female. Do we want