This started out as my ME TOO story and it still is, part of it is anyway… the meta-story of a movement.
The #metoo phenomena is not just about sexual assault or harassment. It is about speaking truth to power.
Speaking truth, telling our stories, strengthens us. The voice in our heads becomes the voice in the streets.
It has been almost one hundred years since women gained the right to vote in the United States by what had come down to one young man serving in a state’s legislature taking stock of what his mother had taught him and what she had asked of him.
Roughly 150 years before women gained the right to vote, a woman asked her husband who was deeply involved in the drafting of documents that would create the first liberal democracy in the world to “remember the ladies.”
It appears to be time for more change.
Ideas develop as time passes. Some call this social evolution. But it does not really matter what we call it. Change happens and it has trajectory and momentum. It cannot be stopped simply by individuals thinking it should stop.
This is my take on part of what is transpiring in the U.S. today. We cannot know where this will lead, natural forces can be channeled but they cannot easily be stopped.
I see patterns. Sometimes when I say this I feel like a character in a M. Night Shyamalan’s film, The Sixth Sense.
These patterns are not, to the best of my knowledge, intrinsic patterns, like spirals and handedness, but simply patterns I perceive given my vantage in life.
The primary pattern I note and study is law “a virtually unbroken chain concerned with inheritance, trusts and foundations and other relevant matters leads back to Roman law” but law through a cultural not legal sense, law painted with a broader brush such as is found in the near universal moral code embodied in what we know as “The Golden Rule.”
The trajectory I see follows the course of consolidated power from when the Council of Nicaea united Roman religious and military powers, until the Magna Carta limited the power of the King, which was followed in relatively short order by the Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Unitarian Reformations of Catholicism that limited the power of the Pope, and Constitution of the United States of America constrained the power of the State.
Another shift in power is occurring. Our human nature has moved us to react to atrocities of slavery in the Civil War and genocide by the Nazis through WWII. We do not want another war, in fact, most of us want to end the use of war as a means of major dispute resolution and dominion.
What I see emerging is a shift in kind. The inclusion of all people into the governance of our selves will change everything, when and if it progresses. The most massive way to change societies is not bit by bit, group, race, or ethnicity. The most massive way to impact all societies and move us along the path of culture change is to include women fully and equally into the governance of society, not just legal governance, but in all the ways our society regulates, manages, and governs itself.
Let’s try this and see what happens.
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