On Blaming the Victim - Democratic Underground

H2O Man

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Apr-05-08 08:40 AM
Original message

On Blaming the Victim

{1} "On Tuesday afternoon a frightful accident occurred near this village, by which two laborers were instantly killed, viz: Thomas Cox, who lived near the Catholic Church, on Pleasant Street, and William Sullivan, who resides about a mile above Wood’s Corners, on the King Settlement Road. ….The instrument of their destruction was a locomotive attached to a special train which left Binghamton early in the afternoon for Utica. ….

" The track hands had all received notice the previous day of the intended passage of the train and were on the look-out for it. Soon after three o’clock an alarm was heard by them, and the train was announced by one of the hands. On looking it, however, it was discovered to be a coal train on the Midland, which runs parallel and about one hundred feet from the DL&WRR at that point. The men at once turned to their work again, Cox and Sullivan with their faces to the north. Scarcely had the coal train passed them before the lightening special came upon them, its small noise being drowned out by the passing coal train. The foreman and one or two others of the gang who were at work about fifteen or twenty rods south of them saw the train and got out of its way, and tried to alarm the others and succeeded with all but these two. The engineer sounded the alarm whistle and rang the bell when about fifteen rods from them, but before they could get off both were struck, one thrown to the right and the other to the left and instantly killed. They were horribly crushed and mangled. The legs and necks of each were broken, as well as the skulls and many bones also. …..

"The train was running upwards of forty miles an hour, and we can not see that any one was really to blame except the injured men themselves, though we can’t see the necessity of running specials through our village, or any other, as it was at that fearful rate. A more fearful accident might have occurred at any one of the dozen crossings in our village, running as it was at a time when trains did not usually pass and were consequently unexpected."
--The Chenango Telegraph; Frightful Railroad Accident: Two Men Killed Instantly; June 11, 1874; page 3.

Yesterday, there was one of those threads that makes DU a valuable place to be, posted by ThomWV. It had to do with the reason that Martin Luther King, Jr., was in Memphis 40 years ago: two sanitation workers had died in a violent accident not unlike the one described above. I was reminded of this, in part, because of the contributions to the Memphis thread by a now "tomb-stoned" visitor from another dimension, who blamed the sanitation workers. We see that same coldness in the newspapers account here.

There was also a thread by Binka, which noted Casey Sheehan had died 4 years ago on the same date that Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed on. By no small coincidence, our visitor lead the attempts to blame the victims, rather than show a speck of the compassion that King tried to awaken in the mentally dead.

My goal isn’t to focus on the now tomb-stoned fellow, but rather the infection that produces the type of social pus he was expressing. We need to be aware of the fact that variations of "blaming the victim" can take place at any of the dozens of crossings on this forum, often in the most unexpected of places.

When we see it in the newspaper article from 1874, it is easy to see the stupidity of blaming individuals for their violent, tragic deaths. But the same infection that caused nativism 134 years ago, causes racism and sexism today. And, in the context of the current democratic primary, we see a media that is as prone to blaming Barack Obama for racism, and Hillary Clinton for sexism, as the Chenango Telegraph was able to identify the dead Irish railroad workers for their deaths.

The media, much like the tomb-stoned visitor, are of less interest to me than the democratic community. My concern is that the "-ism" virus, which mutates into racism, sexism, nativism, militarism, etc – is threatening to blind us.

{3}"Redemption Song"
--Bob Marley

Old pirates, yes, they rob i;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took i
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the and of the almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them can stop the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look? ooh!
Some say its just a part of it:
Weve got to fulfil de book.

Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

I read a post on a thread in February which made me laugh. One of the more intelligent people on DU wrote that there was simply no comparison between the journeys of African slaves to the US, and of the Irish immigrants during the Great Starvation. It is a good example of when we do something related to, though distinct from "blaming the victim." It involves attempting to rank the horrors inflicted upon various group-members of our human family.

The English ships that had been used to transport Africans to North America for slavery were frequently the same ships used to transport Irish to America. The same merchants were making profits off of delivering human cargo. And, again by no small coincidence, yesterday one of my favorite DUers linked a version of Ziggy Marley performing his father’s last song with the Irish group The Chieftains. It is a hauntingly beautiful celebration of our common history.

If an African-American and an Irish-American were to argue on DU about their people’s rankings on the chart of historical suffering, little good would come from it. If the same two people find the common ground that the Marleys and the Chieftains found, can we not see the benefit?

We have large groups of democrats, which each contain several smaller groups, fighting about issues including racism and sexism in our society. Both are infections on our culture. Both harm living human beings. Both are very real.

We can continue to argue and fight. It is not any more intelligent, however, than is the closely-related behavior of "blaming the victim." We also have the option of joining together, and recognizing that we have much more in common than not, and that there is no benefit to trying to rank our personal and group suffering.

{3} "….Pain is pain, suffering is suffering – whether being wrongly imprisoned, wrongly placed in a concentration camp, or wrongly abused as a child. But pain is a component of suffering, but not suffering itself. There are no degrees of suffering. …

"I spent 20 years in prison, in a hell hole where people everyday tried to strip me of my dignity. … Hate took over everything. I was furious at everyone ….Simmering anger and hatred consumed me. ….Hatred and bitterness only consume the vessel which contains it. …I came to an understanding of who and what I am. Like Victor Frankl wrote about the concentration camps, I realized that prison provided me the tools to become all that I could Be. I was able to seize the opportunity to use these horrible conditions to find something above the law. I had an opportunity to go on an anthropological expedition into an unnatural laboratory of the human spirit.

"… Your reactions are the same as mine or anyone else’s. But you have the ability to wake up. That’s your salvation. Somehow, some way, you have to get over it. Hate can only produce hate. That’s why all these wars are going on, all this insanity. There’s too much anger in the US. People are too afraid, too numbed out. We need to wipe out all this hatred, fear, distrust, and violence. We need to understand, forgive, and love."
--Dr. Rubin Carter to our good friend Lois

I do not think that I am alone in noticing a current of simmering anger and bitterness on DU:GD-P. There have been some tense exchanges in the past few months. I recognize that I have certainly played a role myself. Many of us who used to be on friendly terms may not be, certainly not in the immediate future. But perhaps we can use DU as something of an unnatural laboratory of the human condition, and at least move towards some degree of understanding.

The first thing that I think we should understand is that we need to elect a democrat as president this fall. And we need to harness our energies, and work towards expanding the democratic majority in congress. And in state and local elections.

Let’s move forward.

Thanks,
H2O Man