Beyond Polarisation In Politics - Acknowledging Patriarchy?

In the wake of a police officer in Minnesota applying lethal knee pressure on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes, the twitter-sphere -among other spheres- appears to have polarised views. Reading words from screens I have been hearing “shouting” like I've never witnessed before; the volume of messages and the tone of insistence/dogmatism of protest and counter-protest. I've been taken aback a few times, not least by banners declaring “Silence Is Violence.”

I stepped into the discussion hoping to do so with more creativity than reactivity. However, I ended up tweeting more than I intended. At best, my aim was to go #BeyondPolarisationInPolitics, acknowledge what sense I could see in President Trump's words, and adding what I thought might help round his proposals, encourage approaches that put everyone on the same side. Putting everyone on the same side takes more than the hashtag #AllLivesMatter as a response to #BlackLivesMatter.

The most visceral upset I experienced was in relation to this tweet:
[I find now that the tweet I was going to copy I can no longer see in my tweet-stream; presumably deleted by the author or by Twitter. It said it was from a woman writing of her being raped by a black man in Leeds on a given date and the lack of attention/support she received from others in contrast to the attention being put across much of the world on what happened to George Floyd.]

How long would you take to retweet these words, if you would, and with what comment appended? (May #SleepOnIt become a watch phrase for us before sending what we can reasonably expect to irritate others...) Around this time in the middle of the day, I lay down for about two hours without sleep in a darkened room processing the enormity of the stream of human suffering I was feeling in touch with via Twitter that morning.

Sometimes I retweet without comment, and, unlike many other Tweeters I do this also for many tweets with which I profoundly disagree. Rather than have the “retweets are not endorsements” type of comment on my Twitter profile, at the time of writing, I use the very limited micro-blogging persona profile space for these words: Founder(2011)StLeonardsSharing Consortium.Parliamentary Candidate2019(565votes)working with #NVC leaders towards #LivingPlanetPolitics
@2066Country @ceisenstein

By retweeting notable content, amongst other aspects of the Twittersphere I am currently noticing is, as I'm confident you'll be aware, the lull in “We're All In This Together” sentiments. In that vein there has sadly been no apparent take-up of the 3rd part of my General Election slogan/potted manifesto of “Pause5G, Citizens Assemblies Now, Move Forward More Together”.

How might it be possible to cut across the polarisation that it might be too easy to fall into in relation to the #rape tweet above? The best added comment I could manage at the time was something that has now been removed (or I've mislaid), but it said that both concerns pointed us to the need to question patriarchy.

This was the first time I can recollect having written a word that I had previously avoided like the Coronavirus/Plague. The word that took so long to alight on my page (or flash in pixels) was patriarchy. I wouldn't be using that word if I hadn't discovered its meaning within a framework of #NVC i.e. the body of understanding proliferating from the legacy of Marshall Rosenberg.

The richest exploration, for my money, of the paradigm shifts that the world need now was provided  to the East Point Peace Academy YouTube Channel by Miki Kashtan. Miki Kashtan's previous blogging (from February 2013) around one of my poems I just hyperlinked so that I/we can return to extract more of its juice in showing the shortcoming of my compassion at the time I wrote that poem, and, sadly also in many subsequent times I have read words written by others not-trained as I have been privileged to be in the clarity of separation of observation/ judgement/ feelings/ needs/ values/ requests etc
So here's the UNMISSABLE (IMHO) Film of 2020, eclipsing the 007 movie, Spectre, that the #PandemicEra led to be postponed for launch currently to the 26th October 2020:


And here's just a paragraph from what I call “The Film of The Year so Far” (#PandemicEra #BuddhistEthics #SacredEconomics #LivingPlanetPolitics blog rating: 5 stars). This is the first section in Miki Kashtan's world-view that has got me, as I hope it will “get you”, looking more closely at what alliances might be formed in arriving at a shared understanding of, and addressing, patriarchy?

I put my hands in just about everything; I work from the smallest most-internal domain to global governance and it is always like a big choice what to focus on. I decided to focus on decision making because if we get decision-making right then we can go from there to making all the decisions that we need to make to create a collaborative nonviolent future. That's why I focused in this way and we'll see if that yields benefit. I look at the Coronavirus situation as something that is an opportunity in that exposes some things that were there for quite a while but were under the surface, and now suddenly there's crisis and there's the opportunity to see the cracks; so it's even more visible. We either have a nonviolent future or we have no future because the kind of present that we have -the way of living that is based on scarcity, separation and powerlessness- that comes from 7,000 years of patriarchy. The core essence of patriarchy is scarcity, separation and powerlessness. Patriarchy manifests in gender but isn't about gender; gender emerges from it. The two main things I see in patriarchy are control and either-or thinking. I'm going to try to show that in how we approach decision-making we can exit those and go to a nonviolent future of choice, togetherness and flow so that control is replaced by purpose and either-or thinking is replaced by integration.