GENDER EQUALITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS and REPRESENTATION 
AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

E-Mail correspondence below calls for a different priority.

Rabbi Lerner—It is time to launch an “agonizing reappraisal” of the destructive role that religious institutions have had upon Humanity.

The continuing violence against women and her children throughout human history must be understood within a religious framework. Transforming Cultures of Violence into Cultures of Peace is not possible without a transformation of values and assumptions of gender inequality inherent in religious theology.

So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27-29).

Not having health insurance I sat in the waiting room of the local ‘tribal’ clinic waiting for my annual routine blood work to be drawn. Sitting across the room was a Native or Hispanic mother with her daughter, who is just becoming a woman. She watched the television and got up a few times to answer a question or help her mother with a form. I was struck by her natural beauty, her chiseled face, large doe-like brown eyes, her body mid-way transforming from a child to a woman.

The Role of the Paleocerebellum in Eliminating Violence in Mother-deprived Primates and Permitting Expression of Affectional Behaviors Not Possible Before Paleocerebellar Surgery.

James W. Prescott, Ph.D.

It is well recognized that Violence by Homo Sapiens throughout the World threatens species and planetary survival. Violence begins with the individual and must be understood before Cultures of Violence appear. The brain is the organ of behavior and how the brain is encoded for Peaceful or Violent Behaviors is the great challenge to Humanity.

A philanthropist asked: "With so many worthy nonprofit organizations and such need, what would you do? Where would you invest ten thousand or ten million dollars, and why?"

The answer, I maintain, depends on depth; treating symptoms or root causes. A person bleeding after an accident needs immediate attention. Stop the bleeding. Preventing the injury is more complex, more challenging. We need to do both.

Culture is the cause. Self-inflicted suffering and violence is the bleeding. Yes, self-inflected. In a recent interview the Dali Lama observed that we create most of our problems. Physicist David Bohm, protégé of Einstein, put it this way:

We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.

Collectively what Bohm calls thought expresses as Culture. Culture is our semantic-reality, the conditioned memories triggered by words, mental, emotional and physical images and our identification with these images. The culturally induced inner image we believe we are and the outer image we call culture emanate from the same root. Both are images. Both are, at close examination, the same. This insight is both obvious and profound. The difference between our personal image of self and the outer image we call culture is defined only by which end of the telescope we are viewing, near or far, inner or outer. The root of our personal and global conflict emanates from this image.

My intent (whim) has been to awaken parents from the spell and implicit trap created by our cultural identity. I would not have described it as such twenty years ago, but that is an up-to-date and accurate description.

By encouraging adults to become more aware of our self-generated trap we might free the children who come under our spell and with that, culture, or at least lessen the entrapment produced by the enchantment. After all; kids are not the problem. Child development is dependent on adult development.

This spell or enchantment is the normal and natural function of the relatively new neocortex, the 3rd brain using Paul D. MacLean’s triune brain model.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice symbolizes our immature mastery of the image making power generated by this 3rd brain complex. The imagery produced by this center is so vast and so new biologically that we simply get caught, again and again, in the images we create, forgetting that we have created them. Not a good thing given the creative power these images represent, which is what the Sorcerer symbolizes.

Human development is ‘model dependent.’ Every generation stands upon the shoulders of the previous. Nature assumes that the adult model, each individual and the collective culture, is sane, intelligent and wise. She could not do otherwise.

Unquestioned acceptance of the given was Piaget’s observation. That is nature’s agenda.  And it worked perfectly for billions of years until the neocortex evolved and with it the capacity to imagine. Imagination is the most powerful tool in the known universe.  Ah, but what if the user hasn’t a clue what it is or how to use it – sanely, consciously? We all then become the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

If there is a single force that generates inequality, violence and war throughout the world, other than the Central Bank, I vote for the self-image we create gazing up for assurance and approval as infants. At this early stage of development what emerges from that glance is not a fixed image, rather feelings: of acceptance, of care, welcoming, understanding, empathy, encouragement or their opposites; rejection, anger, frustration, neglect and the various forms of abuse.

Over time the repetition of these feelings coalesce, merge and form predictable patterns and these in turn create the scaffolding upon which our social identity is formed. Belonging means survival. Rejection could mean death. So we began to judge our worth and value based on the emotional reactions we experience in the mirror of our primary relationship.

Being accepted and maintaining the bond or attachment with mother extends to father, siblings, extended family, tribe and village. Instead of glances our value is based on comparison; our score, grade point average, nationality, race, profession, political party, social status, cast, club, gang, and religion. Our identity and self-worth are sculpted by the selfish needs of these social groups and within each sub-group is a pecking order forged by comparison, allegiance, obedience and conformity. Conflict, greed and war are implicit in this structure and this structure is based on mental-emotional images that forge our identity.

Martin Luther King and his Viet Nam War.

I was pretty young in the early 60s’ when JFK was politically neutralized. The civil rights movement was no less dramatic. I saw one or two sound bites about something happening in the South. My older sister and brother’s friends were being drafted; protests at Kent State; Viet Nam. I was clueless.

I was also clueless about this guy named Martin Luther King, marching in Birmingham for civil rights. Why, did you know that just a few years ago people of color could not sit next to white folk at the neighbor diner? Children of color had to sit at the back of the bus, could not attend white schools. Imagine that? He had a dream and so must we.

Schools ban hugging and teachers carry concealed weapons, symptoms of a deep, systemic failure of development. Guns don’t kill, people do. In the same way media and virtual-reality in the hands of predator corporations and predator governments profit from fear and anxiety, the crisis du jour, invented or not.