I’m fairly sure that as time passes, some “acceptable” explanation for the recent horror in Afghanistan will be trotted out. And if it doesn’t work, then a single soldier will be sacrificed and the ongoing atrocity – the occupation – will continue.

Speaking of Alice Miller, pattrice, do you know the work of Arthur Silber (http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/). He has an entire series of posts about the work of Alice Miller, he’s uncompromising about the role of the U.S in world violence, feminist, pro-GLBT). You probably know of him.

As for tracing the recognition of certain world realities, I’d love to know the growth of this in Kathy Kelly, for example, and others. I do know it for Virgil Butler, because he wrote about it at length. The problem there is that I have to put Virgil in a category of exceptional people, because we all know how much more often people working in slaughterhouses become unbelievably violent toward the animals, moreso than they would have ever been beforehand. What’s the answer to this?

Charlotte: I too have seen that look of surprise when referring to the good-old USA as a rogue nation. So, how might we prompt awareness that the enemy is us? Would it be helpful to trace the trajectory of your own recognition of that?

Catherine: You’re right. Those directly affected do tend to take some sort of action in the immediate aftermath. And, since this is not sustained, they never learn whether or not that strategy–often just simplistic “awareness raising” as in the Invisible Children campaign against Kony–would have been useful. In communities that have been marked by violence, and thus maybe more likely to be open to fresh solutions, how might we provoke the kinds of sustained conversations that might allow people to discover for themselves the roots of violence right in their own homes?

Speaking of which, Greta highlights children and also mentions domestic violence (along with dietary and consumer choices). As Alice Miller did for Germany after WWII, I’ve been thinking–a lot–about violently coercive parenting (aka “spanking”), which is practiced in the vast majority of US families, as foundational to this particular culture of violence. I’ve been testing out different ways of talking about this with my community college students (many of whom are parents and almost all of whom were hit as children) and will report my results soon.