The first time, ever I saw your face,
I thought the sun rose in your eyes
And the moon and the stars were the gifts you gave
to the dark and the endless skies”
— Ewan MacColl
We live in a culture that promotes images of beautiful women everywhere we look. Turn on the TV and commercials feature super models standing beside products the capitalists want us to buy. Step outside and you see them on billboards doing same. Online they lurk at the outer edges of our screen, sirens luring us to purchase sports cars, perfume, or smart phones.
But the attention falls short of the most beautiful women in the world, who are involved with making a better world. We do not see them on our TVs, billboards, or mainstream media web pages.
Ironically, the jobs which contribute the most toward making a better world usually pay the tiniest fraction of what a super model makes, and require one to do without material things. We see more women than men in both doing this kind of work and providing the leadership in the social justice movement, environmental movement, peace movement and other magnificent causes.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to those who watch women performing heroic acts daily all over the world that they take on jobs to make our world better, and is a remarkable compliment to the female gender.
Every day, unseen in distant places, women give their last food to children and die of starvation, an act as courageous as any other, although we almost never hear their names, as a child dies of hunger-related causes every ten seconds. Overlooking this, our popular movies generally depict male characters as the heroes.
Last week two women completed Army Ranger training and received headlines throughout the mainstream press, even as thousands of female heroes remain nameless.
It is ironic that women receive recognition when they perform as trained killers rather than at their more traditional, nurturing roles.
I have mixed feelings about this Ranger achievement. On the one hand I want women to reach high goals and lead fulfilled lives. I want women to be president, chief justice of the Supreme Court, and attain other high offices. On the other hand I don’t think women are advanced by becoming elite assassins.
I’ve long believed, as is said in Eastern philosophy, that gender balance is best for harmony in the universe. It should not be thought of as an end goal that there are more women in the US Congress than ever before, but that the goal should be that it become fully half female, so we have very far to go.
But in wanting a female president of the USA, we shouldn’t want a militant Margaret Thatcher, called by a Soviet journalist “The Iron Lady,” nor a Golda Meir, called by Former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion “The best man in government.”
It is disgusting that women are asked to be manly before they can be recognized as good leaders. This seems to me to be a test that rules out most of the best females. Of course, the manly test is really to judge whether these leaders are ruthless enough to slaughter the enemies of the ruling oligarchs and plutocrats, as male leaders are traditionally tasked.
I would love to see a president of the United States who was a traditional female, nurturing our dysfunctional planet. She would be skilled at demilitarizing and negotiating peace, cleaning up the environment, feeding the hungry, healing the sick and bringing the people of the world together in harmony. She wouldn’t care at all if those in power called her soft or emotional, she would see that as a strength.
When people accuse women of being too emotional to hold high office, they ignore reality. How often have we seen, just prior to going to war, male leaders rattling the saber and emotionally screaming out for war? I believe it is a myth that women are more emotional, we are simply taught in our youth to display our emotions more openly if female, and hide them if male.
As a combat vet, I would much prefer to see a female leader shedding tears at the thought of our going to war than a jingoist John McCain emotionally shouting out his desire to obliterate a nation in the way of capitalist greed, burning their crops and slaughtering their children as realistically happens in war.
It would be wonderful if girls today had as a role model a powerful female who was courageous enough to stand for world peace, a clean planet, and a fair distribution of wealth, a woman like Jill Stein who is running for president without a single word from the entire mainstream press, all determined that such a person will not be seen by the masses.
Instead, corporate media give us Hillary Clinton, who voted for war with Iraq as a Senator and encouraged the slaughter of thousands in Libya and Syria (among other nations) as Secretary of State. From the Republican side we are given massive coverage of Carly Fiorina, who laid off 30,000 people in her company, damning their hopes. These are women with the mentality of Army Rangers, able to cut throats as coldly as any man, the obvious reason they are recognized as qualified in a patriarchal system serving plutocrats.
In Eastern philosophy the female energy, yin, is opposite the male energy, yang, but just as powerful. It is thought that when the two are given equal representation, there is harmony. When too much power resides in one of them, there is chaos.
There should be no doubt that our world is in chaos today, but there is hope, because of the most beautiful women in the world.