Chuck’s Place: Sexual Abuse and The New New Deal

What’s missing? Relatedness!
-Art by Jan Ketchel

Poised as we are for the juggernaut of The New New Deal we are simultaneously treated to the greatest exposure of aberrant male sexual behavior the world has ever known.

The New Deal was really Eleanor Roosevelt’s baby, the caring, warmly related mother who insured the health and well being of her progeny. The New New Deal is the return of Kronos, Zeus’s father, who ate all his offspring, except Zeus, to insure his unimpeded rule.

The seeming contradiction of these synchronistic events, the rise of divisive egotism and the downfall of the abuser, deserves careful scrutiny. What both events share in common is the absence of  relatedness.

Human relatedness is born of the feminine in both women and men. The feminine underscores the interconnectedness of all life: wholeness. The feminine is eros, the glue that congeals a relationship, a family, a nation, a world.

In its purest form the masculine is pneuma, the imperceptible breath of wind that shows its effect by breaking up clusters of coagulated debris upon a lake, for instance, home to ecosystems in transition. In this image the masculine can be seen as aggressive, though I think more accurately as active. In its purest form the masculine is the active principle, yang, that spreads its seed far and wide creating ever new permutations of life.

This dispersion, however gentle the breeze may be, is destructive to what is. The dismantling of the social welfare caring state marks a radical breakdown of the inclusiveness and maternal supports that have served as the governing principles of the world for many decades.

The takedown of sexually abusive male icons and idols is its own dismantling of the status quo, largely fueled by the active yang energy in women. All are being emboldened by the bright light of consciousness to shine the light on hidden truths that have allowed an unrelated sexual instinct, housed in the dark recesses of the human shadow, to dominate with impunity.

What is currently lacking in both The New New Deal and our modern inquisition into abuse is the feminine principle of yin, relatedness. Perhaps it was time for a world restructuring. Perhaps care for all was becoming too inclusive, but clearly a push to completely shift resource into the hands of the least in need is missing something essential.

Similarly, to destroy careers without trial, to lump all male sexual behavior into the same category is lacking in a feminine relatedness that can feel its way to the differentiated truths in these many abusive vignettes revealed daily.

The truth is that any sexual contact that is not related, meaning not mutually agreed upon and desired by each person, is an abuse of human power.  A purely instinctual sexual encounter that lacks any real human connection, if  mutually agreed upon, is not abuse. However, the quality of such an unrelated encounter is not fully human, as it lacks the inclusion of the highest human potential, the ability to love. Sex without love is not related. The deepest human challenge is to reconcile animal and spirit in true union.

As we move forward from the disintegrative stage of our current world transformation we do well to realize that both action and connection are the yang and yin of our world. All new deals, wherever they may lead, require an equal participation and inclusion of both masculine and feminine principles.

Sexual abuse, as well as the New New Deal, reflects a preponderance of yang and a paucity of yin. Structures that lack balance will have limited life.

May we find our way to love,

Chuck

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