Psychic School Wars Quotes

It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen.

Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. After a decade of Reconstruction, just as African-Americans were seeking entry to mainstream society, the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them. The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness. It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen. Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come.

Women have little to do with the march of history as we are taught it in our schools – women are the ones who wait at home or take on “men’s work” in order to get by and keep the war machine going. Women are, and always have been, the ones who nurse the wounded and bury the dead. Women are rarely the ones who make the decision to go to war and the sacrifice of women and of the culture is the psychic and physical health of the next generation. But those who perish for the cause attain a kind of immortality not often granted ordinary mortals. Mortality makes the loss of the beloved not only bearable but also glorious. Women and power. Women and death. Western culture gives us the glory of death and courage wrapped in a warrior package and occasionally a woman is the warrior. But how do we now – as the world twists and changes – fully step into our role as creator and destroyer? Have we the skills and the hearts to survive the unmaking of the old orders, keep our balance and walk the tightrope between aggression and strength, between power and glory and wiping a baby’s nose? We learn so much through the practice of living and through flying in our dreams. It is up to us now, as women, to define how the glory goes and when and to whom. Our quest as women is to find and claim our own kind of power in a world that has long denied us this privilege. How do we create a new world? As we midwife the death of the dominator system called patriarchy, we must organize and respond as women, consciously creating the world in our image. But first we must clarify that image and find the wit and courage to step into our own authentic power. We can look to the old systems for information, for inspiration as we gaze into the future of the planet and our species on it. We can honor the memory of the warrior-priestess, the queen, and the freedom fighter. Because it has fallen on us to birth the new world. Again. We begin by acknowledging that those centuries of living under an autocratic and misogynistic culture has left gaping wounds in the human psyche. We accept that we must be healers as well as leaders, that we must salve spirits that are hurting and feed those that are hungry. We, as women, will define what a warrior is in this brave new world; then we will become that thing; we will model that for our sons and our daughters, for our grandchildren and our grandparents. For Boudicca and for her daughters, for we are all her daughters.’’ -H. Byron Ballard, The Daughters of Boudicca, excerpt from In Defiance of Oppression - The Legacy of Boudicca, a Girl God Anthology.

Women have little to do with the march of history as we are taught it in our schools – women are the ones who wait at home or take on “men’s work” in order to get by and keep the war machine going. Women are, and always have been, the ones who nurse the wounded and bury the dead. Women are rarely the ones who make the decision to go to war and the sacrifice of women and of the culture is the psychic and physical health of the next generation. But those who perish for the cause attain a kind of immortality not often granted ordinary mortals. Mortality makes the loss of the beloved not only bearable but also glorious. Women and power. Women and death. Western culture gives us the glory of death and courage wrapped in a warrior package and occasionally a woman is the warrior. But how do we now – as the world twists and changes – fully step into our role as creator and destroyer? Have we the skills and the hearts to survive the unmaking of the old orders, keep our balance and walk the tightrope between aggression and strength, between power and glory and wiping a baby’s nose? We learn so much through the practice of living and through flying in our dreams. It is up to us now, as women, to define how the glory goes and when and to whom. Our quest as women is to find and claim our own kind of power in a world that has long denied us this privilege. How do we create a new world? As we midwife the death of the dominator system called patriarchy, we must organize and respond as women, consciously creating the world in our image. But first we must clarify that image and find the wit and cour-age to step into our own authentic power. We can look to the old systems for information, for inspiration as we gaze into the future of the planet and our species on it. We can honor the memory of the warrior-priestess, the queen, and the freedom fighter. Because it has fallen on us to birth the new world. Again. We begin by acknowledging that those centuries of living under an autocratic and misogynistic culture has left gaping wounds in the human psyche. We accept that we must be healers as well as leaders, that we must salve spirits that are hurting and feed those that are hungry. We, as women, will define what a warri-or is in this brave new world; then we will become that thing; we will model that for our sons and our daughters, for our grandchildren and our grandparents. For Boudicca and for her daughters, for we are all her daughters. -"The Daughters of Boudicca", excerpt from In Defiance of Oppression - The Legacy of Boudicca