Child-care
Thank you for Pip Hinman's review of Sally Loane's book Who Cares? Guilt, hope and the child-care debate (GLW August 27). Pip took up a few issues that as a parent of a young daughter I was concerned about.
Arguments that parents are becoming more selfish and that children need more parental care (especially Mr Howard's arguments) seem to imply that it is the mother who must give up or compromise her career. Likewise, this parental "guilt" seems to refer only to the mother.
But why should this be so? Are we not in a late 20th century society where we are facing the reality of great changes in the traditional male and female roles? Or should I say the possibility of new horizons which let both parents share in the upbringing?
Child-care (not a new thing) is not about just dumping the children somewhere and leaving them. Very responsible parental decisions and input has to be made which includes on-going communication with the carers and involvement with a child-care centre's socialising, fund-raising and maintenance activities. So why should abrogation of parental responsibilities be because of a "selfish" desire for self-fulfilment? Why not just pay for less of a mortgage, buy a second-hand car, or learn to need less affluence?
Finally, why live in a working world dominated by the old 9-to-5 metropolitan clock-like existence with people rushing like mad to and fro while squeezing the psyche tightly and without demur into the corsets of workplace demands — anything rather than constructing something better for now and the future?
Bexley NSW
Men are oppressed
I am writing to comment on Ruth Ratcliffe's column in which she states her belief that men are not oppressed as men. Men and women are both conditioned to deny essential parts of their nature and the gender identities created to oppress women oppress men also. While the feminist movement has done much to raise our consciousness of the effects of oppression on women, the reality of male oppression has yet to be generally recognised.
Research has shown that baby boys are picked up and cuddled less frequently than girl babies and we all know that "big boys don't cry". This early warrior training alienates males from themselves and leads, predictably, to competitiveness, workaholism, rage, alcoholism, sex-addiction, suicide in young males, and other acts of desperation. How can men express their feelings when they have been trained to deny and disown them?
For the sexes to put each other down in this regard is itself symptomatic of oppression. We need to work for change, supportively, together.
Nimbin NSW
Tactics not eternal
Nick Southall ("Socialists and free speech", GLW #286) makes two main points. Both are wrong.
He says: "To argue in favour to (sic) the 'democratic right to freedom of speech' in a capitalist society is to support the status quo." He quite rightly points out how tenuous this "right" is. But then, so are all the other rights we argue in favour of.
In Nick's sentence I quoted, you could replace "freedom of speech" with any of the other things we argue in favour of: "bargain collectively", "strike", "earn livable wages", "live in an unpolluted environment" etc. etc. These are all rights which, at various stages of the struggle, are more or less tenuous. Are we then to cease arguing for any of them because we are thereby "supporting the status quo"?
Nick then goes on to the issue of non-violence. He claims that it cuts out the right to self-defence. In fact, they are both valid tactics. Each should to be used in its appropriate situation.
Gandhi's "civil disobedience" (mass non-violent tactics) was a vital factor, if not the only one, in throwing the British Raj out of India. True, a relatively small proportion of non-violent protesters had their blood spilt by police over the years — but the message got across.
In different circumstances, in Paris in 1968, students and their allies on the streets defended themselves. Many of them had their blood spilt, too. It was the Communist Party's refusal to back them that led to their defeat.
Our job is not to determine which of the two tactics is eternally correct. Instead, it is to decide which is the right one to use in each situation. Any one such decision will not necessarily turn out in hindsight to have been right. But at least we will have been appropriately flexible.
Brompton SA
Post-Burnham Bougainville
It would be unfair to judge someone merely on what they thought of William Burroughs, but in Dave Riley's case I shall make an exception.
Thank you very much for the article on the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (GLW #285). This actually makes the peace process in Bougainville harder, since local and national governments can be sued, and successfully, by transnationals for interfering in any way with their activities.
A local government faced with a bill for $200 million would be bankrupted, and have to cave-in, as would (even a well-intentioned) national government. This means that the BRA cannot place undue confidence in the ability of the electoral process to protect them and the population in the villages from, say, the effects of mines.
Nor can they have undue confidence in friendly governments who have done all the talking post-Burnham. This for instance: "The Australian Defence Force will be asked to prepare a strategy for sending servicemen to territory controlled by the Bougainville Revolutionary Army" (Age 28/8/97).
Do what? I've got a better idea — everybody buzz off and leave them alone. They have walked the tightrope of existence for hundreds of thousands of years as we all did, by village autonomy; this cellular democracy also won them the war, as it wins every guerilla war. They will use it to survive such peace as the corporate steamroller will allow.
Harper Creek Qld