Me Too Corrected?

 The Me Too movement has taken down many horrible people. The likes of Harvey Weinstein have totally deserved it. But in the case of Johnny Depp, things have not been as simple. In his case, he was accused indirectly by one person where Weinstein was accused by multiple people with plenty of evidence to criminally convict him on several counts.

The one problem I’ve had with Me Too has been that it is trying people in the court of public opinion. Public opinion is notorious for being unreliable. There are plenty of times when that court has convicted someone innocent.

There are claims that Amber Heard’s loss to Johnny Depp is a huge blow to the Me Too movement. I don’t agree. Johnny Depp’s defense was not that Amber Heard was just wrong, but that she created her story of abuse because that was what she had been doing to him. The case was all about the inconsistencies in her story. They had what few people do, audio recordings of various arguments and incidents. They had documented medical care given. They had many eye witnesses to events, a number of them unaffiliated with either of them.

Having spent a good deal of time watching the testimony in the trial, what I can report is that the evidence presented did not support Heard’s story. There were a number of inconsistencies that did not seem authentic. There was a lack of physical evidence supporting her story. There was a lack of any evidence supporting her story. There was what she told her therapist, but much of that was not reported at the time of the supposed events. On the other side, Depp’s lawyers were able to bring a lot of evidence to support that he was the victim of abuse. They were able to provide evidence of multiple instances of physical injury. They were able to play audio recordings of multiple times when she basted him verbally.

One of the biggest things that went against Heard in the US trial that did not come out in the UK trial was that she did not donate the $7 million from the divorce settlement as she claimed and pledged. The first installment was paid by Depp’s accountant directly and the only following installments were donated by Elon Musk, Heard’s boyfriend at the time. No further payments were made. Lying about this donation destroyed her credibility. Her credibility on this was a key to Depp’s loss in the UK trial.

So when you put the lies about donating millions to charity, the evidence of abuse to Depp, and the lack of evidence of any medical treatment she received, plus all the verbal abuse in the audio recordings, previous charges of abuse against her, the multiple former partners of Depp who testified that he had never abused them, and all the witnesses who saw Heard blowing up at Depp, all worked to prove that it was Heard who was the abuser. Her accusations against Depp appear at this point to be a case of an abuser gas lighting their victim - a common defense.

In addition, she tried to paint a picture that she was not a substance abuser and he was. But the evidence shows that she was at least an equal abuser.

Other aspects of the case that worked in Depp’s favor were the abuse he and his father and siblings suffered at the hands of his mother, his defense mechanism (leaving the situation), that defense mechanism showing up in the audio recordings of the fights with Heard and her ridiculing him for it, his silence in public, his well laid out defense in court and the clear picture laid out of her verbal and physical abuse of him.

And it was telling that her attorney’s closing argument contained the statement that the jury must find for her or it will damage the case of future women who suffer from abuse. That is not a personal defense but a plea to ignore the evidence and consider the larger picture. That the jury did not heed that request shows that they were looking at the facts of the case. And now that she has lost, they are repeating that false equivalency on the talk show circuit.

This case is all about uncovering the true victim of abuse and tearing through the lies of the abuser. Gas lighting is a common defense of abusers and in this case it took on the abuser playing the victim in public. But how can we tell? Because Heard’s accusations lacked substance. The medical records in question were not hospital records of treatment but self reported incidents to a therapist at a later date. Witnesses reported no bruises were seen. Police called to the scene saw no evidence of abuse and left. Abusers tend to be habitual. Heard was accused of abusing a previous partner where all of Depp’s former partners have stated that he didn’t harm them at all. Also, Depp was seen to fall into depression and worse substance abuse during his relationship with Heard (to the point it affected his work) and sought treatment after and has cleaned up his act.

The overall picture is in Depp’s favor. It is in the victim’s favor. So in terms of victims of abuse, this case is solidly on the side of evidence of abuse.

As for the Me Too movement, I think that it will go forward little changed. I think Depp’s team made it clear that he supports victim’s rights and that victims need to be listened to, even if they are men. I think the one thing this may do is correct for the flaw that a single person could take down another. There are many cases out there where a bad relationship might come to light. But I think the Me Too movement needs to focus on taking down the serial abusers (the infamous casting couch) that have preyed on the innocent. Even the name implies that the movement is based on the idea that when multiple people come forward, they must be listened to. Several cases have risen out of this that did not involve multiple accusers that were not as clear. But when multiple accusers are involved, many with similar, if not identical, stories, the criminality of their actions becomes clear. Even if such charges cannot be proven in court, the number of victims should ensure they get their say in pubic and that the careers of serial abusers should come to an end. With any luck a criminal conviction should follow, as many have.

So this case has not set back the cause of victims of domestic violence, but forwarded it by showing what lengths a guilty person might go to in order to appear innocent. Does it really impact the Me Too movement? Only time will tell, but I would hope that with a single accuser that their story would be scrutinized appropriately and if found credible would get fair treatment to see the abuser pay.

Realities of Modern Bigotry

This would not be necessary if we didn't still have a problem. But we still have a lot of bigotry in the world and I fear that in our attempts to lift us out of that quagmire we are only lengthening the process.

To be more specific I must first explain where I am coming from. There are many visions of the future and the ones that show the world where all are equal have certain things in common. The key thing is that race, nationality, religion, or anything that we currently cling to that divides us is no longer a factor. That is not to say those things can't be important to a person, but no part of society cares. Race is gone and those attributes are no more than part of a person's physical description. But how do we get there?

Getting there requires a concerted effort to educate everyone. As we can see with the current pandemic and who people are listening to, it is hard to educate people for something that is that critical. So I wonder how long true equality will take. And here we can address Critical Race Theory which, contrary to what some politicians are claiming in their scare tactics, is only taught in law schools as an examination of racism in our centuries old legal system in the United States. Using it they are digging out the embedded racism in our system. First find it and then we can change it. That is an excellent next step. I recently re-read the US Constitution and made an amazing discovery. For all the claims of embedded racism, there is little written into that document that preserves racism. It does indeed acknowledge slavery, but neither race nor gender are ever specified leaving the core of the document free from that taint. It is a structural foundation for a system of government that can be free from bigotry. Some of the racism seen in it today were not things included and when you look at our history (I am not a lawyer and have not bee taught accurate Critical Race Theory) you can see where racism has been hung on the Constitution by the laws and legal decisions made since it was written. So we have a foundation with a lot of clutter on top. We need to clean that up. I recently heard someone talk about needing a new vocabulary and a more accurate label for Critical Race Theory would be Identifying Codified Bigotry.

So educating people is a challenge. It has to be something in the moment that all political parties can agree on and that is truly rare. The polio vaccine was one. But as they try to finally eradicate it from the world, that same educational challenge rears its head and prevents the final pockets from getting the vaccine. Fear of the unknown and fear of change are powerful things.

So what we are looking at is a real challenge. How do we end bigotry without creating reverse bigotry? The end goal should be a color blind society that recognizes every individual has a different story and embraces that story. But to get there we have to recognize that in those stories bigotry plays a vital role. So we can eliminate bigotry, we have to make it fade away slowly. We can't wave a magic wand and have it vanish because that would wipe out the role bigotry has played in so many people's lives.

So we are caught in a hard situation. To end bigotry (and racism is by far the hardest to stamp out) we have to build an equal society but we have to educate on bigotry to show those who have not been the victim of it what the victims have gone through in order to stamp it out. But I think we need to reframe it in some way. I don't have that answer.

And one part of this that does bother me is in our history we have many people who have tried imperfectly to work toward this goal. Because the were imperfect by our modern standards, even though they were way ahead in their thinking in their time, we judge them by today's standards. If a person owned slaves in America they are automatically bad. It does not matter that they inherited them. It does not matter that they desired to see slaves freed. We judge them based on modern assumptions and write off their key part in getting where we are today. Those historical figures who did own slaves have been remembered and honored because they had a bigger vision of the future. They were in the same position we are in. They desired to end slavery, but were deep in an entrenched system. We desire to end bigotry but are in an entrenched system. The system must be broken. Their actions led to the breaking of the system of slavery. Our actions today need to lead to the breaking of bigotry. All types.

And to be clear, racism is when you treat someone of a different race differently. It is when you don't want your kids marrying someone of a different race. We must end all differences. Each person should be seen as the sum of their past. Their personal past and their ancestry. Watching these genealogy programs can be eye opening. Sure they pick big stars, but when you forget that the person is famous and just look at them as a person, so many come with mixed ancestry. A few have DNA results that show a very homogenized ancestry. Though some forget that even different countries in Europe have deep bigoted divides. In the UK it is hard to say whether they are more bigoted to someone with Scottish ancestry or Indian ancestry. And we see that in the US in the bigotry toward the Irish and Catholics.

And I am deeply troubled by the divide between African American activists and Native American activists. They should be working together, but many times they are at odds. We need to unify the groups working to end bigotry and realize that they all have the same goal, even though they don't have the same history.

One area that might be key to this is understanding the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange. One is theft, one is sharing. Sharing is not bad. Sharing teaches understanding and equality. A white American becoming a Japanese Tea Ceremony master is not cultural appropriation. Is that fine level of distinction that we need to be careful of as we strive to fix what is broken. Cultural exchange is not broken, but it gets lumped in with cultural appropriation. So we need to end all bigotry. But in the process we don't want to destroy other things. We need all groups that are seeking equality to join together and put aside their differences - to find the common history and work for a common future.

The reality of race in today's world is that it was a construct of those seeking to divide and now it is hard to bring us back together. And so many are unaware the dividing us by culture, national origin, language or anything else is just as bigoted. Race is just one aspect. One piece. We need to work on pulling all the pieces together into one effort. We have a difficult issue today of a huge divide in politics in the United States. It is so huge that it counts as bigotry.

One side of that political divide has taken one of the Revolutionary War liberal battle cries and turned it into a reactionary one. I prefer one of the other battle cries - United or Die. We must unite all those working to end all forms of bigotry. We need merge the messages together while maintaining the individual stories. And that is what the ideal future will look like as well. United while maintaining our individual stories. And I think Genealogy, seen by some as a test of racial purity, can become instead the archive of our individual histories. We can keep the stories of the past and the bigotry that different groups have faced as a lesson to the future to not do that again. And we can use it to uncover lost pieces of history and expand our personal histories. We can do all these things to face modern bigotry and continue to erode it.

In 1964 it would have been impossible to contemplate an African American President. Today that is history and we have an African American woman as Vice President. Yet many communities still face the same troubles they did half a century ago. So in some areas our society has greatly advanced. We need to see those advances and build on them and carry those down to every community. No one should ever feel that bigotry. And if we truly want the word "all" to mean every single person, we can't let their political beliefs, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, religion, national origin, or any other aspect of their person to be held against them. The only people who need to be ostracized are those who want to continue to promote bigotry. They are the problem and that message needs to be silenced.

I am hoping to see improvements in this situation in my life. I'm halfway through it so if we make as many changes as we have in the first half of my life, that could be amazing. But we can't ignore it. We have to work at it and we have to join together. Division only works to help bigotry endure.

Perspective

One thing that is always on my mind is perspective. Not as in art and vanishing angles, which I leave to artists, but rather how we look at things. Politics tends to be full of people looking at things from a narrow perspective. I prefer to look at things from many views and as wide a perspective as possible. In the past I tried to put some of this into words, but feel I failed. So here goes again.

History is full of events. Each event can be looked at in isolation. I just watched a program about Nagasaki in the months after the atomic bomb. Many interviews of with the people who lived through it. Everything they said was valid, but I began to see that it was not the only view to take of those events. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left horrible devastation. The force of the explosions leveled a large area and the heat vaporized everything within a certain radius. It left people injured and dying and as the immediate effects finished, the longer term effects began to take hold even as the cities began to recover. These two cities had an extra legacy to deal with, radiation sickness, that no other bombing sites in the world had seen before. It was horrible. It tugs at the heart and brings tears to the eyes. Yet save for the radiation and the number of bombs, this was a scene that played out all over the world. It had played out during the fire bombing of Tokyo. It was played out in Europe in city after city. Why? When a country goes to war, the civilian population is put to work making the weapons of war. In order to bring a quicker end to the war, factories and other facilities were targeted. WWII bombs were not terribly exact so to ensure a target was hit, they had to bomb a large area. The first atomic bombs were to accomplish this with one bomb. It worked and the devastation they caused is remembered to this day and is barely a taste of where such weapons were developed to.

But bombing isn't the only horror in war. What conquering armies can do can be even worse. There are worse things than death. Case in point are all the camps established for WWII. We all know about the concentration campus where millions died in Europe at the hands of the Nazis, but the US internment campus and the Japanese POW camps. Starvation existed in many of those camps and starvation followed in the wake of the armies. The US took the unprecedented step of feeding the refugees after the war, but most of the horror of that occurred during the war. With their systematic killing, the Germans silenced many of the stories, but the Japanese did not often outright kill their prisoner and the raping and torture is fairly well documented by survivors. And when you travel back into history things get even worse. How many know that Hitler was only the third most deadly leader of that era. Hitler and the Nazis killed more than 10 million people. Joseph Stalin is estimated to have had around 20 million killed. And before either of them, King Leopold II of Belgium killed upwards of 15 million. And going back much further, an estimated 40 million died during the Mongol conquest.

So, perspective. Whose view do you focus on? Let's narrow in on Japan in WWII. What view do you take? Do we feel for the civilians bombed by the US? Of course. Do we feel for the Koreans, Chinese, and many others that the Japanese conquered and subjugated? Of course. Ultimately the fault lies with those who started the war. War is hell. In some wars it seems that hell actually comes to earth for people to try and survive. WWII was such a war. Hell came to Europe and the Pacific rim at the hands of the Axis powers and the Allied powers only added to that to prevent the horrors from spreading any further. Horrors upon horrors. That is the perspective of war. We feel for the victims no matter the cause because so many of them were innocent of causing the horrors but were the ones who had to live through it.

In other areas we need perspective in looking at day to day events. So many times people insist that you look at things from just one perspective. Sometimes that is not the only valid perspective. Sometimes it is. Frankly when the second perspective is from a racist or murderer, that is not a valid perspective. Not when their hate led to someone else’s suffering. People can become mentally ill. Injury, sickness, dementia, and many other causes, and none of those are an excuse for their behavior. It is the reason and we can come to understand why their minds led them in that direction, but we don't have to tolerate it or accept the actions. The one single incident that I think best describes what I am talking about is the story of Patrick Stewart's parents. Stewart grew up in an abusive home. His father would go off on his mother and beat her terribly. She took the brunt of it. for most of his life he held great hatred for his father, but something made him question it. Perhaps the glimmers of his better side. So he investigated (with the help of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are?) and what he uncovered opened his eyes. His father had been with the British troops in France. Part of the troops pulled out at Dunkirk. They were able to trace his duty through that period and found he had been exposed to some of the horrors of what the German troops were doing to civilians. It has scarred him. Scarred him horribly. He was never the same. He finally had the answer to why his mother had always stayed by her husband's side. She saw it as a war wound. Many came back with physical scars, or missing parts. The elder Stewart had come back with scars of the mind. Today we have treatments and therapies, but in those days there was nothing to do but endure. So Mrs. Stewart endured and loved her damaged husband. So now Patrick Stewart is not only a tireless fighter for domestic abuse, but also for mental health treatment for soldiers. He gained perspective.

With perspective we can judge whether someone acted in response to something or if they acted and caused something. In the grander scheme of WWII, the question on American minds was what it would take for the Japanese to surrender. It couldn't be left up to a guess. We needed it to happen at the earliest possible moment. We can debate whether the Japanese leaders were reading to surrender before the first or after the first bomb, but in reality the world was done with war and every moment it dragged on more people died on both sides. The need for it to end overrode waiting and seeing if one or both bombs was needed. The war ended and the healing began. That was what was needed.

Examining all sides and every perspective allows us to judge events objectively. But as I said, while it is fine to understand a monster's motivations, that is not a side to take. But for us writers, we must learn to write from that monster's perspective. The monster must thing they are doing the right thing. They may be crazy or just plain evil, but from their perspective they are in the right. From any truly objective angle their evil is on display and taking their side makes most people feel sick. Perspective gives us understanding not agreement. Agreeing with a monster make you a monster. There is no getting around that. Agree with Hitler, Stalin, or Charles Manson and you are as much a monster as they are. We all should know right from wrong. But modern events have shown how easy it is to be swayed by monsters. That is when perspective becomes warped.

The Thrill of the Hunt

I don't feel like getting into politics, but I think some of my feelings might be clear from what I am about to cover. I find myself in an odd place these days, but I used to feel I knew where I fit. I still do with writing.

I am a firm believer in science. Some people don't understand a few things about it. Some see science as a monolithic stone structure - unchanging and unmoving. That couldn't be further from the truth. Sure, there are aspects of science that have a long history and have been tested and proven over and over again. But there is another area of science. This is cutting edge and theoretical science. This is an ever changing battle ground of ideas, tests, and results. I've heard some people say that if someone changes their mind or says something different that they can't be trusted. And I'm like.... that is what science does. You form a theory and test it. And the initial results may tell you one thing, but further examination or further testing reveals that the first results should be interpreted in a different way. So it is a constantly changing landscape. In some areas they have competing theories that battle back and forth for years. Sometimes with neither one ever being proven right. Take our current virus. It broke onto the scene as new and different. A mutation from what had come before. So what we knew before didn't really apply, but that was what we had to start with. There were many questions and many theories. So as the questions came up, test were run and our knowledge grew and some things change greatly and some have bounced back and forth as we narrow in on the real facts. It isn't that anyone is lying, it is that they are learning and growing the body of knowledge in real time. It seems to confuse quite a few people. No need. Just go with the latest and don't sweat it. You are watching science at work.

History is a different thing all together. History is the gathering of knowledge of the past. Facts, observations, stories, etc. You have to put everything together to get the full picture. There is what those who lived through that time have to say. Often this is a mix of in the moment writing and looking back writing. Then you have hard facts. Photos, artifacts, less opinion based reporting. Archeology plays a part. It can uncover missing or incorrect elements. In the end, you have to put it all together and some things don't look the same when the full picture comes into focus. In 1912 a great ship sank in the North Atlantic. Only a third of the people on board survived. Man eye witness reports said the ship broke in two, but during the official investigation, no one brought in those witnesses and the official report was that the ship sank intact. Fast forward to 73 years later and the ship was found on the bottom in 2 large pieces and many smaller pieces. It broke in two. But it wasn't until the sea bed was fully surveyed in 2011 that all the pieces were found and the full story of that night could be finally put together. So many movies were made based on what was believed true at the time and at this point, they are all incorrect due to the incomplete information available at the time.

Genealogy is a guessing game. First off, we like to believe that our ancestors were faithful to their marriages and in the age of photographs and now of DNA we can know for sure. But as you delve into the mists of time, that becomes less certain. The realities of family relationships are hidden. Are those really the correct parents. Was the child adopted, were they legitimate, was it some other blood relation or were they strangers. We can't say. Genealogy is partly a research into your DNA and partly a research of family relationships. And it can be fun when you find a mistake. I found I'm related to Benedict Arnold because one family was disconnected from the mother (probably due to her relation to him) even thought he mother was alive when the youngest was born. Setting right such an old error is rewarding. But you still never know what the truth was. One of my grandmother's cousins was really her cousin by blood, but his mother died shortly after he was born and he was given to his childless aunt to raise. Fast forward to when he was in his eighties and he finally found out. Some of those secrets can never be uncovered because the people who knew took them to their grave.

What is true for me in each of these is that it is the hunt for information that draws me. The mystery of what can be found. I follow science more than research it personally, but I have conducted historical and genealogical research. It is truly rewarding. Almost as much as writing. If I wrote in a different genre, like some writer friends of mine, those discoveries could be fodder for stories. Instead I prefer to dream up my own worlds and explore them. Still, those discoveries often creep in anyway.

Well, that wasn't good....

 I dont' know how I manged it, but somehow I deleted everything. True I was trying to drastically alter the layout (which didn't turn out to be that drastic in the end) and I'm going to move everything for my author page here (instead of Google Sites), but I hadn't planned on starting over.

Well, perhaps I needed a fresh start. Maybe something good will come of 2020 because of it. So time to get writing on some new blog posts.

But I needed to get something up so it isn't so bare.

Tune in soon for more.