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137 GAIL DINES Idon’t remember the day I took my first risk, but I am pretty sure it was before I was five, when I stood up to my abusive father by refusing to cry as he repeatedly slapped me hard across the face. He wanted to see tears, but I knew somewhere inside my soul, that if I gave him what he wanted, it was all over for me. What followed for years was intermittent beatings, a small price to pay for keeping my inner self intact. Like most oppressors, my father wanted me to crumble in the face of the overwhelming odds stacked against me. Well today, I am still facing overwhelming odds, as indeed is the majority of the world’s population. Our physical, emotional, economic and spiritual survival is under threat from bullies who will exploit anything or anybody to maximize profit. In a society of plenty, such as the United States, risky behavior has come to mean doing too much; too much drinking, too much drugging or too much indiscriminate sex. The slew of prevention programs that have grown up are all about moderation, calling for us to set limits in what is increasingly becoming a society without limits. But when faced with an environmental, cultural and economic crisis, surely we should begin to think of risky behavior as doing nothing; the less we resist, the more the corporate bullies will plunder. If we are to have any chance of creating a world worth living in, then we need to see our resistance as having no limits. Drastic times call for drastic risk taking. But for those of us who have spent our lives taking risks, we know that on an individual level, such risks are like drops in an ocean. When I refused to capitulate to my father, I was isolated in the family, as no one else wanted to risk taking on the patriarchal bully. It was the isolation, not the physical abuse, that led me to years of despair. Now as an adult who continually resists corporate patriarchal bullies, it is not despair that I feel, but an overwhelming sense of being alive, because my resistance takes place within the radical feminist movement. The day I discovered radical feminism (as an From Individual Despair to Collective Risk Taking Stopping the Corporate Bullies  CH031.qxd 7/15/09 7:52 AM Page 137 138 GAIL DINES undergraduate student who stumbled on Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful) is the day my life changed forever. Although I was sitting alone in the library, I was catapulted into a community of radical women who, just like me, had come to the profound realization that giving in to patriarchal bullies was a sure path to destruction. By joining the radical feminist movement, I relinquished my isolation , and instead of feeling out of place in the world, I found my sense of place. Engaging in resistant behavior is indeed risky if done alone. The psychologist Judith Herman, in her work on trauma, makes the point over and over again that the isolation caused by trauma is often more unbearable than the abuse itself. On a political level, we live in a society that is one big perpetrator. The unequal distribution of wealth, the mind-numbing work inherent in capitalism, the fear of becoming poor, the lack of access to life-giving resources and, of course, the physical, emotional and sexual violence that so many people, especially women and children, suffer on some level turns the majority of us into victims of trauma. We walk around with our own PTSD, thinking that something is wrong with us rather than understanding that PTSD is a normal state in an abusive world. In her remarkable book, Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales talks about individual and collective healing, and echoes Herman’s argument that rebuilding the self after trauma requires collective political activism. This message does not bode well for us in the United States, where individualism is the religion and self-help is the gospel. The risks we have to take today to wrestle the world away from the global perpetrators require acts of unbelievable bravery as they have to be uncompromising in their aims and unflinching in their defiance. Stopping environmental destruction is not about buying a fuel-efficient car; it is about organizing to end the capitalist society that is based on over-production of useless status symbols. Fighting for economic equality is...

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