Family Therapy

Feminist ecotherapists, deeply immersed in polycultural ecology, a systematic teleology of cooperative nutrition economics, remain rarely flushed out from their safe spots. A self-isolating, often eremitic, subspecies, with shamanic nature-as-spirit tendencies, our most articulate mentors often wander off to pray for, breathe and suffer and dance and sing with Earth and all Her multiculturing species and seasons, spaces and times, avoiding glaring spotlights of media networks and shallow soundbites. That said, perhaps I can share lessons from my eldest urban BlackMale son about internal and external landscapes of justice and passion, passion for restoring justice and against unnecessarily traumatic retributive injustice. What does justice look like for my 22 year old African American eldest son? who graduated from special support services at Entitled-Elite High School with a fourth grade cognitive and affective functionality, no marketable skills other than his physical strength which shows decreasing likelihood of endurance due in part to horrid nutrition lack of self-care his preference to self-medicate away from his internal dissonance. He prefers THC, although he is angrily aware this means state and federal employment protection laws form a moat around his buzz, with all opportunities on the outside and far too many long-term risks on the inside of his bleary silo of despair. This loyal handsome young adult son recognizes discrimination, marginalization, poverty in comparison to outcomes for white privileged self-medicating with alcohol. It's a cultural thing that old people do to his MultiCultural TransMillennial Generation, like declaring wars so youth can learn to kill each other, while elders suck our fat wealth deposits into sporty cars of shifty ludicrosity. His skills do not include multiplication, much less division, but he knows when justice divides his population of young adults looking for their first jobs, so they don't have to live under tyrannical oppressors, condemning, rather than helpful, parents. Self-medicating with alcohol can easily pass through a drug screen test with one day notice from Human Resources, while my son watches from the other side of this divide. Can he get through at least eight weeks without medication that does seem to help him feel and think better of and with himself, and, given any doubt that any of this makes any sense, how long before he stops bothering to apply for any hope of a full life? Surely long before age thirty? Eldest son understands the justice and injustice of attending a horribly designed state contracted job program, to sit for eight unpaid training hours, for at least four weeks, probably six or even more, in a summer classroom with no windows, with 29 other ADD and ADHD medicated trainees, to face the dismissive derision of their trainer for being who they are, Losers who will never actually be sent through to paid employment in this card-shark process, violating perhaps every justice principle intended by the Americans with Disabilities Act, while the trainer draws his pay at our tax dollar expense. My son was not outraged that the State had no record of contractual oversight, no evidence that anyone who did eventually get paid could not have done so with one week's unpaid training, no evidence that there were no other training contractors with the capacity to avoid violating civil rights of those supposedly receiving a service for positive, nurturing regenerative outcomes, rather than rejection and dispossession and dismissal and further hopelessness without incomes, without icons of economic or political integrity. He was not alarmed that the Commissioner, his own State Senator, his US Senator, the ACLU, did not seem to raise so much as one eyebrow to a misuse of public dollars and trust with outcomes that could not even perform at the thinnest level of Hippocratic justice: If you cannot do any good, at least be sure you cause no harm. He has become used within an economic and cultural ecology that does not include him, and others who look and act and perform and breathe and beat their hearts, and try to balance their bicameral hemispheres as best they can in a "Business-As-Usual-Means-You-Do-Not Matter" environment. So, he reminds me of what I recognized long ago, growing up gay male in a homophobic hetero-dominant culture. I am reminded of what it means to have no economic right to employment and no socially supported right to love, to be disvalued human nature because intrinsically mendacious, to be negatively deviant, sin-infested removed from all that feels universally orthodox good, knowing justice could not include any honest relationship within my Beloved Community, could not include acceptance as a healthy soul or body or identity, as the appropriate offspring of socially acceptable evolution. My son's bottom line, "If they wanted to abuse us, then I wouldn't have minded so much if they were at least going to pay me. I'll be The Man's whore if I have to, but I won't be his ."