You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing

My father was the weather of my home growing up. If he was angry, he would come into the house a storm, his footsteps on the stairs like thunder, and the distance between footfalls how I counted how long I had to seek shelter. We were everything in his path, and the trail of destruction he left in his wake.

Like weather, abuse is cyclical, and not the same all the time. There are moments of clear escalation, and moments of precarious calm. The most dangerous phase of an abusive relationship is when a survivor tries to leave. Survivors usually require an average of seven to nine attempts before they are able to leave successfully.

Once I understood what I experienced as a child to be gender based, domestic violence, I saw this very intimate, personal violence to be a microcosm of a large misogynist, violent culture. As Bell Hooks said, “The term "patriarchal violence" is useful because unlike the more accepted phrase "domestic violence" it continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination” (Feminism Is For Everybody, 62.)

It is very rare for men to be held accountable for the trails of destruction they leave in their wake. Less than 1% of all sexual assaults end in conviction. When men are not held accountable for their own misogynist, white supremacist violence, they never have to integrate their violence into their self image. Instead, abusers force the world around them to conform to their warped reality. This creates a culture of rampant gender based violence that escalates exponentially and consumes everything in its path.

There is a way out of this cycle of violence, and it is for men to be accountable for their violence. It is only through accountability to survivors that men will be able to consciously face the truth of their violence and the harm they have done.

If we understand our culture to be a white supremacist misogynist abuser, then we can recognize where we are in the cycle of abuse. We are trying to leave the white supremacist misogynist abuser behind, and this is the most dangerous time. It will take us multiple attempts to get free, and white supremacist misogynist violence will escalate. Nevertheless, we must each day again choose freedom.

It is not a coincidence that powerful men are losing control over those they’ve subjugated at the same time as the pandemic is once again ravaging the country. The surge of cases is due to white men in power holding the country hostage, enacting bans on mask mandates and vaccination requirements.

As a child, I frequently feared that my father would kill me and then himself. Abusive men are more likely to kill their whole families and then themselves. They seek control, and if they cannot have it, they will take everyone down with them. In this moment, as bleak truths are being revealed and old systems are destabilized and collapsing, the abuser is recognizing control slipping from its grasp. This culture is a white supremacist abuser, and it will burn everything to the ground before it lets us go.

If we understand our culture to be fundamentally abusive, then we can recognize survivors telling their stories to be sounding the alarm for all of us. When men refuse to be accountable for their violence, survivors are the only ones who carry the true toll of this country’s violence. Survivors are the moral conscience of this society, and a culture that rests precariously on our silence will be undone by survivors holding up a mirror so that this country might see itself.

Forty percent (40%) of police officers are domestic abusers, and my father worked for Boeing for thirty years, including during the Iraq war. The same men who are responsible for mass death enact destruction at home. Survivors are trying to save all of our lives. On scorched earth no one survives.