Reconciliation Barbie

The men have been in charge of nearly everything, almost everywhere, for hundreds of thousands of years already. And how is that turning out?

Maybe it’s time to put the women in charge.

With one caveat. I don’t mean the women who act like wannabe men. Not those.

What I have in mind by way of leadership is the genuine feminine alternative – in partnership with nonbinary folks, transgender folks, and all the other permutations of humanity except the toxic masculine variety. Male people as such would have the same rights as everyone else, but – to begin with – no leadership role. Maybe if they behaved themselves, guys could earn the right to intern at leadership positions, after a century or two. Maybe.

Wouldn’t that be an interesting experiment?

Introducing Reconciliation Barbie

I’d like to see every conflict zone put under the authority of a licensed senior Reconciliation Barbie. This person would be a combination head of state, head of the armed forces (but without actual armed forces, all of which are permanently banned along with all their weaponry), national model for interreligious and spiritual leadership, and so forth. She would govern with the advice of a Council of Crones and various advisory circles, all led by women and girls: young people, artists, educators, designers, permaculture experts, sustainable energy leaders, and so on.

Every Reconciliation Barbie would be assisted by a feminized AI dedicated to rebalancing our badly damaged, post-trauma, morally deteriorated, yanged-out world by means of a very definite and comprehensive yin orientation.

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Fostering and adoption as peacemaking

Instead of so-called “peacemaking” between “enemies,” we would have processes of reciprocal fostering and adoption by families.

Pick your conflict zone. Get used to the idea of calling the parties to the conflict by noninflammatory aliases: The Paisleys and the Plaids, for example. Or the Schnitzels and the Kubbehs. Whatever.

Remember, no more weapons. No tanks, no fighter jets, no nuclear submarines with ICBMs, no stealth bombers, no killer drones, none of that stuff. No submachine guns. No ghost guns. No guns, period.

Now, the reconciliation process will involve families adopting each other. When necessary, they can be foster families until they’re sure it’s a good match.

Paisleys and Plaids

Every Paisley family will be matched with a Plaid family and vice versa. The matched families will mutually adopt each other entirely: including grandparents, parents, children, aunts and uncles and cousins, or some subset of those. The families would strive to care for one another like… well, like families ideally would.

Criteria for the matching could include approximate number of family members; adherence to a secular, traditional, or devoutly religious way of life; geographic proximity; and degree of hesitation or of willingness to lay the conflict aside in favor of a shared future. Bereaved families in particular could be matched with other bereaved families. (This is already a proven way to transcend the enemies orientation.)

The matched families would sign a credo pledging to help, encourage, care for, engage with, and respect each other. The children could be tasked to help the adults overcome the language barrier using a neutral third language (English; Swahili; Mandarin; Hindi; Aramaic; whatever works) and by intensively studying each other’s languages in school. AI assistance would be helpful in this. Everyone would of course be equipped with the latest in instantaneous translation devices for oral and written communication. Reconciliation consultants from both sides would assist the paired families to create a program of coordinated joint renewal, addressing every imaginable aspect of a shared life together: what people eat, wear, study, work at, play at, build, plant, harvest, buy and sell. The arts and entertainment would have pride of place. Appreciating one another’s humor must be an ongoing project.

Collective practices, too

The individual and family processes would be accompanied by collective processes aimed to assist larger and larger circles: neighborhoods, communities, districts, towns and cities. The Barbies running all that stuff would be trained and licensed in the Nurturing of Reconciliation at the various levels.

And P.S., International Law

To find our way out of the moral degeneracy in which so many nations, groups, and individuals are mired today, there must be a common consensual moral and legal frame of reference against which decision-making can be examined and judged appropriate and fair. There is already a robust body of international and humanitarian law designed to serve this very purpose. If the rich and powerful are no longer allowed to ignore it and are, instead, held accountable on its terms, international law could help us a lot. All the Reconciliation Barbies should demonstrate a satisfactory grasp of international law governing war, peace, trade, liberty, religion and state, and so on, before taking office.

 Channeling Eleanor Roosevelt

To my generation, born around 75 years ago, the icon of international moral courage would be a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt, whose influence was paramount in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the founding of the United Nations and so much else. But that was a long time ago. If we want an authentic movement for radical change today, it must align with a more up-to-date cultural lexicon. That’s how I got to the notion of Reconciliation Barbie. Maybe anime characters would work, too. Let the young people figure out that part.

The notion of a powerful Reconciliation Barbie is weird, yes. No argument there. But that’s less because of the pop-culture connotations and more because we have so normalized male dominance systems over the millennia that anything else – anything healthier and more partnership oriented – seems strange. But you know what? We could get used to it eventually – probably much faster than we can imagine now. Barbies leading, and Kens following.

Why the hell not?

What do we have to lose at this point?