Essay: Lessons From Who I Am

Lessons From Who I Am

 

As the world trends darker, driven by the rise of  fascism, a world already a vast misery for the many born under poverty and tyranny, where there is no respect for life, only coin and might, and, as well, with membership in the middle class no panacea against pain or woe, including the sufferance of stressful pressure to  stay financially afloat, at the cost of conformity to the norms of overlords, who have no qualms about stepping on the necks of others, I find myself reflecting on how I was able to live as an idealist for so long, as an adherent of the Good, a poet and thinker who believed humanity could rise out of darkness.  Strangely, as we descend toward what looks like WWIII, I still believe in the possibility, however unlikely, that humanity can overcome.  That I was gifted with this vision, this hope, when so many people are cast into abject toil and enforced fealty to corrupt, brutal leaders, with few options but to struggle to abide, is worthy of pause. 

First, I was born in the right socioeconomic class at the right time and place.  After WWII, the hope of democracy flooded the world, fueled by the defeat of Hitler.   The USA was only empire left standing.  Buoyed by national wealth and the ideals of equality and free speech, access to education became widespread.  Knowledge offers awareness, the impetus to confront injustice.  The 1960s brought the Civil Rights Movement and vociferous peace activism, galvanized by the atrocious Vietnam War.  The 1970s inaugurated the Women’s Movement, Earth Day, and critical  advances in the fight for gay rights.

Even in the wealthy, democratic empire, however, there was still plenty of poverty, oppression and classism.  A door of opportunity had been cracked open to advance the ethos of the nation--and, in consequence, the world.  But note full well:  the US caste system hadn’t been broken.  The White patriarchal structure had lost some ground, inch by inch, but only through brutal conflict.

I was born into this tumultuous scene in 1963, amid the ongoing social unrest.  A few months later, the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated.   In 1968, one of history’s greatest, most courageous advocates for human rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated as well.

These were the times that encapsullated me.  Full disclosure:  I am a White male, a member of that segment of society granted the most freedom to think and explore.  There’s no law that says White males get special privileges; but the officials and institutions that adjudicate the laws and social rules are steeped in prejudice. 

A second source of influence was my parents.  They were idealists, in their own way, my father a professor of philosophy (imagine being the child of such!), and my mother intensely religious, quite adamant about the palladium of God’s love.  

Idealism was the prettier side of my parents’ effect on me.  Like my country, it was stark and two-edged.  Both of them were self-absorbed.  My father was autistic and had no concern for social graces.  Barely abiding by the most basic etiquette, he’d wear the same dirty windbreaker, day in and day out, for months at a time, and would rarely shower.  Because he was a genius (and a White male) he could get away with this.  He earned a PhD at Cornell.  My mother, also brilliant and at Cornell, gave up her intellectual future for her husband and family, as women were expected to do.  In addition to the resentment this caused, she was not psychologically suited to raising children.  She was absent when she could be and, when present, expected to be the center of attention, while defining me and my siblings according to her needs. 

My childhood fed me idealism and intellectualism, but offered little training on becoming an adult.  My mother preferred a dependent, attentive child.  My father apparently expected me to find my way by listening to his lectures on Plato, dispensed every night at the dinner table.  As early as I can remember, these lectures dominated our time.  Rigorous table etiquette for children was enforced with corporeal punishment.  Neither parent offered direction of a practical nature, whether on job, family, partnership, or handling one’s own emotions.  Each in their own separate bubble, they divorced when I was 12.  What they shared in common was a clear distaste for parenting, or even this earthly world.  It seeped into me that my life should be dedicated to some sort of chivalrous quest, a noble journey to seek Love and Truth, detached from the vulgar routines of ordinary, carnal life.

Disposed toward introversion and even misanthropy, I found myself largely living inside my own head, where I created my own fictional worlds.  If I were an extrovert instead, I probably would’ve gained helpful knowledge about how to be social from my peers.  But I hid, largely out of fear, but also due to my propensities for introspection.  At age 16, I started writing poems, stories and, a bit later, novels.  Barely 18, I bumbled into college with almost no interpersonal skills and a sense that I needed to resist temptation.  I wouldn’t drink a single beer until I was 21.  I would have no sexual relations, beyond two or three dates, until much later.

This brings me to the third influence over my soul.  My own.  My choice. My struggle between light and dark.  

My parents had their ideals, but also a dark side, the same Jekyll-Hyde-ism as my country.  I wasn’t raised to be a practical person, to conform to social norms and ‘keep my head down.’  I was a creature of far-roaming ideas and fantastical stories.  I read a great number of books.  There was no internet to distract me.  I was baptized at age 16 and embraced the message of the gospel, which seemed noble and lofty.  Jesus, like Plato, spoke of a supernal reality, wiser and better than our own.  Throughout my 20s, while I floundered in and out of college, I volunteered on a crisis hotline, and rose to become one of its training coordinators.  On the phone, I emergency-counseled suicidal, addicted, depressed, beaten and otherwise tormented folks.  I found that I truly cared about others and I related this work to seeking the Good.

But when it came to personal interactions with other humans, I was deeply flawed and crippled.   My childhood had left me with a great deal of rage.  Neither parent had ever listened to what I wanted or even granted me attention, except according to their needs.  There was plenty of gaslighting.  Instead of being an abused child, I was ‘an angry, ungrateful child.’  (my country, I would learn later, was much like my parents, proclaiming itself a ‘city on the hill,’ even as it overthrew democratically elected leaders in other countries and replaced them with dictators to serve its own power).  I was a brutal bully to my siblings, who were already suffering in their own ways under our family dysfunction.   I got into a number of fist fights.  Starting in my teens, I collected knives and guns, and had dark fantasies of committing suicide--or, more often, killing and hurting others.  Fortunately, I never crossed that line.  My poetry and other writing served as a release valve for my hate and frustration.

It was perseverance, rather than conscious choice, that led me on a path toward the Good.  I never lost enough self-control to commit a major crime or become a permanently selfish person, lost to the vice of manipulating others for my own sadistic urges.  Make no mistake, I did manipulate others.  I got in fights.  I did bad things, some quite wanton and cruel.  I have a lot of guilt to deal with.  Like grief, guilt never completely goes away, though it can be met respectfully, acknowledged and listened to in order to approach some inner rapprochement.   I thank my younger self.  I thank him, that flawed, tortured young man, not only for persevering to survive, but for finding ways to get relief through writing.

Stuck in an internal, personal war for most of my twenties, years of meditation finally led to an epiphany.  It was not a conscious act, but rather an arrow that erupted from somewhere inside my heart.  I sold or gave away the last of my weapons--or threw them into the ocean--and was accepted, after some intense preparation, into a PhD program with a full scholarship. 

The three forces I’ve outlined--country, family, choice-- vastly affected the course of my life. What this shows is that circumstance largely affects outcome.  This is the critical point I’ve been building toward in this essay.  We are not fated to suffer war as a society.  We are not determined by our natures to be unethical and immature.  A higher level of maturity is hard for us to imagine; for civilization has always been saddled by patriarchy and might-makes-right.  But we can be raised in healthy environments that enhance family dynamics.  Better dynamics, in turn, lead to improved emotional competence for us as individuals.

We can work toward a better system as a civilization.  It’s perfectly doable.

A spectrum of well-researched therapeutic techniques are available right now.  For thousands of years, these tools for higher awareness had not been invented.  Even today, however, most of us never get to access them.  It requires going to a therapist, which in our current culture is expensive and stigmatized.  Ironically, in our ‘man’s world,’  it is considered a sign of weakness to have the strength to face what you are feeling.

Another example:  the consumer marketing industry spends untold amounts of money every year actively attempting to cripple our mental health:  to make the US citizen insecure and envious, so that we buy more corporate products.  What if all that energy, instead, was invested to advance the collective consciousness toward a better ethos?

Since the beginning of civilization, we have always been subjugated to social systems that are primarily vehicles for power and greed.  If we escaped the trap of the patriarchate--if we escaped a pattern of social programming that I refer to as an "ignorance vortex" [1]--we could then ascend toward the Good. 

We almost made it.  Kamala Harris lost to fascist candidate Trump by a sliver of the popular vote.  A Black and Indian woman, who believes in human rights, was almost the most powerful person on the geopolitical global stage.  About half the population of the USA was ready to let go of 12,000 years of petty male warlordism.

I am impressed that humanity has started to develop advanced ethical systems. Democracy, human rights, equality. These are high tech ideational tools compared to the Hammurabic Code and the divine right of kings.  We have, as a species, taken some big strides toward escaping the ignorance vortex.

Indeed, it speaks to the power of conscience that we made it as far as we did.  As much as Evil exists in the triad of violence, hate and ignorance--the forces of fascism--the Good exists in a weave of love, fairness and reason.

 

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Footnote

(1)  https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/11/op-ed-trillions-of-happy-humans-its.html

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