(no subject)
I’ve realized that part of the high anxiety lately is that I started paying attention to the news again. I’m going to have to stop that if I want to be able to breathe and to live.
It’s just…I don’t know.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life reading about WWII and Nazi Germany and the musings of people who were alive then, about how it happened. And I saw the same cultural currents begin to swirl here after 9/11.
And no one listened.
Which I realize that I’m completely ignorant about other humans and how they work and that there’s this whole culture out there that I somehow never touched, and so all that meant that I had no idea how to communicate.
But still.
Reading about human depravity when your brain is still forming, when you’re growing up with trauma and abuse, and then watching as an adult as your country drives closer and closer to the abyss, and you’re screaming but no one listens…it does something to you.
Especially if when you were around five or six your mother threatened to drive off the side of a mountain while you screamed and cried, but hey, at least she didn’t actually do it.
I know, I know, I should be out there doing direct action and stomping on fascist heads and throwing my body into the gears to try and at least slow them down a bit. But, well, I am weak and fragile, and instead I am struggling to redirect my brain because when it focuses on the nightmare that is here and now and real and in my own country, I can’t breathe. And that’s not purple prose. I really start to panic and I have trouble breathing and I feel a strong pull towards old negative coping mechanisms because it feels like the only way to survive, the only way to breathe again.
People talk about learned helplessness like it’s wrong and bad and immoral and like it’s just a symptom of trauma or a “victim mentality” or whatever, but I’ve read a lot about genocide. About authoritarian regimes. About slavery. About how humans work, and why humans are susceptible to those things. I’ve been human for a few decades now, and I’ve experienced being abused and traumatized while other humans just looked on and blamed me and joined in, although what I’ve gone through is nothing compared to what millions of humans have endured at the hands of other humans. And I’ve read their stories and their experiences, and how other humans just looked on and blamed them and joined in with the abuse and cruelty and genocide.
I don’t know how to save humans from humans. I don’t know if there is a way to do that.
And the platitudes that people say don’t help, at all. They say “we all want the same things” but I don’t want to cause suffering and I don’t want to be a willing accomplice to abuse and I don’t want to commit genocide, so I don’t believe them. They say “look for the good” but the good does not outweigh the bad. The good doesn’t even come close to being equal to the bad. Yes, a very few humans are decent and will try to do what they can in the face of genocide. Genocide still happens. Not sure how a very few people who try to do what they can and are sometimes brutally killed for it are supposed to redeem the great numbers of humans who participated in or stood by and approved of the genocide.
I don’t know. Maybe it is just a symptom of the trauma. The whole “negative beliefs about self, other people, or the world” thing.
But I don’t know. How is that disordered when it’s true?
I don’t think it is disordered. I think maybe it just makes the bystanders and participants in abuse and bigotry and genocide uncomfortable to be called out, so if you call them out they say you’re disordered, and that there’s something wrong with you for not wanting to participate in abusing and traumatizing other living beings.
On the other hand, I know I don’t understand other humans very well. I’ve picked up on a few of the differences. It seems like when they talk about “look for the good” they mean things like “Yeah, sure, Gertrude and Bertie voted for Nazis and went to their rallies and chanted hateful slogans and broke the windows of Jewish businesses and reported their Jewish neighbors and stole their belongings after they were transported, but Gertrude is always so nice and polite and she baked brownies for the Nazi meetings, and if you blew a tire on the road Bertie would stop and help you.”
I don’t know. I need to focus on other things if I’m going to live.
It’s just…I don’t know.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life reading about WWII and Nazi Germany and the musings of people who were alive then, about how it happened. And I saw the same cultural currents begin to swirl here after 9/11.
And no one listened.
Which I realize that I’m completely ignorant about other humans and how they work and that there’s this whole culture out there that I somehow never touched, and so all that meant that I had no idea how to communicate.
But still.
Reading about human depravity when your brain is still forming, when you’re growing up with trauma and abuse, and then watching as an adult as your country drives closer and closer to the abyss, and you’re screaming but no one listens…it does something to you.
Especially if when you were around five or six your mother threatened to drive off the side of a mountain while you screamed and cried, but hey, at least she didn’t actually do it.
I know, I know, I should be out there doing direct action and stomping on fascist heads and throwing my body into the gears to try and at least slow them down a bit. But, well, I am weak and fragile, and instead I am struggling to redirect my brain because when it focuses on the nightmare that is here and now and real and in my own country, I can’t breathe. And that’s not purple prose. I really start to panic and I have trouble breathing and I feel a strong pull towards old negative coping mechanisms because it feels like the only way to survive, the only way to breathe again.
People talk about learned helplessness like it’s wrong and bad and immoral and like it’s just a symptom of trauma or a “victim mentality” or whatever, but I’ve read a lot about genocide. About authoritarian regimes. About slavery. About how humans work, and why humans are susceptible to those things. I’ve been human for a few decades now, and I’ve experienced being abused and traumatized while other humans just looked on and blamed me and joined in, although what I’ve gone through is nothing compared to what millions of humans have endured at the hands of other humans. And I’ve read their stories and their experiences, and how other humans just looked on and blamed them and joined in with the abuse and cruelty and genocide.
I don’t know how to save humans from humans. I don’t know if there is a way to do that.
And the platitudes that people say don’t help, at all. They say “we all want the same things” but I don’t want to cause suffering and I don’t want to be a willing accomplice to abuse and I don’t want to commit genocide, so I don’t believe them. They say “look for the good” but the good does not outweigh the bad. The good doesn’t even come close to being equal to the bad. Yes, a very few humans are decent and will try to do what they can in the face of genocide. Genocide still happens. Not sure how a very few people who try to do what they can and are sometimes brutally killed for it are supposed to redeem the great numbers of humans who participated in or stood by and approved of the genocide.
I don’t know. Maybe it is just a symptom of the trauma. The whole “negative beliefs about self, other people, or the world” thing.
But I don’t know. How is that disordered when it’s true?
I don’t think it is disordered. I think maybe it just makes the bystanders and participants in abuse and bigotry and genocide uncomfortable to be called out, so if you call them out they say you’re disordered, and that there’s something wrong with you for not wanting to participate in abusing and traumatizing other living beings.
On the other hand, I know I don’t understand other humans very well. I’ve picked up on a few of the differences. It seems like when they talk about “look for the good” they mean things like “Yeah, sure, Gertrude and Bertie voted for Nazis and went to their rallies and chanted hateful slogans and broke the windows of Jewish businesses and reported their Jewish neighbors and stole their belongings after they were transported, but Gertrude is always so nice and polite and she baked brownies for the Nazi meetings, and if you blew a tire on the road Bertie would stop and help you.”
I don’t know. I need to focus on other things if I’m going to live.