[916] Are You Ready

I've had a lot on my mind lately. This provoked in no small part from recently splitting with my girl. I had several long and reflective emails, a blog with scaled back viewer access, and now this. I keep noticing little lines calling out. Let's see where they go.

I think it's incredibly short-sided to lose track of your environment. As much as any individual wants to believe they are doing their best to live their values, you can be corrupted and subverted. I read an article from a woman who was trapped in the Chinese prison camps for Uyghurs for 2 years. She said she finally knew what it meant to be “brain-washed.” Her individuality was broken down. Her punishments were arbitrary. Her imposed silence all-consuming. In a radically oppressive environment, the consequences are swift, visible, and for the rest of your life built into whatever manages to come out of the other end.

It's easy to lose track of the idea that the story from above is the modern-era. In one form or another, we have an environment with totalitarian governments that kidnap and imprison people. They do it from a set of cultural values derived from their experiences and narratives carried out over generations. The world, left to its own devices, is kill or be killed. Whether one can psychologically get the notion of existing in an otherwise “polite society” to comport with the extent their ideas are deadly, is a world deconstructing then rebuilding task few are prone to do.

A few more refrains from modernity are about representation, who has the power, and instantiated repressive and traumatizing systems. White people, men in particular, are told to maybe shut up, contemplate their complicity, and realize the broader nature of their tastes, humor, or privileges. Whether and how any of them do so is measured by anyone's guess, but participating in show-trials or guilt-signaling language appears to quell Twitter somewhat. I think for all of my privileges, earned and unearned, I'm still first-world poor, have a credible fear of getting sick, and have felt “oppressed” by the normative language, willful blindness, and expectations laid out for me. My experience, not-black, not-woman, not-Uyghur, should be a cry for a gospel of unity sung by Sly and the Family Stone, not a game of oppression bingo.

I think it's the habit of most, if not all, culturally momentous movements to get co-opted by a subset of particularly privileged or radicalized adherents. You got the money or smooth tongue? I bet you find your way to the head of something that forgets who's still on the ground. You willing to be violent? I bet you swallow the news coverage. We don't ask ourselves what makes us like our oppressors. We don't contemplate the environment as a subset of larger environments all with their own dominating forces or tendencies. We don't account for the parts of our nature that ravenously subvert and consume.

It's exhausting. It's hard enough to deal with a bad day, break-up, or the in-your-face fascist symbolism daring you to put up too much of a fight. What if you're sick? What of your unrealized or recognized trauma? How do you work in service to some “largest context ideal” at all? Doesn't it require a kind of privilege or extreme naivety to begin with? Even if you try given the resources at hand, your larger contexts are creeping in. The series of things that would make you fail get added to the “let's not discuss that” list. The denial, resentment, or catastrophic oversight will make themselves known, and then familiar narratives about the inevitability of failure or corruption go to work.

The fact that I can watch or read about any era of history and see direct parallels today suggests to me the “themes” of history or humanity are eternal, and the work always the same. “Waking up,” or acknowledging and building as much of the context into something salient and not-arbitrarily or incidentally powerful seems to be the task. What's that mean in English? You have to know and accept that you are good and bad. You have to know that you are perfectly arbitrary and perfectly exist with as much agency as you can claw from that existence. You are oppressor and oppressed. You have to start seeking failures you intend to learn from. You know the wisdom and purpose of being truthful in spite of your fears. No one is keeping score, not even you, in this game, and the temptation to “give it up God” is no excuse or path for taking as much responsibility of the largest projects.

What I'm trying to do with the land, or at least through my work and speech about it, is provide evidence that the environment can change. The environment can suggest to you 30 projects that embody ideals in service to the largest projects. The environment has visceral and pragmatic asks that remain infinitely obscured by modernity and hashtag-activism. My environment, in spite of recent trauma, is still my land. It's still with a budding counseling business. It's still surrounded by my words attempting to process, not merely cope, with its changes. It's a privilege I've worked for and never been tempted to apologize about.

Last week, I sat with a client who has no-less than a dozen severely traumatizing incidents from her life that have wholly subsumed her present. I spent two-hours with her scrubbing dog and cat shit off the floor of just one room of her house. Hers wasn't the worst house I've seen nor cleaned. Before I got there, half a dozen people, including the building inspector and a social service agency worker, were witness to the crisis. None of them got the inclination to start helping clean.

It's not any more or less complicated than that. Do you try to clean, or not? Do you recognize as much as you can about that environment? Can you recognize her trauma? Can you feel yourself reeling at the prospect of the work that clearly needs to be done, and then do it anyway? Can you remain encouraging, pro-active, and realistic about the consequences? Can you enlist or create the kind of help that's screaming to exist?

So far, my environments suggest, “no.” Unless I do it, it doesn't get done. My help most often resents me. My consequences remain contained to my budget or back. I keep trying to create and demonstrate otherwise. It's not “noble” or “nice” or “moral” or bending an historical arc. It's trying to count. It's trying to feel myself for all of the different contexts I inhabit. How often I talk about wishing to be left alone. How thankless and low-paying if not negative-paying it is to try. The worst narratives and inclinations don't have to win or dominate. They don't. You can work differently. You can try what you don't recognize anywhere else. You can acknowledge where your project fails or was blind, and then persist. You have to keep tapping into what's already there, celebrate it, and keep the invitation open.

What I can't decide is whether or not it happens “alone.” We all seem perfectly willing to lend ourselves to the oppressive environment. I've worked myself to proverbial death both for myself and for organizations happy to exploit me. You're taking risks and making sacrifices in everything you do. Are they ones you choose or ones you're forced to swallow? Are you patient and methodical enough to do the math behind the “revolution?” Are you humbled by the nature of your task and service you provide?

Persistently, I see an unhealthy ego. It's not an ego grounded in doubt that keeps you open and exploratory. It's an insular protection mechanism. It's a selfish, defensive, and insecure pride for the ignorance of your larger environments and how they're shaping you. The Chinese know you can literally beat that ego to death. Why leave it up to them? Why leave it up to Trump to play with? Why let it arrest your attention with memes and “news?” Maybe the infinite task and nature of all work is to be able to fluidly change to meet the needs of any given moment and sublimate the ego in service to the task. Maybe what we need altogether is poorly understood and rarely appreciated. For my part, I “just” want to help and be helpful.