To what degree are we simply homeless, the exiled children of convicts and prostitutes? We are not agents of jolly old England, not anymore, and they don’t want us back now anymore than they wanted our les misérables grandparents then. It may be noted that most of our colonizer ancestors were simply dropped off, while the ship captains and the generals and admirals kept their old world permanent addresses.
Of course our behaviour has been appalling.
It could have been the Thanksgiving Day fantasy, in fact they say it was, for a time, and surely there has been some peace interspersed with all the overwhelming violence of the ongoing genocide all along. Past is past, we like to say, except it isn’t. I am concerned with my own illegitimacy, my own moral homelessness, placelessness, as well as the enforced placelessness of the Turtle Island People, today.
The past is only past if you change; that’s why it never really is, because we never really do.
I never thought of getting a job and buying a house as me taking a place for myself, or taking it from anyone, but it is, we have no place and must take one, make a place for ourselves, I mean we think we do, we believe we do to the point that we accept paying most of our money for a tiny plot for our whole lives. Privilege is that I never really had to fight anyone for it, never had to put it on the line, I just had to show up for work.
Of course, in reality, that’s a fight, in reality if anyone is drowning and anyone else can simply go to work and purchase floatation, then that is one big fight, with winners and losers, and I tell you, I feel the pressure, and I feel the guilt of the wins I had, and I don’t want this whole deal, where I pay all my life’s wages to the bank, and so I don’t have to fight – but there’s still a fight? I have to pay and kill, or pay for the new killing? Even as a relative winner, I’m unhappy, insecure, morally compromised, and these bon bons and cakes are giving me heart disease. Please make it stop!
Who is happy?
I mean, I know there are rich, dominant people, and I know I’m one, and well, stated above, I’m not happy. And don’t the richest, most powerful bastards seem angry and miserable? Who is happy? If the richest and worst of the invaders are so upset that they sound like they’re getting ready to kill everyone, they must not be happy. No?
So if the winners are pissed, the architects and owners of it all are murderously unhappy, who is happy? Can we just bloody stop? Who are we serving? Can we just stop feeding the misery machine? This invasion has been going on for five hundred years now. White people found both coasts and their way to the middle hundreds of years ago. Who decided it should never end? Who decided it wouldn’t stop, ever?
Where is the upside? Who are the humans that are benefitting, what general good does conservatism conserve in a system the poor are sad and the rich are angry? Need I spell it out – where all beat their children, to acclimatize them to a life of endless conflict, rich and poor alike?
Can we stop?
Can we change the supposed goal?
Can we just pretend that we are all here now and just try to find a way to live?
I say this, because we look like we’re caught up in some mythology about a journey, or a saga of some sort, that there is always some other, less peaceful goal than simply deciding that we are in the present, the very middle of time, and simply settle in and do what it takes to carry on, for the kids. There is always some stupid vision of the future that we are screwing up the present for – and of course we colonizers are, of course that is our mythology, because our ancestors banished us for all time to this God-forsaken turtle shell where we do not belong. You know I mean that in a very pointed way; it’s “God-forsaken,” only because we do not belong here, because it is the place of our exile, “God-forsaken” for we invaders. I suppose it means placeless, mostly, God has forgotten you when he has given you no place to belong.
We are living on the run, perhaps the next undiscovered continent will be uninhabited and we can finally live the dream of peace. Of course, every clever even partial mystic has always said, that world is here the minute you choose to have it. We choose to keep it tied to the end of the stick to keep us slogging through the mud of the endless conflicts. One hates to eat the dessert, I mean, then it’s gone, I suppose? We prefer to think we can have peace one day, but fear to verify, to test the idea?
Because . . . ?
Again, because before we reach this future experiment, we have proven the matter forever, this could have been the place for it, the last place could have been the place for it. Because deep down, we know what I try to articulate, that we never do the thing that would be trying, we always slide towards a fight, and that is because the fight is the morality, the highest and lowest form of it and the harder we “fight for good,” the more we are forever fighting. Again, again, the answer is to simply stop.
We work way too hard, we are forever trying to fix things – hey, I approve, I am a repairman, and everything needs fixing, but it seems our only tool is an axe. It fixes some situations, too many trees, mostly, but it only hurts others and the harder you try, the more you wield it, the more stuff is going to need to be repaired. Put it down, pick up something you can build with . . . the axe is morality, our moral fight with ourselves. Full disclosure, in other stories I tell, our only tool is a club. Same, sort of.
The point is, all you have is an axe. Please stop “repairing” the clock, the clock being the super complex human being and its entire world.
I say “human morality,” when I say it, but the point is, it is further concentrated, laid more bare in the invader, in the European version, and honestly, it is a great mystery of my life, one I expect I can never truly know about, as to whether pre-contact Turtle Island people had a lot of punitive social control going on, if the average person was the same seething time bomb walking about as we are today, or were at home in Europe then. I’m curious to know if there was child abuse, if it was largely what Chagnon saw in the boys among the Yanomami, children sort of self-abusing one another into warriors.
I want to learn these things were not the case, that seems like it would be a positive thing to discover. I would very like what I see as human morality not to be a universal thing, and I have an unlikely dream that along with learning a sustainable lifestyle from the Indigenous, perhaps there is a sustainable human development to discover as well. It’s all one in the end. For first time readers, or if I haven’t been clear, what is statistically “normal” development for these humans we see today is abuse and the leveraging of an aggressive genesuite option.
I wish to start a rumour that there was ever another sort.
It’s like languages, when you only know one, you sort of don’t know what a language is, what the parts and structure are, and if we never postulate a different path of development, then we sort of don’t know what a path of development is. To bring it home, in line with the rest of the blogs, the one sort we half know we call Human Nature, and it’s my idea that it’s only one possible Nature of humans. Again, like language, it is the only one we know, and so the structure, the blank form for human development, is still something of a mystery.
You hear about it in the general terms, like I complained about in the previous ramble, it’s an interaction between an individual’s set of genes and the individual circumstances of their life history – and so maybe we don’t identify the huge things, just hide them among the general idea. But I digress, ha.
Just kidding, still digressing!
I saw a meme on Instagram from someone in Gabor Mate’s circle that said overexplaining yourself is a PTSD symptom, and fair enough. I feel I need to build the whole edifice.
Back to Earth again, the only sort we know is largely abuse to activate your warrior genes, and I’m saying the dominant society, the group who wins the war is the one more actively engaged in the abuse of its citizens and its children, the one with the more activated violence genes. Getting back to the pre-contact situation, I’m not clear that the Euros were fiercer or that they would have won if the microbes had not been on their side as well. Again though, as today – that is some abused, aggressive to the point of mental illness people who discover this immunity disparity and use it, or engage in secondary extinctions, exterminations of the bison to aid their genocide.
I don’t think there is any evidence to say the Turtle Island people would have done that if they could have, sent a deadly Turtle Island bug to wipe out Old World people? I think the whole sad nightmare describes the near end and end of peoples who if they thought that way it would have been a very different story. Europe never would have gotten a foothold, maybe. No Thanksgiving Day if the Turtle Island people had been such Art of War hard cases.
I don’t know. Hyperbole, maybe. I’m desperate to think that some children somewhere, at some point in time were not abused into hyper-aggression. If this title attracts any Indigenous scholars with ideas about pre-contact childhood, I’d love to hear it.
Colonization is a system of abuse, absolutely, but it’s not exactly an orphan in our tree of ideas that way, is it? Aren’t they all. Of course, brown people the world over are at the very bottom tier to we invaders, whose entire society is what I have described as a champagne fountain of abuse, we all have a full load already, but it just keeps coming from above and we pass it on to the vessels below. The bottom layer holds it all up and takes it from every level.
No-one is happy, though.
Happy people don’t need to do what you need to do to get or stay rich – those miserable bastards are lying. I know it’s an extreme example, but the second in command in America recently had to run for his life and publicly thank the man who ordered him strung up! I suppose he’s “happy” they missed him. Those Masters of the Universe, they’re not happy. They live among bloody killers and sociopaths, for starters. I can say a lot of words about it, I stupidly think I can explain it to you – but honestly, I fail to see what they are protecting, this system we live in where none are happy.
We take it, we live this way, afraid if we don’t it will be worse, it’s some game theory rubbish, and yes, of course I know why that is, it’s because our only tech for people is the axe, the punitive abuse, meaning “making things worse,” it’s how we make everyone do everything, of course the worry is they are going to make it worse. What else is there?
If I weren’t simply crazy and any of this were true, how could anyone be happy?
It’s my point in all these things that yes, there is a disparity, some are less happy than others, some win the fights and some die in misery – but, as the Buddha said, I suppose – it’s all misery, I mean it all runs on misery, misery is the currency, the causative thing, and it’s, oh let’s use a modern term, it’s the great capitalist lie that anyone is able to purchase happiness with it.
I swear, there is a way, if anyone wanted to know.
Jeff
Abuse with an Excuse 