Posted by Timne on May 25, 2009, at 11:01:37
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003965876
I was not in Iraq. I did not guard nor interrogate detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay nor any of the secret prisons one nation under somebody maintains around the world. I don't, in this context, assert that the particular nation's military activities in those theaters were right or wrong.
Mine was a different job. Glamorous...powerful...independent. So they say. My marching orders were to be servile, fawning and sycophantic to a subset of characters many of whom are now under investigation for public crimes and others of whom are beyond the reach of the law but whose rhetoric is widely attributed with compounding the personal impact on many of the recent economic collapse. My formal job description was to expose the misdeeds of these characters. My wink-and-nod job description was to keep them centered in middle of the main stream, no matter how catastrophically that required us to divert the main stream. I don't expect these obligatory investigations to result in anything except catharsis for a public mentally confused by constant pressure to accept irrational claims as rational, and to believe social proof as if it were logical proof.
I walked away -- jumped out the door and started plummeting to the ground let's say in terms appropriate for the financial model we call our economy. When my parachute opened, I was relieved. Then I found myself swooping toward another camp where I knew I could not find moral comfort. Took me a while to confirm in my own mind what was happening to me there. See, I've lived by old-school Semitic principals most of my life. Call them Talmudic or Sharia-style principals -- I avoid credit. Nor do I own property, which is to say, I don't rent my home from a lien-holding bank then claim to "own property." I'm not a homeowner, which means, unless I'm overtly wealthy, I am deficient in class standing in most office culture. Whatever technical or rhetorical skill I bring to the table, wealthy employers consider irrelevant because of my lack of property holdings, which to them is a more reliable measure of my personal worth.
Most people might not recognize the class hatred one faces when one eschews middle-class culture. That's why it might be so difficult for people to understand why I am so alienated. I doubt any three-year investigation by a radio-talk-show host with a hunch will ever shed much light on my personal collapse. I'm just a good man gone, so I couldn't have been that good - or I wouldn't have gone.
So what's with that link at the top of the page? My principals, no matter how urgently I might feel I need to sacrifice them for my own survival, remain imprinted on my conscience. Few dare to venture close to principals they've been taught are reprehensible or outdated. And these principals interfere with my survival. I'm headed to the streets, about to lose my modest home of several years for lack of income. That's if I survive that long. I feel unwelcome here -- here being my nation, which I will decline to name in this post.
I talk to those phone hotline counselors and they pretty much agree that there is nothing they can do -- they are trained to maintain the system, and to assure people the social service system has resources that could help me. It doesn't. Nor is there anything these "counselors" can say, except to suggest that I have a reason to live because I got to talk to a volunteer half my age who has no idea what they would do in my shoes, much less how it feels to live with a moral conviction that is considered pathological by a social context that is itself clearly veering off course.
I've seen my nation's leader murdered in broad daylight and witnessed my nation lying about simple facts of his death, despite clear, shocking, stunning photographic and witness evidence that documents from the back side the very trajectory through his head of the missile that blew his head to pieces. I've listened to testimony of dozens of witnesses of events of that day -- credible professionals -- who described the manner of that leaders death. Yet my nation's government, and the media that services that government, continues to assert improbable ballistic theories, to ridicule good people who speak clear truth about tragic events they witnesses, and to consider those who cannot buy into the lie mentally ill, deluded and unstable. It's more evidence of delusion to believe the plain facts of that well-documented murder than it is to believe a coworker can assess my character and my very thoughts on a particular day by looking at a computerized astronomy chart on which they overlay popular mythology.
Does anyone here understand a bit about why I don't care to be part of this game any more, and why I am prone to reward assertions that my mental health is the problem by exhibiting just the reaction one would expect from someone so described? Just curious, probably, but I wonder. Is there any sympathy for the notion that some mental illness is actually instead mental injury?
One more tragic female in this tragic comment, as a post script. Sophie Scholl.
"At the age of 21, Sophie Scholl was executed by the People's Court in Germany on Feb. 22, 1943, during the Holocaust, for her involvement in The White Rose, an organization that was secretly writing pamphlets calling for the end of the war and strongly denouncing the inhuman acts of the Nazis."
http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/holocaust/articles/sophie-scholl-white-rose.2786.htm
By whose hand we die, does it matter? If I die of starvation for love, warmth, understanding and trust, is it any different than if I had made a reckless move during a dangerous propaganda mission that led to my arrest and execution? It was her hand against her own society and culture that led to her death. She enjoyed the hope of youth and the comfort of supportive friends. She could have played along with the culture of the time and place, or could have better maintained tactical discipline to avoid arrest during a dangerous mission. Only difference, I believe, is that Sophie was remembered. As she did, I suffer dangerous frustration that can cost my life, no matter whose hand releases the blade to fall through my neck.
poster:Timne
thread:897579
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20090513/msgs/897579.html