The Rock and The Mountain
By Jesse on Nov 3, 2009 in Featured, Street Voices
The reason people remain oppressed is because they remain powerless.
Oppression is maintained by corrupting the consciousness of a people.
Oppression ends when the people reclaim their minds and souls.
That is not the precondition to liberation it is the definition of liberation.
Oppressed peoples feel profound feelings of hatred, rage, despair, terror, guilt, envy, hopelessness and grief.
These feelings wreck havoc with our lives and our genuine attempts to move forward individually and collectively.
We wake up and look at our lives and believe that there are real present time causes to these feelings. We believe that the causes are in our daily lives.
They are not. We lie to ourselves and to the people we love. We lie when we believe that factors in the present day environment are bad enough to cause such deep suffering. They are not.
I was raped. I saw a relative of mine raped. My mother suffered horribly during my childhood. My parents had a violent divorce. All of these things and more happened before I was 12 years old.
I often feel deep deep anguish. I have felt this intense pain for much of my life. And I feel this pain because of what happened to me as a child. It is the legacy of an abusive childhood and the lack of resources to recover.
If you feel deep suffering as well then the causes are in your past. I am not asking. I am stating this as a fact.
We are young and our legs and arms are broken. Then, many many years later we are in a situation where someone brushes up against our leg. And we freak out in rage. We attack. We despair.
We do this because we never were allowed, in fact we have been systematically prevented from healing the wounds of our past. And so we carry them with us and we try to vent this pain at every opportunity and this means that when someone brushes up against our once broken leg we scream.
I am not saying the present situation is fine. It is not. It is not close to being fine.
I am not saying the problems are all in your head. They are not. They are problems that have been systematically and historically maintained and enforced by particular groups of individuals and by institutions that they run.
I am saying this and I am saying this in blood:
We have a moral responsibility to look deeply inside and see the true nature and character of our suffering. We have this responsibility because we will continue to cause suffering unless we address our suffering.
When one does this introspective work one conclusion is that human beings are astonishing. That we have unbelievable capacities for love, courage, brilliance, power and creativity. We are not gods but we are as close as any creature on this planet can get.
The stupidity that poor people get thrown in their face each and every day is more pathetic than alarming. We get treated with disrespect every damn hour or close to it. Yes. Yes. I know this too.
But really it is like a man running up to a mountain and saying “You better listen to me because I am going to throw this rock at you.” The mountain would barely notice and if it did it would laugh.
If the man gets some huge piece of machinery or if he gets some bomb then the mountain needs to notice and it will.
But this happens less often then we think. For the most part it is the small rocks.
It is time to be clear about the small rocks and the big bombs. It is important to own our confusion about this difference. If we do so then we will be in a much better position to deal with the bombs.
If we do not then we will exhaust ourselves with the rocks and the bombs will fall and we will die and the mountains will die and the rivers will run down the earth red with blood.
I love you,
Jesse
Image: sheilaellen
Jesse - Artist/Revolutionary raised in New York City’s Spanish Harlem. Mom was a Commie and dad was a liberal. Got a college education and do believe that the pen can be mightier then the sword. Been traveling past two years and will be moving to Mexico in two weeks. Plan to write a book called Coming Om on my years homeless, incarcerated … Am 44, Jewish and…well…if you take my date’s word…an 8 out of 10 but who’s counting….hehe.
~Jesse, thanks for the thought-provoking article.
A long time ago I heard the expression that, “It isn’t the snake’s bite that kills us, it is the venom that is left behind.” So, apparently, we can die from the poison; suck it out; have it sucked out; or be given medication to stop the effects.
As a survivor of abuse, there finally came a point in my own life, when I had to say, “I can continue to feel victimized by the past or I can get the help I need to heal and move forward.” This is not to say that I am the person that I might have been had it not been for the abuse, perhaps I’m actually stronger because of it.
In my own case, a lot of the blaming and keeping the past alive was also serving as an excuse for not becoming successful. Underneath it all, in a very twisted way, I felt my life being a mess was proof/a testament of how horrible the abuser had been - he would never be off the hook - “look at what a mess he made of my life” - “see how evil he was”. Plus there is an added dynamic in my family of only giving me attention/love if all hell is breaking loose around me. So from that standpoint, it has been beneficial (in a very skewed way), for my life to be in constant chaos.
Holy smokes! What happened to “success is the best revenge”? So, after decades of being in self-destruction mode, it finally dawned on me that it would be in my best interest to take my power back. I do not need to be a constant victim of my past, especially if it is now self-imposed by my keeping the past alive!
Continued blessings along the journey…
Rev. Cynthia | Nov 3, 2009 | Reply
Yes.
One of the key issues I am trying to raise here at HT is the tendency for oppressed individuals and communities to become attached to their identity as a victim.
It often feels like a step forward. It is certainly progress when compared to denying that one has been abused or victimized.
But, as you mention, there comes a time when one must keep on moving foward and this involves letting go of the very identity that seems to have been so empowering at one point.
The way I see it is: I am walking down a street and someone assaults me. Then he runs away.
I am left there..bleeding, engraged, scared.
Now there are several truths here. One is that this was absolute abuse and a violation of my rights as a living being. No question.
My rage is absolutely valid. My terror is valid. Any and all feelings I have deserve deep respect because they were caused by real events and I have reasons why I feel what I feel.
But there is another truth here. And that is that once the attacker assaults me I am responsible for what I do. Yes I am being victimized. But I am still the only person in the universe who is capable of responding to this. I can respond passively and just lie down on the street and bleed. I can respond with rage and start smashing things. There are many ways I can respond.
And I do not want to cast judgement on the responses. Some may make more sense and others may make less sense…given the particular situation I find myself in.
But the point is that despite being the victim of injustice I am still an intact, powerful, intelligent human being and I will have to tap into that part of me to handle the victimization powerfully.
We all get victimized. That describes what happens to people. But this does not mean we are victims. That refers to who we are at core and we are never victims at core.
One describes what happens to us and the other describes how we define ourselves. The two aspects of victimization are distinct.
To the vast majority of people there is confusion here. It seems that if I have been repeatedly abused then that says something about me. We all get hammered around this by the society. We eventually internalize the idea that we are not distinct from what happens to us. That the abuse, poverty, racism, sexism, violence….say something about who we are.
And I want to say clearly that they do not and never will and never have and never can.
Jesse | Nov 4, 2009 | Reply
Jesse,
While I agree with most everything you have written, I have to interject a few thoughts.
People that are oppressed not only should, but NEED to fight back. The problem is you need a clearly defined target to fight against. Lumping society as a whole into some massive fight just isn’t fair to the people that didn’t have anything to do personally with whatever the fight is about.
Everyone alive has been a victim of someone else. No one is immune to it, whether it was physical or financial or whatever rotten thing someone did.
At some point everyone just has to let the bad go…….otherwise it will eat you up from the inside out.
michael | Nov 4, 2009 | Reply
~michael, your last sentence was perfect and exactly what I was trying to get at w/ the snake bite venom.
Don’t know why it never really dawned on me before, but now that you & Jesse have mentioned it, I guess it must be true that almost everyone has been victimized in some way- hmmm… Now I will see others differently.
Onward…
Rev. Cynthia | Nov 4, 2009 | Reply
The one core area where everyone has been victimized is as a young person…as a child.
We are born into a helpless condition both physically and psychologically. When we are young we can not take care of ourselves physically and so we need adults to bath us, cook for us, clothe us etc…
Likewise, psychologically we are still developing on a fundamental level. We do not yet have a coherent sense of self. That self is being formed. And so we are also dependent on others for many critical psycholgical needs such as knowing we are loved.
And so, when we are young we are in a higly vulunerable situation in which the adults around us can harm us very deeply and at the same time we are absolutely dependent on these very same adults for our survival and well being.
And so, when young, our deep sense of power that we feel just as living beings has to confront the powerlesness situation we are in.
Now, in an ideal situation, the adults would be really very careful to use their considerable authority in fundamentally life affirming and loving ways. They would use their power to care about us and help us flourish.
But instead the adults around us have been hurt deeply and have major issues emotionally. And so they wind up misusing their power and authority and mistreat, harm and abuse the children in their lives.
This is pretty close to being absolutely universal and it is the absolute core of all later adult feelings of powerlesness and vicitmization.
It is exactly and precisely the experiences of being powerless as a young person that is the dominant issue for adults in their later lives and it is this childhood experience that must be looked at directly if any real power is to be reclaimed and used in ones more mature years.
Jesse | Nov 5, 2009 | Reply