This thing I am going to write

I apologize for the vagueness which will permeate what I am about to say, but the sad truth is that it”s completely necessary.

There is a document I need to write. I need to write it because I am the only one who can do it and it definitely needs to be done. In that sense, I don’t feel like I have a choice in the matter.

Man’s gotta do, etc.

But I am scared. This document could get me in a lot of trouble. And not just me. Everyone who knows me. My family. My friends. My therapist. Everyone.

Because to say the views I will express in this document will be extremely unpopular is an understatement along the lines of referring to a nuclear submarine as a “little boat” or referring to the Grand Canyon as “that little hole over there”.

Words cannot do it justice, really.

These views fly in the face of all popular opinion and force people to think about something they really don’t want to think about., and hopefully shock them out of their comfortable hate and force them to consider the group these view represent in a new light, as human beings.

A group to which I belong. It’s one of the most hated groups that exist today despite the fact that nobody chooses to be in it and nobody in it can choose to leave, either.

Some things, once set, stay set. Forever.

My group is such an easy target that politicians of all stripes have no problem advocating for harsher treatment of the members of said group despite the fact that said group is mostly harmless and isn’t hurting anyone.

But the group, being weak and powerless and so shunned by society that nobody dares speak up for them when they are forced into ghettos, or subject to blatantly unethical “medical” treatments, or even when the good, normal, decent folk of the world have no problem playing a fun game where they take turns describing all the truly horrific and inhumane things they would do to one of us if they “caught” us.

All because we violate a very deep taboo, one that possibly part of our very DNA. It’s such a powerful taboo that much well-intended harm is done by people reacting blindly to it and lashing out without thought to the consequences.

You know I’m not talking about being gay, right? That battle’s over.

My group is so hated that people go to great lengths to avoid any possible action that even suggest they might belong to the group. The sheer paranoia about this taboo is astounding. At all times, people feel they must make it absolutely and abundantly clear that they are normal and safe and not part of my group at all.

Activities that were once considered completely normal and safe are now considered taboo. The white hot glare of narrow minded suspicion passes over every person who matches even the vaguest of criteria for membership in my group.

The ferocity of this taboo is only matched by how unexamined it is and the degree to which none of its basic assumptions make a lick of sense and are merely word noise put in place to meet the very minimal requirements necessary to make this taboo seem like it has something to do with reason and compassion.

It has nothing to do with either, but that’s ever stopped people before.

Absolutely nobody outside this group of mine will ever stick up for us. That’s rock solid certain. Nobody wants to be even remotely associated with us and heaven forbid that anyone express any human concern for us because everyone agrees that we are the lowest of the low and even so much as expressing the opinion that we are human beings and that means we probably have at least a few rights would instantly mark someone as a “sympathizer” and they would be ostracized almost as brutally as if they had confessed to being part of this group themselves.

And all to defend people everyone already agrees is less than worthless? People who could not possibly have a lower social status than they do now?

What kind of person would risk everything for THAT kind of person?

And so the only way any progress will be made is if we stick up for ourselves. That’s pretty hard to do when none of us – even those of us born to wealth and power and privilege – dare admit to membership in the group at all.

Including me. I am going to write this document and I am going to post it to a community I know to be a haven for people like me. Hopefully, others of my group will read what I have written and take comfort and hope from my words.

These words will be written for them first, the world second. If the world gets wind of the document, and the right (wrong) people catch the salacious scent of a truly epic social massacre in the offering, then the fertilizer with truly strike the air conditioning and all Hades will break loose, especially if the document can be traced back to me.

And the press seems to be awfully good at that type of thing lately. Perhaps because they can call upon the internet hivemind to do distributed research that is funneled into a central clearinghouse for integration and synthesis.

And yet, I feel like it’s something I have to do. I am the one with the skills, the courage, and the will to articulate the pain and injustice of my group, my people. For me, not doing it is no longer an option.

The words are in me and they have to come out or I will go crazy. That’s the selfish part of the equation. Part of my job in this life is to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. And wow, is that true for my group.

So I will take all due caution to post my document as anonymously as I and the Internet know how to do it.

But ti has to be done.

It is my destiny.

And just so you know, those who love and cherish me, that if the shit really goes down and I become the most hated person in the world, I will understand if you no longer feel that you can afford to be associated with me.

It will hurt, but I will understand.

And what the hell. What I do tends to get ignored anyhow.

Might as well get it off my chest.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Two balls, and an alibi

Currently stuck in my head :

 

It’s a great album. Tells the story of a poor little rich boy. Here’s the song I really identify with, or at least, with the chorus :

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I know how you feel, man. When I was a kid, I envied (without being able to articulate it) the poor kids with stable, loving families. I would have traded all my middle class stuff for parents and siblings who wanted me around.

The sort of family my babysitter Betty had. They were poor, and everything in their house was cheap, and growing up she’d had to share a bedroom with two other siblings, and so forth and so on.

But when I was there, I could feel the love and the bond between them, and often wished I could stay.

In those days, her family paid a lot more attention to me than my own. And they seemed to care if I was happy, too. With them, I felt like I was being cared for.

As opposed to at home, where I felt like I was barely being tolerated, and to get that I had to be completely accommodating, never ask for anything, and “understand” when my needs got utterly neglected or something I cared about was withdrawn in favour of the comfort and convenience of others.

No matter what, they knew I would “understand”.

It was a very cold childhood. Perhaps that’s because I come from a family of chilly intellectuals, I don’t know. I’ve talked here before about how cerebral a family we turned out to be.

And we also all turned out to have mental health issues. Way to go, Mother and Father. You successfully raised a crop of brilliant kids with fucked up heads.

And of the four of us, I got the biggest dose of both of those things.

My siblings have their issues, true. But they also had friends when we were growing up. I did not. And it’s not like I was going to get the necessary emotional and social stimulation from my icebox of a family.

As a result, I was a depressed kids in an area when nobody knew that was even a thing that could happen. I withdrew hard into my little world of TV and books and video games. A world I still live in to this very day.

Obviously, I am pretty bitter about all that.

But what can I do? It’s in the past. It’s far too late to get mad about how I was treated forty years ago.

Nevertheless, I am pretty pissed off about it. My childhood burned its lessons about my place in the world into my so deeply that I was in my early thirties before I even realized how badly I had been raised.

It’s a staggeringly sobering thing to realize that despite your brilliant mind, you have been completely blind to profoundly important truths about your life for as long as you can remember, all the way back to your early childhood.

Every childhood is normal, I guess, until you compare it to others and realize what exactly you should have had.

As you patient readers know, I am still working through all this emotional garbage from my childhood. It’s taking such a long time, I suspect, because of that heavy dose of icy intellectualism I got from my family.

That left me without the emotional tools to deal with my problems directly. I have to work through them intellectually, which takes a hell of a lot longer.

I mean, I didn’t even have a relationship with a deity who loved and cared about me. No religion in my childhood.

No religion, no friends, no family to rely on, nothing.

Just long days of loneliness, boredom, and fear. Like all emotionally neglected kids, I learned to entertain myself.

And never really learned to do anything else.

Perhaps my highly developed verbal skills come from my (highly intellectualized) attempts to express what I did not know how to express as a child.

Or rather, I suppose, what I was too scared to express. It was very hard for me to articulate my needs because I got such a strong “you don’t matter” vibe from my family that I felt like I had no right to ask for anything, ever.

All that was left was for me to be grateful for whatever fell from the sky into my life. You know, those rare moments when someone noticed me enough to be nice to me.

There was nothing I could do to bring them on, and I had better be grateful for what I did get because I sure as heck didn’t deserve it.

Sometimes I sit and wonder : did I even stand a chance?

Because it’s easy to come up with a million “if only” scenarios. If only I had stood up for myself. If only I had demanded proper treatment from the world instead of passive absorbing whatever happened to me. If only I had used my winning combination of articulacy, passion, and stubbornness to raise a fuss and get myself what I need.

Etcetera, ad nauseum, infinits.

But the fact that there are things now that I wish I had done back then does not mean that I actually could have done them back then. They would have been alien to my nature at the time. I was a product of my environment and felt very little sense of agency or self-determination.

I just adapted to whatever happened without a single thought in my head of having an alternative way of dealing with it.

Just like I had no idea that changing myself in order to fit in was an option. So I never learned to do that, either. I just got lucky and found a group of nerdy friends who would never ask that of me.

We nerds are cool like that.

Come to think of it, my family never demanded that of me either.

That would have involved noticing me and, worse, actually thinking about me and my needs and well-being.

And they sure as hell weren’t going to do that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.