1964. Protecting the teddy bear which connected me to my loving caretaker.
The most basic elements of abuse are fear mongering and victim blaming. Violence - the abuse - induces fear, gives you power. Without projecting evil onto the victim, you could not bring yourself to do harm. So you have to make yourself insane, at least temporarily, in order to help you exert force, by making yourself believe that the victim deserves whatever you do to them.
As a young child with a sense of self derived from the loving care of an older woman who ran the state-run daycare center in the town where I was born, I knew, some years later when I was abused, that what was being done to me was wrong. However, I still absorbed a flood of victim blaming that assuaged the perpetrators’ budding sense of guilt. At the age of six I believed myself to be “a whore,” “dirty,” “evil,” and generally shameful for existing. After speaking up strongly after the first time I was abused in the network, I was threatened. It was made clear that if I dared to speak to anyone, as I had stated I would, I was going to be killed. I was very afraid. My greatest fear, though, was not that I would be killed; it was that the lies I had been taking on about myself were true - that if you peeled off all the layers of good behavior and reached into my core, you would find there nothing but filthy rotten evil.
That fear, that acceptance of the lies that are introduced into one’s mind during abuse, is the key to all evil actions. The perverted world leaders who abused me came from that place inside themselves, and it drove them to perpetuate their fear and blame onto their subjects - we the people - while lying to us so we will keep believing that we need them.
We all know that money is being printed out of thin air by the world banks, and that we give real resources and real labor in return. We know that if we don’t pay taxes to pay for wars we do not want, control we do not need, and to fund our own indoctrination - we would feel the iron fist underneath the satin glove.
The prison industrial complex has shown us how violence and victim blaming can be used to target an entire race and put its members in cages. Prisons remain largely populated by people of color, many of whose crime is what? Poverty? Slavery? Should people be locked up in prison? Certainly active pedophiles and child porn users need to be locked up: they pose a real threat to our children. Certain violent offenders are a threat to society. Does the removal of one person from society need to happen in a punitive setting where abuse is the norm, where one gets blamed eternally? Or does it make sense to create general rehab centers everywhere, including for pedophiles, where treatment is constant, blame and judgement are absent, and where there is no fear factor?
Currently, we are all gripped by fear. The news outlets are doing their job serving the powers that be, broadcasting sensation, warnings, edicts, rules. How much of the control we currently experience is necessary? How much is truly for our own good? Or for the good of others?
We are at the beginning of experiencing unparalleled levels of control by authorities, worldwide. The fear mongering induced by the media goes beyond reasonable caution. We are asked to blame anyone who does not follow the rules, who does not keep the recommended distance, who does not cover their face, who wants to shake our hand…
The opposite of fear is love, and love is what is needed. If we let fear take over, we will isolate, and would our depression not come in handy if someone wanted to control us? If we let fear win, we may become blind followers of a system that has us turn against each other, over what? Will we take the bait, point the finger and blame?
At some point, the iron fist of the vertical power paradigm is bound to be revealed to all members of society, and privilege is no longer the cushion of comfort that helped us to sigh with relief that the problem is not ours. What will we do? Will we go along and become blind enforcers of the rules? Will we become kapo’s for the rulers? Or can we use our own minds, our intuition, our deeper knowing, to discriminate between truth and falsehoods? Will we use common sense, calmly consider opposing viewpoints? Looking at every side of an issue cannot be a threat. If it is, it invites us to examine ourselves, so that we can face our fears, and come from a place of love in our opinions and conduct.
Judgment at a distance is fear up close. Does our judgment for our sisters and brothers flow from the fear of the force behind the vertical power system? Or is it another fear that creates it? We judge what we are afraid is in ourselves. There has never been a more perfect time to internalize, to take stock of everything, to work on ourselves for the sake of all, and to overcome fears so that we can be more loving in all that we do.
The dark power that threatens the world is infantile. Infants are completely powerless. In a baby’s tremendous need for their caregiver, love means life, and lack means death. An infant deprived of love grows up dead inside, not even capable of feeling the deathly fear at the basis of all their thoughts and actions, needing to control completely, to avoid ever feeling that powerlessness again.
When the day comes that we stand up against our ineffective, incompetent leadership - not because we belong to the other party but because we see that this leadership is composed of the sickest among us - let us make sure to have overcome our fears, so that we can extend kindness and compassion even towards the most evil, the worst of humankind, because we will know they did not know any better. We can stop judging everyone, and seek to understand everyone, if we go inside, and understand ourselves.