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24 posts tagged activism
I really don’t think society is going to change all that much in regards to issues such as… racism, sexism, and/or any discrimination against any oppressed group in society, if all we do is try to make people be more accepting and not try to come down hard on people who continue to perpetuate violence against others for race, sex, sexual orientation - whatever. We have become too relaxed, too loose over people who wouldn’t give one fuck if they trod all over you. We’ve seen it with the countless suicides of people who can no longer handle living in a place that tolerates this behaviour.
And you can give me all that freedom of speech, free nation crap. I don’t care. Western culture is too easy on these people who continue to violate others.
I just don’t care to tolerate this shit anymore.
A reality tv show, here, was on the other night, Big Brother to be specific (disgusting show) and a man on tv, called this young girl a trashy slut. But that doesn’t matter, right? We let that go because those are only words, but they are words that contribute to a society that gives no shit for those who are feeling the weight of oppression. People throw around racial slurs like they mean nothing. It’s normal, now, to use insults that were used against the oppressed in every day language.
We are normalising violence.
Why are we so easy on people who do this? Why do we let it go?
We have these things like Slutwalks where girls are trying to reclaim the word slut, instead of talking to young boys in schools - men, even, about respecting girls and women.
I don’t get it. We are doing this shit wrong.
Once I asked you, how deep down this rabbit-hole are you willing to go?
Folks want to say this and that about our fucked up conceptions, our misogyny, our racism, every bigoted facet of our institutionalized fuckery, yet when the outspoken move our dialogue, when we advocate action, to do what is necessary, we are labelled too radical. We are the insane. We are bat-shit-crazy.
Yes, you are right, we are normalizing violence, but only the violence which enables perpetuation. Our castrated conceptions of what is ‘acceptable’ enables the abuse. In this world, subconsciously, the dominant view is that violence must always travel downward in our hierarchy. The abused may never send it back up or they are fetishized as political terrorists, eco-terrorists, misandrists, reverse-racists, anti-nationalists, and more ridiculous than all, anti-freedom.
We have Stockholm Syndrome—nationalism, patriotism, imperialism, hierarchy, capitalism, patriarchy, zero-sum politics, you name it—for the creation of our inequalities.
Lundy Bancrot wrote:
“It is also impossible to persuade an abusive man to change by convincing him he would benefit, because he perceives the benefits of controlling his partner as vastly outweighing the losses. This is part of why so many men initially take steps to change their abusive behavior but then return to their old ways. There is another reason why appealing to his self-interest doesn’t work. The abusive man’s belief that his own needs should come ahead of his partner’s is at the core of the problem. Therefore when anyone, including therapists, tells an abusive man that he should change because that’s what’s best for him, they are inadvertently feeding his selfish focus on himself: You cannot simultaneously contribute to a problem and solve it.”
Our refusal to give the purveyors of abuse ‘no choice but to change’ has systemically been ingrained within the blood washing our brains and bodies in filth. We do not challenge it less our methods conform to those dictated and prescribed by the abusive.
Without thought we have all but fully accepted that ‘change’ may be only the change of tweaked illusions. Our strategy of ‘change’ has been predetermined and prepackaged to be ineffective.
Wilhelm Reich framed our problem within a trap:
“It IS possible to get out of a trap. However, in order to break out of a prison, one first must confess to being in a prison. The trap is man’s emotional structure, his character structure. There is little use in devising systems of thought about the nature of the trap if the only thing to do in order to get out of the trap is to know the trap and find the exit. Everything else is utterly useless: Singing hymns about the suffering in the trap, as the enslaved Negro does; or making poems about the beauty of freedom outside of the trap, dreamed of within the trap; or promising a life outside the trap after death, as Catholicism promises its congregations; or confessing a simper ignorabimus as do the resigned philosophers; or building a philosophic system around the despair of life within the trap, as did Schopenhauer; or dreaming up a superman who would be so much different from the man in the trap, as Nietzsche did, until, trapped in a lunatic asylum, he wrote, finally, the full truth about himself—too late…
The first thing to do is find the exit out of the trap.
The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP?
One can decorate the trap to make life more comfortable in it. This is done by the Michelangelos and the Shakespeares and the Goethes. One can invent makeshift contraptions to secure longer life in the trap. This is done by the great scientists and physicians, the Meyers and the Pasteurs and the Flemings. One can devise great art in healing broken bones when one falls into the trap.
The crucial point still is, and remains: to find the exit out of the trap. Where is the exit into the endless open space?
The exit remains hidden. It is the greatest riddle of all. The most ridiculous as well as tragic thing is this:
The exit is clearly visible to all trapped in the hole. Yet nobody seems to see it. Everybody knows where the exit is. Yet nobody seems to make a move toward it. More: Whoever moves toward the exit, or whoever points toward it is declared crazy or a criminal or a sinner to burn in hell.
It turns out that the trouble is not with the trap or even with finding the exit. The trouble is within the trapped ones.
All this is, seen from outside the trap, incomprehensible to a simple mind. It is even somehow insane. Why don’t they see and move toward the clearly visible exit? As soon as they get close to the exit they start screaming and run away from it. As soon as anyone among them tries to get out, they kill him. Only a very few slip out of the trap in the dark night when everybody is asleep.”
Again, you are right, we are doing shit wrong; but those wrongs can never be righted within our dogmatically trapped activism.
I ask you all over and over, what is your threshold; when will you fight back?Each of you must decide for yourselves when your fear can no longer withstand the flood of your courage. Realize we have to do more than we are doing. We must. Let us not wait for the abusers to kill us—the capitalists, the sexists, the apathics, the warmongers, the racists, all the oppressors. So fight, or get ready to die in your silence because it’s the only real choice you will ever have.
(via america-wakiewakie)
Posted by
America Wakie Wakie
