I am a product of rote learning, of nudging, bending, pressuring, conforming, imitating, group thinking, “the apple cannot fall far from the tree”, social engineering, IBM clones etc…
No wonder. After a while, I came to believe, as Patty Hearst once did, that the Stockholm Syndrome is the Law of the Land, like physics and biology (empathizing with your abductors and their causes, the end justifies the means etc…)
I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to be somebody else, to live somewhere else. ” You can have any model T’s you’d like, as long as it’s black”. I’d rather go along, unquestioning and …oh well, conforming: ” oh, you want me to rob a bank for Our cause?” No problem.
Instead of upward mobility in the hope that the trickle-down economy somehow will spare some chunk of change, past the next to the top level, I sunk, slowly. Enjoying the view from the Titanic. First by acknowledging and confessing that I am a sinner. Then slowly I have become one, by appropriating the sin of my fathers (and theirs), acting out a pre-set, propensity and impetus to fail.
So does it mean , I am doomed from the get go?
Always I am in between, the Alpha and the Omega, striving and stumbling with no upward trend (have you paired the dollar of 50 years ago vs today’s! I was shocked at New Yorker’s sticker price of 8.99). When does this (quality of life) downward trend end!
Without affirmation, validation and award, the world needs assurance that it’s OK with its soul.
Machine learning, but men are not. Men sleeping, but machine are not. Who is going to liberate whom? Want a fruit juice? (Ken Kesey).
We exist, live a little, love a little and lose a little. We’re all different yet all the same (destiny, misunderstood and misunderstanding – born the wrong way, bought in the wrong cause and subscribed to wrong method). Always on the outside, not in the know. Forgot password?
Religions have been counter-productive if they seek the end to justify the means.
By itself, it is a path, a means, yet out of sheer insecurity, it compromises and shows its true color (Priest abuse, indigenous school children ab/inducted up North in Canada, private-jet preachers ).
We no longer examine cause and consequences, raison d’etre as to why we exist and how much we’re needed ( if at all, beyond election year, when solicitation from both parties die down).
Until someone with “authority” tells us who we are and could become. Nudged, pressured, pushed and pulled. To become They, the abductors, the Jim Jones and Jim Bakker. In short, we’re finally de-individualized; no longer the person whose name was on the birth certificate. We no longer are with our names. We’ve become numbers. Assigned and slotted into a verticalized and structured algorithm like soldiers with dog tags for convenient identification, just in case.
Born this way, died that way. A completely different, inauthentic and unrecognizable version. If life is a Xerox machine, it certainly has ran out of ink, thus, makes poor copies. Just click “Accept” on all the terms of use.
The saddest thing in life is to live someone else’s life but one’s own.
Dutiful, obedient and without authenticity. Parents are guilty in this respect as much as Priests, Teachers, Politicians and Philosophers (those who tackle the “why’s” ). How many gay men and women died without ever given a chance to “come out”. How many soldiers died in “friendly fires”, whose death certificates did not reflect the reality of war (perhaps to protect pension). Those who suffer silently, without an internet connection, to vent, post and share their grievances (today’s Patty Hearst would be deprived of her access to a phone).
Last week, we had a moment of joy: prisoner swap. Patty Hearst comes home, so to speak.
Now, the hard part: de-briefing and de-programming. Our “Spartan” have done his job – hostage rescue. Now as a society, we must ride this momentum (of “one is free, all are free”), and reexamine who we are and who we want to become.
As Sec of State says it all ” given the choice between a society that does everything to bring its innocent citizens home, and the one who went the distance for its terrorist, I would choose ours any day”.
Becoming You, I’d say, is the hardest of all, in a society and social media that say otherwise. Your mission and mine, is to become ourselves, from cradle to the grave, owning our idiocy and idiosyncrasy; that way, while we are around, the world could exhibit its flavorful whole.
Our world is wonderful not without you and I in our fullest (of nuances).
So drop the facade, the pretense, unlearn those rote learning, stop saying the expected and for once, release that weight (stress) someone has outsourced onto us. Fly free, face the Sun, and feel the warmth of free air and freedom. I’d take that over any Stockholm S** any day, since we all eventually die alone as part of the package we didn’t sign on.
Thang Nguyen 555 