I've been thinking a lot lately. About wounds. Our collective and individual emotional wounds. The tapestry they form as pain entwines here, diverges there. The myriad ways trauma shapes us. I apologize for rambling a bit today. I want to process my thoughts and they are coming from many threads, some from many years past, some barely conjured this week.
I wrote last about a very formative era in my life. I am well aware of the comforts I seek because dad left. Of the interpersonal scripts I repeated through the years. The programming that made me continue to turn to those scripts. I repeat my scripts under the same conditions and similar variables in the hopes that I would break the loop and have a magically good ending.
Thinking about it, it's odd behavior. I think it's rooted in the human need to retread the grooves we have walked before. Pain hurts, but it is also familiar. We seek what we know as a humanity, at all costs. Like Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, we even willingly make others suffer for that comfort and familiarity.
I am reading Angela Y. Davis' Women, Class, and Race. I am on chapter 8, and I need to process more before I can discuss my thoughts about the book with more confidence. But I recommend it. Dear God, we all need to read Angela Y. Davis. We all need the unvarnished truth with the sparse prose with which she devastates. History matters. In seeing our collective and individual history we zoom out and view reality as the patterns that weave it. And one conclusion I am drawing (other than some famous suffragists being racist asshats that used abolition as their cause celebre until it got in their way) is that ultimately we seek comfort.
When someone dives head first in an echo chamber, and says things that are patently false and outragous? They are scared their institutions were pulled from under them. When I myself refuse to reach out to a friend and walk away, I am terrified they won't reply, and leave me like dad. When people hoard wealth. When they gaslight themselves into thinking that only in protecting theirs they will thrive. When they refuse to learn media literacy. To seek more perspectives. To open their eyes to the suffering they vote for and endorse. The racist remarks. The homophobia. The panic about autism. Just as I have drowned myself in the fear of losing others, society repeats patterns to seek the comfort of the familiar. Comfort no matter who pays for that comfort.
But were we placed on earth for unfettered comfort? We are here to live. And that includes a wide spectrum of comfort and discomfort. We are to take what we are given and make the best we can with it. To accept fate, yet to open our eyes to the systemic issues caused by our fellow comfort-seeking humans. So many people vote in the powerful, with the false assurance that with their power comes safety. There is no safety.
The powerful want to exploit. It's in every cycle of history and we see it now again. I wonder if the powerful will one day crack the code and stop tipping points that cause revolutions. Propagada's scale and effectivity has only improved. I mean, we have people that legit believe the government controls the weather. Modern propaganda is only improving and becoming ever more outragous.
I think... I'm more terrified of comfort than discomfort.
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
– Ursula K. Le Guin (The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas)