I was thinking in my forward and backward future thought game and was wondering why some friends of mine are constituted the way they are. They dance the dance of the abuse in their past, and I keep wondering where the hell they got it.
Take my friend A., for example, who is black, a true large-figured, loudmouthed, in-your-face, know-it-all, talk-to-the-hand kind of woman when she gets angry. She’s a delight most of the time, all humour in big deep laughs, baking and sewing and grandmothering, but has a huge chip on her shoulder about the white world (and maybe she should?.) and turns on a dime when pressed. I love her most of the time, but when she gets that way, parts of her just turn into Level 5 whitewater. She’s just un-runnable.
I visually traced back to her parents’ time, in the 1930s or 40s. Tough times for everyone. Then I visualize the grandparents in high collars when Louis Armstrong was just a kid. Days when no black person spoke to a white person without a shuffle of reverence and compliance, ever. And then before that? Slavery. Who taught them to hand down their abusive anger? Us. We did it. Yup.
And here it is still snapping out of her. It’s still damaging all of us, scaring me, making us grumble and hurt, coloring our decisions about each other, ruining lives.
How many slave-holding estate owners actually existed in this country at, say, the time of the Civil War? Couldn’t have been more than a few thousand, could it? i wonder what the actual number was. Only a drop in the bucket of population of the planet. And look how much crap they brought on the world. How much pain, how much death, how much irreversible psycho damage.
I look at what we’re doing in Iraq, no matter how well-intentioned some parties thought of the initial plan, and it makes me sick. If slavery swelled into this kind of damage, I can’t envision the sad future the Middle East mess will vent on us. I almost am relieved I’ve no children to see it.
To the progenitors of this war: Look at yourselves. Think of yourselves branched out into hundreds of decedents, all living in anger and hate and pain and dearth of food and water and health and normalcy all because you just couldn’t resist the idea that you knew better than everyone else on the planet. Are you proud of yourselves now? Are you?
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