Morbid Manipulation

 I have been keeping up with the conflicts around the world as reminders for living simply and humbly as a small token towards shrinking my culpability in these global conditions.  As I have been staying aware of the Palestinian struggle, I came across a synchronous intersect between my trauma interests and insight into the Arab injustices being morbidly manipulated to fuel a long lived punishment of Palestinian communities.  I felt it important to clear a little space on my small soapbox to contribute to the algorithm.  I have a Palestinian bias knowing that being against Israeli policies is not being against Jewish peoples.  I also understand that taking sides is not what is needed in this complicated situation. But collaboration is.  I can only grow more aware of what I can do to shrink injustice understanding balance has a formidable opponents. 

Conflicting Changes - Part 4

 Part 3

Where did the ability to self abuse originate?  

If I take a critical look at the people in my barrios that perpetrated on the homes, bodies, and minds of their neighbors, their motive seems to be some disillusioned type of prosperity.  In most cases the prosperity was a way to afford addictions.  In my narrow understanding of why someone would break into a home and rob, it sadly would be to convert the goods into drugs.  It was the drug dealer who chased some perverted vision of prosperity.  The drug dealer from my narrow understanding of dealing, could sell poison to a neighbor because they desired a better class of living. Granted these explanations are the simplest and narrowest of conclusions they don’t deviate too far from the thorough versions.  I thought self abuse was a cultural trait.  Then I learned more about the opioid crisis. 

The Sackler family shares the same perversion as “Diego the dealer”.  Despite the sophistication and education of Richard Sackler, his desire for prosperity motivated him to sell poison to his neighbor.  And like “Diego the deal
er” he’d argue that he wasn’t poisoning anyone, rather he wasn’t the irresponsible one.  Providing poison shouldn’t implicate someone in the actions of the consumer.  What the consumer does with the prescribed compound is their responsibility.  A pharmacist and “Diego the dealer”, some brown sociopathic person capable of consciously delivering poison to a person, is not very different from Richard Sackler.  The scale to which each of these men are unfortunately working to increase profits are not comparable.  The corporate dealer of chemicals is on a scale far greater than “Diego the dealer”.  The end goal of both is, maybe power, status, visibility, prestige, vanity, or prosperity.   The goal reflects a human trait, greed.  Brown people aren’t the deviants anymore than other peoples.  Brown consequences sadly are more harsh though.  When I look at my barrios and grieve the way we can treat each other, I can no longer say this is a brown thing.  This self destruction is a human thing. 

Now for the major difference.  Where these 2 men are not the same is in the eyes of My America.  “Diego the dealer” is a different and apparently more deviant type of poisoner.  When “Diego the dealer” is discovered to be poisoning people he is imprisoned.  Unlike Richard Sackler, a man who camouflaged himself in a pharmacists smock was able to poison globally.  I don’t know what type of trait creates this disparity in perspective.  My lazy self resorts to bigotry, racism, and oppression.  Republican’s likely have some acrobatic philosophy to rationalize how this disparity could be sensible.  Democrats might use a different type of evasion to distance their culpability by suggesting they were only functioning in the rules and laws that are mandated.  I think it is far more important for me to emphasize how “Diego the dealer” saddens me.  I think the only way to describe this is disappointment.

10 years ago I might have gotten stuck on the injustice for how the Sachler family didn’t have to unravel their family, throw away their freedom, nor pay any substantial consequence for their savagery.  Today I try and recognize how I am being “Diego the dealer”.  Who am I poisoning?  What is my desire motivating me to abuse my neighbors?  I can’t simply vent about Richard, I have to find the pain I am running from.  I have to find the pain that feeds my desire in a way that might be growing my potential to be greedy.

Conflicting Changes - Part 3

Part 2

The darker aspects of my culture are simply expressions of communal pain.  Without diving into excuses or reasons for class structures in My America.  My America being the  America in my head.  I have to see how inferior or maybe less desirable my peoples are.  I had to accept early on that beans and chili were considered poor foods. I had to accept that drug dealers weren't safe, tattoos were shame filled, and when you couldn't afford rod iron for windows a piece of wood would keep robbers out.  I sadly write that the community I was raised in beat the shit out of itself.

I have to come to terms with the self hatred.  In this context the self is our neighborhoods, our homes, and our streets.  To say it in another way we would rob ourselves.  This isn't absolute and it was a proportion that does NOT reflect the common home in my barrios.  And it is a measurable toxicity.  Looking back it seems really risky for people in my communities to invest in anything nice.  It meant taking the risk that it would eventually be stolen.  The dark markets were significant.  We often had things stolen.  

For my sanity I have to remind myself and you the reader that this toxicity does not define us or give validity to stereotypes.  It gives fodder for the convenient ways My America rationalizes its laws to alienate me.  It uses this toxicity to build a case against trusting me.  It leverages this toxicity to paint a fearful picture of who I possibly can be.  And it is not who I entirely am.  It is who I am when I am wounded, desperate, and surviving. 

I am numb when I think about how far behind I was intellectually.  My intelligence by My American standard was measured by how many "A's" I could put on the little card I took home to my mother.  I did not realize that what was important to discover wouldn't be integrated into my barrios. Despite being near nuclear minds and physicists with leading ideas, we were valued more for our barren land and maybe expendable lives.  I wasn't asked to experiment or adventure into sophisticated concepts or technologies.  I wasn't invited to use my imagination to the extents that other classes of people were.  I was taught to compete and at its worst, fight.  I was not being taught to learn, instead I was being groomed by the vocation monster.  The vocation monster was the human resource machine that My America created to enrich itself.  The vocation monster continues to feed on Latin lives, seeing the people with my skin tone and in my barrios mostly as labor. We simply are Consumable.

And the conflicting darkness in this is believing that I wasn't designed to excel and lead.  My barrios were filled with laborers who might have let their curiosity dry out.  The fatigue of the mundane and remedial drove my communities to be subservient.  The darker side of the Hispanic is in its alignment with an Anglo authority that still to this day resents sharing authority with Latinos.  This submissiveness leads towards a self policing of the toxic kind. The darker side of the my barrios is the division between the Hispanic and the Chicano.  We divided ourselves and added a handicap to our self protection from the disease of colonization.  Like scar tissue, on our brown faces.

Part 4

  

Conflicting Changes - Part 2

Part 1 

I start my cultural acrobatics functioning through the masculine perspective and from recognizing the patriarchal bias in my New Mexican region.  I preface this because I feel much of my orientation can only represent a view from this side of the gender border.  My conflicting changes have to begin with my gender.  I am not indulging the gender conflict currently enflamed in today's pop culture, I am writing through the male lens, a masculine privilege, and competitive instincts.  I have chosen to be a gentle warrior upholding values for ancestors who I feel had to drift from communal.  This identity has evolved from desiring to be a champion, dominant, and prestigious.  The deep dive into my cultural paradoxes have resulted in a condition that has at times been numbing.  I am human, diagnosed as Chicano.  Yes, diagnosed, better yet self-diagnosed.

My mother is my most influential teacher of focus, birthing me while only a maturing child herself, at 17. She was guiding herself and me into choices both blessed and ominous, yet mostly seeming to turn fortuitous.  My step-father is another.  My father in his brief opportunities to be with me, made a strong impact.  I had uncles and aunts that steered me and at times squished me.  These are my first attempts at loving relationships. I see these relationships are the bedrock for who I am and how I am.

I am about to describe how my darker shades of brown were made.  

This is not an attempt to disenfranchise myself or burn the bridges to my past.  This will be an encounter with my soils.  It will be a critical look into what building blocks and nutrients surrounded me and still feed my existence.  It will be the curious step into machismo, addictions, violence, criminality, and victimization.  It will be the first step towards taking responsibility for being bonded with the idea of being more human and less obligated to be lower case chicano.  It is a way for me to embrace the victimization in me by taking responsibility for not looking for the wellness that transcends labels and identities.

Conflicting Changes - Part 1

Part 1

Love is measurable, like counting the atoms that make up our universe.  We have an obligation to keep counting.  We paint ideas of being loved in romance, our passions, and heartfelt expressions.  That might only be half of its existence.  We are deeply capable of resisting care, and the potential feelings of emotional susceptibility. Maybe saying that practicing love has formidable obstacles.  Love has proportionate hurtful ways of being avoided, tactics for not being vulnerable.  I spent hours with people seeking care for behavioral, lifestyle, and relationship healing.  They were looking for answers, as if they didn't have the answers intrinsically or even as if there was an answer.  I find counseling, when done well, is addressing the ways we are not lovable.  And it might be important to say that mental health has disease and dysfunction that can't be reasoned with using this understanding.  I am talking about characteristics found in the heart of the human struggle bell curve.  I recognize, in a person’s creative demonstrations of independence, a pattern of resisting or avoiding love.  The cliché term is pushing someone away.

I am guilty of the action and prefer to think of it safeguarded sabotage.  I might blow up relationships, more like stress the durability, and likely exercise my reactivity with protagonism in order to reveal the depth of love that truly exists within them.  And for clarity relationships in this context are not limited to the romantic flavor.  I can’t say that it is test.  I can’t say there is any type of thoughtfulness in it.  I think it is a modality for emotional protection, and when reckless just a coping strategy.  I do this because so many relationships in my life have softly pinched me, bitten me, and socked me.  I am sure I have done the same.  

Because my safety is found in solace, I think the push is to restore some form of stability to organize my emotions.  I retreat.  My comfortable distance with gregariousness is kept by the angst from not knowing when my protagonism is not seen as agonism.  As I become intimate I am lured into vulnerability and this is where my first defense has been to sabotage for safety, like a tunnel rat might scan booby traps.  I blow that shit up.  Sometimes it is intentional, more often it just feels like I got entangled.

Experiencing this resistance to the vulnerability and safeguard from deep connection might be our love limit.  I want to explore this vulnerability as a spectrum for progress.  I find popular enjoyment in using the term push-pull.  And isn't this nature or expected.  Life is polarities dancing, generating a chaos that tends to result in creativity, consumption, or contribution.  It isn't dysfunctional and even better recognized as a natural way of being in or struggling for balance.  I have practiced curiosity when I grow aware of these tensions, and this has been a helpful tool for adding focus to the push-pull. This helps me to formulate messages to create healing "space" in and through the back and forth.  Space here is defined as a platform for confronting the barriers to a harmonious self concept or inertia to disconcerting for togetherness. 

In this next little series I hope to describe my struggle to hold the Chicano identity, while framing my struggle in the above described psychology of safeguarded sabotage.  I am going to describe the dysfunction I experienced growing to be American while being seen as something embedded.  I'll share my reflections on the symptoms of ignorance and neglect that come from the people, the humans, that label themselves Loving.

Pardoning the Ex-tradition of a Legacy

 I come from Latin privilege and Chicano scarcity.  My maternal grandparents are a large influence on who I became in life.  They didn't seem to struggle with identity openly.  They did label though.  And for whatever social influences or lack of need they rarely promoted any label themselves.  They established the bedrock for what I rely on as a character compass.  They created what I know as my family.  They were raised in a generation that inspired the need for a Chicano mentality.

My grandparents were taught under a regime of Catholic dictators enforcing laws that disabled a lot of their reckless creativity.  I paint with a bias that overlooks the love and tradition the same Catholic ordained paradoxically brought with them.  This Christian archdiocese, including the radical authorities, enforced a catholic tradition of shame and guilt right along side a message of stewardship and compassion.  The penitent façade of Catholic Christianity seemed to bind my grandparents into obedient stewards to humility, handicapping them, while protestant Anglos capitalized on their, reformed alignment with prosperity and wealth.  I don't need to be Protestant I need to radicalize my Catholicism.

My religious attitude paints with broad strokes.  I am inflamed by my commitment to the Catholic rules that don't seem to stifle the liberated "Christian".  Blessed are the meek, while my ego looks up at the Christians who seem to be lavished by the sleek.  I am dull by the sadness from the discouraged attitude the Catholic church has towards the spiritually creative and grip on dogma.  I am jealous of the prosperity that comes from Anglo-American Evangelical modalities.  I want the same freedom to interpret and create revolutionary mentalities around the gospel that aren't commercialized.  I want to dismantle the  faith that rooted my grandparents in hesitancy, fear, and obedience.  My grandparents died obedient Catholics and I want to die a believer in Christ.  I don't know how different these deaths are, and pray they lead to the same heaven.

Gettin it right

Part II

 "I'm not a smart man", my grandpa tells me, slopping up fresh pinto beans and green chili with a torn off piece of tortilla.  The tortilla creates a pocket when he slightly folds the tortilla piece while pinching the ends together.  This make shift spoon helps shovels spoonfuls of frijoles while at times becoming a bite of it's own.  "Don't be like me", he continues between bites.  He rakes the plate with each tortilla piece leaving small gravy tracks, whittling his pool of beans and chili into a shrinking portion.  "I wanted to go to school".  He describes how he isn't sure why he couldn't focus.  He hasn't shared what were his barriers but his rhetoric paints a story of an early exit, an easy exit.  

This baffles me because he is such a craftsman.  The education that he did excel in was not in a classroom.  It isn't listed on a transcript in a data warehouse that I can admire.  He doesn't have certifications hung on his walls, highlighting any curriculum that vetted his knowledge against other men.  And I don't know my grandpa as anything other than capable.  This is different than smart.

Grandpa, I want to be like you, and if not being smart is part of that then I will find a way to just be capable.  I want to learn how to come from my day of work and build.  I likely won't build cabinets from scratch but I will create.  It may be a poem, a story, or a reflection.  I hope I can be a learner like you.

Grandpa you didn't get it right, rather you got it well!  I hope you can feel on your new cosmic journey that there was never a smart way and you surely didn't have to avoid the wrong way so strongly.  I hope you see in the heavens that how you lived was valuable and worthy of praise.  The love so many have for you, should help you see that the lessons you mastered are accredited by the ethos.

At times it appeared hard to tell that you cared, were pleased, approved, or were impressed.  I needed more smiles that came naturally, and didn't have to wait for libations. I hope to learn to be sweet without the reliance of beer or two.  I hope to soften my feedback, because it hurt to hear your doubt come through in your praise.  And I remember how much it hurt hearing you doubt yourself, so I hope I can find a way to build confidence with the modesty I admired from you.  

How come you describe yourself as falling short?  I miss you, sitting down under a roof you built, reaching for a salt shaker from a cabinet you fashioned, pouring frijoles into a bowl grandma crafted, scooping chili from pan older than me resourcefully maintained.  You are quality.  Who taught you to hold yourself down?

Part I