There is a troubling trend in our society. The trend isn't about skin color. The trend has nothing to do with social classes, the very rich or the very poor. What it has to do with is middle class citizens of the United States and an apparent sense of guilt along with the desire to make someone else pay for it.
The Struggle for Power Is Real But Not What you Think: The trend of Trigger Warnings and Micro-aggression and Anti-Bully campaigns does nothing to address the underlying problems that lead to these trendy terms and phrases. The power struggle is real but it's not what we are being lead to believe. We need to stop creating divisions among the human family, we need to stop creating victims and we need to start owning our own power. A million victims of unintended slights feeding and reinforcing their own fear will lead to hatred among the victims and their supposed oppressors who do so not out of malice but ignorance of the others feelings....which will inevitably led to violence. Our society has become a boiling cauldron. To hopefully keep it from exploding and maybe turn it into a magical love potion we need to understand the underlying issues on the individual level regarding empowerment. I'm going to go over some things that I have shared in the past but I think it's worth understanding this situation from an individual point of view. I really don't care about a group point view. Groups and mobs are made up of individuals who make personal choices to belong to that group. People cannot alter a group but each person has control of their own opinion and lives- that in itself is powerful and enough to change the world. Fear Fear is a survival instinct. There are good types of fear and there are bad types of fear. Good fear causes you to move off the train tracks when you see a train coming towards you. That type of fear is healthy. That's survival. Bad fear is the type is when you project negative ideas onto situations that are otherwise innocent. This type of fear is the irrational type that might prevent people from leaving their homes least they run into someone who is mean. When the bad type of fear, that is based mostly on feelings and emotions, is reinforced- especially in a group setting- it can become amplified and more solidified in the persons mind. Suddenly, they have even more justification to stay home and be frightened of every person that passes by on the street in front of their home. The latter type of fear is being amplified by multiple sources in our society. The media employs it to get more viewers. Conspiracy websites promote it by vilifying one group or the other as being masterminds of exploitation. I have seen more fear in the the last fifteen years in the alternate and mainstream media than ever before and it seems to be reaching a fever pitch. That fear is dividing people in record numbers. The strange thing about fear is that each of us as individuals gives power to it. Once you start feeding your fear it becomes this ever growing monster. Your heart beats faster when you encounter a situation that reminds you of that fear. All of the feelings that you have when that train is barreling down goes through your mind but none of them are physical- they exist solely within the mental construction of the world in our mind. Unlike with the train where you can move a safe distance from the tracks when the fear is a mental issue there doesn't seem to be an easy way to walk away from it. Reconstructing your mental world is not an easy tasks nor is it something that many people realize they can do. In the physical world facing our fear is the only way to discharge the energy. If we are afraid of a cliff we stand on the edge of one until we realize that we are safe. What do you do when the fear is intangible and it's taught to you by society? Further, once you give power to that fear you enter a state of powerlessness. You feel helpless. Your self esteem becomes low. Being motivated is hard because you feel no matter what you do the situation cannot be made better. You enter a dark hole from which you cannot emerge. In fact, your frightened of what you might find if you emerge from that hole which has become 'normal.' Even worse, when you are in a negative state of mind it brings everyone else down. People exchange mental states, if someone is smiling and laughing it's contagious. The same is true of a bad mood. People, without realizing it, tune in to the emotions of other people and match it instinctively. This can have a ripple effect as we transmit this negative damaged state of emotions to other people throughout our day. Fear separates us from others. Our seemingly justifiable fear isolates us from those who do not have that fear. This leads to a break down in communication. Suddenly, we cannot communicate our desires, needs and wants. We isolate ourselves or we join a group of like minded people who also feel wronged where that fear becomes even more amplified until it controls every part of our lives. Then because we no longer feel we can communicate our needs, desires and wants we feel even more powerless and the victim never realizing that other people are not mind readers. Other people can never know how to make us happy if we do not tell them how. Fear, however, is a choice. Self-Empowerment As I said before, when you fear something, you give power to it and over you. You feed it, which takes a lot of energy leaving nothing for the person feeling the fear. All of our energy, all of our personal power, goes into the fear or trying to avoid it. We start to feel empty. We try to fill that emptiness with food, alcohol, drugs, sex, hobbies...whatever we can to make us not feel that horrible sense of powerlessness. We can choose not to be afraid. We can choose to take our power back from fear. Since these non-physical fears are largely in our imagination we can choose to change our approach. We can face our fear, we can study it, we can see if it is justifiable (without other people's input) and we can offer concrete solutions. No, it's not easy to take your power back and realize that you create your own reality. I will go more deeply into how we create our own reality in another post. For now, let's suffice to say that we have control over how to react to every situation in which we are involved. We control the mental construct of the world that we perceive through our various physical filters because we build it meticulously within our own minds as we grow older and encounter new situations. Each of us build, create and live in our very own unique world. I might not be able to control everything that happens to me or that happens around me. I can, however, control how I react to it. Sometimes, there are immediate responses based on how we have been conditioned/trained in early life by our parents, schools and society at large. All of us know social etiquette. We are taught how to respond to certain situations. These rules, for the large part, is what dictates how we behave with others in public spheres. That social etiquette, however, might be wrong. Further, the social etiquette is not he same in every society or culture on Earth leading to some very interesting misunderstandings. Sometimes, we have to learn to overcome what we have been taught and conditioned to believe. Life is an ever evolving process of learning how to deal with new situations and each new situation offers us the opportunity to test and adjust our response. The Bully As A Tape Measure Everyone wants to eliminate the bully. They want to end bullying. They want to end what they see as injustice. We need to protect the weak and bring down the strong. They are missing the point. In fact they are missing a very important life lesson. Bullies are often not born. They are created. That's with every negative type of human behavior. People are not born evil. They are taught evil by society, by their parents and their friends. They are first and foremost victims. So first, you have to understand that a bully has their own story, often they feel as powerless as their victims. They are playing a power game where they are trying to take power from their victim. Bullies create victims who then in turn, make a choice, and become bullies. Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Each time we encounter a bully we can make a choice. We can choose to be afraid of them. We can choose to fight. Bullies do not like defiant people because when you defy them they do not feel empowered. Which makes them more hateful but we'll get to that... If we choose to be afraid of them the bully wins. They get exactly what they want. We can also turn the other cheek. By giving into their demands by choice we do retain our own personal power. They didn't force us, we willingly gave up the thing they wanted by choice because we didn't feel it was worth fighting for. We can also choose to stand up to them. We might end up being beaten up but we know at the end of the day we had the courage to say no. To enforce our personal boundaries and potentially end the bullies reign of terror (when they don't get the fear they want a bully ends up feeling unsatisfied which is usually why they lash out in violence). Here is the thing though, we test ourselves against bullies. They can provide us an accurate measurement of how we are feeling regarding our own personal power. They can show us if we are feeling powerless and most importantly they can teach us how to take back our own power. They can test our boundaries, what we are willing to let happen to us and what we are not willing to let happen to us. When we pass the test and stay true to ourselves we feel great but when we fail and let them dominate us we feel terrible. Out of the three ways we can deal with bullies turning the other cheeks is probably the most noble. I will never cease to admire those who choose to stand up to bullies and fight back, however, because it will make the bully think twice about repeating the same behavior. If the risk is too great to them they will not repeat the behavior. Yet, bullies provide a wonderful tool to test ourselves in every day life. They can accurately demonstrate our mental state and how we are coping with the world. Every time we fear a bully, we know we are in a personal place of dis-empowerment, we can use that and then begin to make adjustments to our approach. We can actually use the situation in which we are bullied to feel empowered. Again, we always have power, we always have choice. We simply choose to let fear control our actions. Bullies also provide wonderful instructive moments for parents with their children. When a child is bullied you can teach them that it has nothing to do with them. You can teach them how to respond to that bully in a self-empowered manner. Further, I don't believe that we will ever completely eliminate bullies from existence. There are so many causes that I'm not sure we can ever completely address them all. However, we can change our response to the term Bully and see it as a very important instructional experience. People only change if they want to change. Often it takes pain as a motivation for them to make that change but that's what we are here on this planet to do...learn, change, experience, and grow. Bullies definitely cause pain and promote change but we decide to make it negative or positive. We assign the definition in our own minds. Victimization There is a strange sense of power in the word victim...a sort of sick twisted justification as to why we feel powerless that can justify insane actions afterward. When I say I am a victim there is a a release from responsibility of making a choice. I'm a victim. The idea of choice was taken away from me and my life has been a nightmare every sense. We tell victims it was not their fault. Of course it wasn't, but we don't tell them that they have the choice to react to the situation in a constructive way. We tell them they should feel sorry for themselves. We tell them things may never be the same often insinuating that it won't get better. We tell them no one will ever understand exactly what they've been through. They are in a deep dark hole and we don't tell them they can ever climb out...because they are a VICTIM. Upon considering ourselves a victim we can disconnect with our humanity. People who consider themselves victims see themselves as powerless. As soon as you assign that term to yourself there is a sort of relief in it. Whatever happened wasn't my fault, it was the perpetrator/aggressors fault. I'm a victim and I need to be defended. Being a victim also leads to a number of other emotions. Hopelessness, fear, rage...and hatred of the perpetrator/aggressor. Further, it suggests that the person that made us a victim needs to pay for what they have done in blood or money. That's why we have to be careful in how we define the term victim. Especially when it is a purely a psychological/mental construct. Then we need to teach people who are victims how they can overcome it and not dwell on what happened. To often we cause people to dwell on the pain to the point where they never overcome it...they don't see that it can be a character building experience in their own life. I will go into how this might work in another blog. The Nazi's felt that they were victims. That is why they were eliminating the Jewish population. They felt the Jewish race had somehow weakened the "Aryan Race". From their perspective it was because of the other groups effect on them that they needed to be eliminated. This is why we cannot empower people to feel like victims. We cannot let people dwell on their powerlessness. Once people go down that path they take as many people with them as they can. Once they have a group of people to justify how they feel they then begin to act out and hurt the people they feel are aggressors. Once a person identifies themselves as a victim that is so violated that they are no longer human beyond all hope they will commit atrocious crimes that they feel are justifiable. After all, they are no longer human...they are victims. This is the cause of terrorism. This is what provokes people to act out in extreme and violent ways. We justify victims to do this, we encourage them to dwell in their powerlessness, we feel we need to protect them in a way that makes their own sense of hopelessness more profound. We cause them to act out violently as a last cry of pain because they are unable to deal with their own mental construct of how they perceive the world. Justice is hard to find when you don't believe it exists and you cannot define or envision what it looks like. The term victim is very dangerous. Conclusions In order to over come the recent rash of people in our society that feel dis-empowered we must educate people about their choices. People must understand that we cannot control everything that happens to us in our lives. However, we can control how we react to situations. We can choose to be the victim and dwell in the darkness of that inhuman violated mental place that inflicts so much harm. We can choose to hate others and blame them for our own mental state. Those with little regard for life will then inevitably harm as many people as they can seeking an ill-defined form of justice. We can choose to turn the other cheek because no major boundary is being violated. We give into the bullies on our terms by our own choice. In this way, we retain our own power but we don't incite violence because we realize that the bully is probably emotionally hurt and identifies themselves as a victim in their own mind. We can choose to fight back. This will reinforce the bullies perspective that they are a victim. This, however, will leave us feeling better because we no longer feel that our boundaries have been violated and we were in no way a victim (unless they beat us unconscious but that's the risk you take right?). Bullies want us to be victims or fight back. This justifies how they feel. They are the ultimate test of our moral and personal self-esteem (empowerment). I don't want them to go away. That's not the answer. The answer is choosing how you react to bullies. Will you rise above? Will you see them as a test? Or will you give into fear and hatred becoming one of them? The battle for power isn't political, racial, or anything else...it's personal. That battle exists within each and every one of us and every day we can test ourselves. We can make a difference by not giving power to fear and hatred. Stop creating victims. Stop being victims. Choose to be human.
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Brave Soul! May Your Journey On The Path Of The Seeker Bring You Joy and Peace! I'm currently posting every Saturday. With a new addition the family I have pre-scheduled most posts through December 2022. Full Moon Posts will contain up-to-date content when I can get to them. Thank you so much for your support and understanding! This is a place where you can encounter new spiritual ideas that have helped me develop as an Individual On The Path of the Seeker. Take or Leave this information as you see fit. Archives
April 2024
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