Question:
The other day I wrote up a big long essay in response to Mischa’s Chaos’ post. But, as I finished up the proof read and edit my power went out and everything got zapped into disoranized electrons or something like that. Frustration and disappointment overwhelmed me, but here I am, attempting to do it again. I remember that Mischa’s Chaos raised two questions that I thought were extremely important, but, since I’m sending this from my email acct. thru twwells right now, trying to be safe, I don’t have the post in front of me. I should have thought to save/forward it. Oh well. I’m disorganized. I’m distracted. I’m disaffected. And, the important dis, I’m dissociative. Dis and dat, eh? I think that Mischa’s questions were something to this affect: Do we have needs that we refuse to feel as an act of denial because of the situations in our childhood that caused us to link needing/dependence with pain? [and] If we do, how do we get over the association; how do we get to regard needing as an acceptable and even healthy part of living consciousness? Of course I’m totally paraphrasing, but I think that sie did say something to the effect of those questions. I think those questions and how each of us answers them are critical, of supreme importance, to the survival of all of us. I want to look at need from the perspective of material requirements for survival and how we construct need, dependence, and independence around those things. Then I think we can transfer the methodology onto what we do with ourselves emotionally and perhaps gain some insight. It seems to me that, in the economy of transnational capitalism and global corporatism, human beings in hegemony or close to the privileged classes devise and generally accept an alienated definition of independence. That definition boils down to being able to pay one’s own way. It doesn’t even get involved with earning one’s own way, for people who have inherited or married into money and get to have control over that money via accounts with their own names on them do consider themselves to be independent, not needy. This applies even to people who have never worked at anything a day in their lives. Meanwhile, the thing that they are alienated from, the thing that they blind themselves to, the thing that they construct lives in total denial of, is that they are at least entirely interdependent (if they work, themselves) with other working people, for their survival, and even entirely dependent on working people for their survival if they do not work. Paying the working people for the labor, goods, and services that it takes for them to survive does not make them less needy or dependent. It simply provides a system of alienating them from the process by which those goods and services are provided and constructing and maintaining a profound denail of the interdependence and/or dependence on other people. Take the production and distribution of food, for example. Certainly no one will deny in a direct conversation regarding the subject of food that sie needs it for survival. However, few people who are not involved in the planting, nurturing, harvesting, storage, transporting, and marketing of food pay any attention at all to those who perform the enormous labors associated with those processes. The people who perform that labor are poorly compensated for it. They certainly are not shown any appreciation for it. No one acknowledges their need and dependence on them. They are treated like some sort of disposable commodity. Farmworkers do not, for the most part, have permanent homes. They live in shacks and hovels, often without plumbing or ready access to potable water. Their children work with them, little children. There are no laws restricting child labor in agricultural work. All of them, including the children, are exposed without any sort of protective cloting, to high levels of toxins from pesticides and herbicides and chemical fertilzing agents. They are all, including the children, in frequent physical danger from machinery, inappropriately used tools, faulty ladders that are placed poorly among tree limbs, and pressure from their so-called employers in agribusiness to work at a pace that is stressful to the mind and body. Many children suffer life-long disabling accidents and do not have access to workers comp or adequate medical attention or disability benefits. Those are the same children who are not given the gift of literacy because they do not regularly attend school. Certainly, if any one intellectual skill aids people in freedom and being able to live up to the accepted definition of independence it is literacy. But, really and truly, the children of farmworkers, often themselves illiterate, are denied proper education even to read, never mind keeping up with information technology such as we are employing for this discussion right now. Yet, absolutely, without a doubt, all of the rest of us, no matter what our labor or source of income may be , need farmworkers. We need food. We also need the truck drivers who carry the food from field to market. And how do we treat them? We overwork them to the point of dependence by them upon amphetimines in order to complete their responsibilities by deadline. Under the same pressure that drives them to that, a practice that puts them and other highway users at risk of accidents, we create circumstances in which they do not have time to adequately check and maintain their vehicles, adding to the on-road risks. Then there are the employees at grocery stores: Also pushed to work at paces beyond healthy tolerance, underpaid, and overlooked. Reflect, for a moment, on the fact that most of the time when one shops fewer than half of the cashier lanes are even open. The workforce has been cut. The unions have been busted, over and over. People are forced to stand when stools could be provided to eliminate some stress on legs and backs. Most people who are not involved in the production and distribution of food don’t respect the people who are, if they bother to give enough thought to those people to determine whether they respect them or not. Most of the rest of us, on some level of consciousness, simply consider food workers to be easily replacable and therefore disposable. Yet, obviously, we need them. We need them. I mean, what are you going to do? Grow your own food? Keep a cow or goat someplace for milk, yogur, butter, ice cream? Chickens for eggs? How many varieties of fruits and vegetables can you grow in your yard or in pots on your balcony? C’mon. We need food workers. We deny that we need them, in a huge system that encompasses a variety of methods to create and support that denial. But, we do need them. Okay, so what else do we need we that deny that we need? We deny that we need attention, affection, expressions of love, interest in our personal lives and innermost thoughts, interest in our pain. We even need interest in our pain. Why else is novel after novel and poem after poem and essay after essay and short fiction after short fiction and film after film etc, etc. written, published, directed, and produced about grief and pain? Records, songs, symphonic movements, orchestral composition? We need. We need to express love, fear, anger, grief, concern, care, happiness, joy, all of our emotions and know that we are heard and understood, know that someone cares about it. We need to read it, see it, hear it. We need to respond to it. We need to say, "ah, yes, I know that feeling." Yet, it is generally considered wrong to make a personal, outright display of such need. Artistic and cultural expressions are fine, but we aren’t to get caught showing grief in social or work or community situations. Expressing too much joy may raise question of our sanity, also. Stay cool, stay calm, stay "in charge" of yourself. Stay collected. Learn and practice tact. Leave your homelife at home when you arrive at the workplace. Worhip movie and t.v. heroes who stay cool in the most dire and traumatic of circumstances. Certainly, never never never let most people know that you were severely traumatized, whether as a child or adult. Your trauma? Your weakness, eh? Isn’t that how we think? Go pay a t to listen to you. Then wonder if sie "really" cares. Then hate yourself for caring if sie "really" cares. Then hate yourself for realizing that you need and depend on the t. Then hate yourself for needing and depending on the t. That’s absurd. We do need emotionally. It doesn’t matter why or how. We will never answer the nature/nurture debate. It doesn’t matter. We are as we are. We need to respect our emotions and the needs that come with them or we will become/remain unhealthy and unable to function in the vast network of the fine division of labor around the globe that provides for the goods and services, including emotional supports. Then we will not honestly be able to say that we hold our own within that network. Then, even, we will need more out of it. We will need to be helped to heal so that we can participate in it once again, or finally, so that we can give. Denial of our needs allows some of us (using us to refer to all of humanity) not to provide for the needs of the children. Denial is the root of *bse and neglect, stuff that traumatizes children and disables them at important points of their subsequent adulthood. And if you were one of the children who suffered the trauma of that denial, then you righteously need a little more now in order to make up for what happened. In order to learn what you need to learn about how to cope with stuff so that you can cope with stuff. That’s okay. That’s right. That’s necessary. You/we/I do not need too much. We are not "too needy." We are not less independent than anyone else. We are being honest with ourselves about interdependence and need. We are taking care of
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Response:
what you have written here is amazing, all of it! your compassion, brilliant insights and wonderfully talented way of expression, never cease to amaze us! Of all you said this part grabbed me and shook me to the core. Denial of our needs allows some of us (using us to refer to all of humanity) not to provide for the needs of the children. Denial is the root of *bse and neglect, stuff that traumatizes children and disables them at important points of their subsequent adulthood. And if you were one of the children who suffered the trauma of that denial, then you righteously need a little more now in order to make up for what happened.
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