Posts Tagged ‘abuse’

What our ancestors show us - the overwhelming importance of family

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

In todays world, it can become quite confusing.  Morality is now a fine thread which is quickly defined and rearranged by individuals, often to suit their own ends, hence a sexual abuser can sometimes pervert their thinking to believe that “I was only teaching them in the act of sex”.

The bible too speaks of family and notes how even unbelievers adore and cherish their families, giving to family members and friends, but no other, and in so doing the bible makes comment on how what virtue is that for a follower of Christ - meaning, there is no greatness in looking after family and friends that you love and like and know, as the expectation of reciprocal looking after is ever present - rather the greatness comes from giving to others without expectation of return of any kind.

Yet, we see, family is vital - to both nonbelievers and believers.

For those of us in the Western world, the beliefs are clouded by words such as honor, duty, law, abuse …

A parent is encouraged to give up a son or daughter if they commit a crime or are called up for war, likewise a child is expected to rat out a parent if things go amiss in the family (not talking about child abuse, or abuse as such of one family member by another).

Things were not always so though.  If you look back through Scotlands history, there is a strong thread - even within the kingly lines -that ones promises and agreements with others were only to be kept when it inflicted no hardship upon family and those who depended on you.  Treaties were frequently made and broken to protect families and underlings from the English and so on.

(An interesting thread to this bit on Scotland, is that the Scottish Kings paid the Catholic church - the guardians of morality and spirituality - on condition that the priests and other of the Catholic robes to not sexually abuse Scottish parishoners, which had become quite rampant.  I transgress, but you would think after all these centuries, the church would have got it’s act right.  Anyway…)

You can see the difference clearly - now we are expected to uphold laws and governments, even if it means betraying family - yet it is the family and friends of the family that buffer the individual from the world that would take everything and give nothing back.  Laws, governments, rules .. these are constantly being changed and are transitory at best, and an act of oppression at worst.

Fact is, things do go amiss, and often authorities just react, place pressure on individuals, bad mouth them (report them) for supposedly very bad crimes, yet then nothing changes nothing happens.  The family is just left bewildered and in anguish, generating more stress.

To give an example that has upset me considerably.  I am still not allowed to comment too clearly about the events, I may not even have the facts myself, as the ‘criminal’ hasn’t been tried, so I will alter details, but the basis of understanding will remain the same, and is also a mix of another case I am aware.

The mother or father is reported by someone as a potential threat to their child.  The authorities react by investigating and interviewing the members of the family.  What does this do, it places considerable stress on the family - the uncertainty of future is made transparent, family members are expected to rat each other out.. Now, everthything settles - the memory remains - but things settle down, then the same person makes another complaint.  The authorities get involved again, putting the entire family through the ringer again.  This could keep going on and on and on.  For example, if one yells, it could be considered an act of domestic violence today, a few years back it was considered to be within the bounds of normal human interaction between husband and wife - see the law change - now a child hears the yelling, that becomes, by law, an act of child abuse.

That’s how easy it is to end up on the wrong side.  What’s more, you don’t even have to do anything wrong.  It could be your ex claiming they heard or saw something.

Now what does all this complaining and investigating do, it stresses people out no end, then when something does happen that breaks the camels back, a child or spouse or friend may be abused or killed, but the stress was put there much earlier - in essence the authorities have become the instrument of abuse - but he person who breaks down and does the crime, is the one that takes the blame.

Interesting that.  When you make laws too tight, you make everyone law breakers.

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On the construction of rage

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

Rage is an interesting and often overlooked facet of human emotion.

Simply put,  rage is an underlying anger,  that lurks below the facade of civility that we all portray to the world.

A  child who has been abused, although compliant and nice on the outside, may harbor a devastating rage - yet it is frequently overlooked.

An adult who feels he or she is being taken advantage of, may also have a great deal of rage, held in place by the illusional facade.

So what happens when the facade of civilization is broken?  The rage flows out like an erupting Versuvias, taking everyone aback and off guard.

The person becomes engulfed in the outflow of unbridled anger.

But who is the victim?  Who is the perpetrator?

It is easy to point the finger at the adult showing the rage, making comments about how they should have dealt with their emotions better - how many of us hear such shallow comments about others? Many of course - a father who snaps and throws the child, is clearly blamed, but why was the rage there?  Who is responsible for putting the rage there in that person?

Yes, maybe it was another person, but Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, had insight into many things.  He talked of how societies age - the more a society ages, the more laws that are generated.  In the end, a simple crossing of the road may one day lead to long term imprisonment, and be considered one of the foulest of crimes, with the end result being revolution against the government or dictator, as the people reach a point where they can no longer endure the hardship of law.

This is what we are seeing now, the extension of law to control behavior to a level unheard of before. A 14 year old can legally have sex with a 13 year old or a 12 year old, and law permits it on the basis it is experimentation, up the age level to one partner being 17, and it becomes an act of pedophilia.  My mother was married when she was 16 years old, now that marriage would be seen as an act of disgust and reviled.

On top of the tightening and ever expanding of laws to outlaw more human behaviors, we also have a dependency on supermarket chains and the like that continually rip the average bloke off.  For example, in one state, all plastic bags that don’t carry the company logo, like the ones you find in supermarkets, are to be totally banned.  Needless to say, there has been a sudden increase in bags with out logos, that means the companies will no longer provide them - An interesting manipulation of profiteering. 60% of the people, the majority, don’t approve of the law to be enacted, but it’s being enacted against the will of the people, as it may save a dolphins life. Most of us reuse those supermarket bags as garbage tidy liners, food carriers and so on, so now we have to go out and buy plastic bags for the job, making the supermarkets even richer.  If that weren’t enough, there is no offer of the free brown paper bags that supermarkets used before, now it’s you to pay for the brown bags and or buy the stronger shopping bags, which is really making the supermarkets a nice gift.

To top it off, some supermarkets then stopped carrying the plastic bags before the law was enacted, but they don’t tell you that before you enter the shop, they tell you that after you do the shopping, and say, do you want to buy some bags! I calmly told the operator that the law has not been enacted and they had no right to try selling me bags to carry the groceries in.  He then packed all my groceries into one box, enough to say that even before it was properly positioned in the trolley, the bottom of the flimsy box gave way, issuing the contents over the bottom of my trolley.  So I took 4 boxes to pack the same amount of groceries.  He packed one of them.  When I got home, guess what, there were the bananas underneath the apples and ice creams that he had packed…

We all know these chain stores make massive amounts of money out us.  We get a paper called the Weekly Times sometimes, it’s a farmer’s newspaper.  We found that one egg grower got about 55 cents in postage stamps for around 64 dozen eggs - that same supermarket that paid him then went on to sell those eggs for around $2 a dozen.

There is also another law of human behavior so to speak, Carl Gustav Jung, about a century back, one of the fathers of modern psychology and psychiatry, commented on how we become the thing we hate the most, that we are all capable of the most horrendious crimes and the greatest acts of sacrifice.  This is where the facade of civilized behavior becomes real interesting.

A policeman or policewoman who uses excessive force, or refuses to deliver proper aid to someone, or who lies to get the result they want, has either been unfit to start with, or become corrupted by their zealousness to do good.  People who protect the abused of a society, also often become the perpetrators of abuse in many hidden ways.

Of course, with that happening also, and mixing that power abuse with increasing societal laws, creates a strong basis for the generation of rage.

But society desires to have perpetrator and victim clearly identified, clouds the real issues, that continue to mould the degeneration and eventual overthrow of society.

I will rant more about this at another time.  As mixed up as the above may seem, if you read it well enough, you can see what I am getting at.

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