Her divorce lawyer, Mr. Paulson, the guy in charge of procuring her child support and maintenance, won’t answer phone calls, is an old casino buddy of Daddy Biz’s, and is paying off the gambling debts to mutual friends first. She’ll max out the credit cards and stock up on nail polish and Gucci while she still can, and is trying to figure out where to hide the SUV before the repo man comes. It’s only a matter of time before she starts freaking out and shrieking at the children for whining about being hungry.
Meanwhile, “we the children” had better grow up quickly.
Lest I be accused of sexism in my analysis, I will say that you can swap out the genders of the respective “parents” at will, it doesn’t really matter.
What does matter right now is that the citizens of the United States - and to some extent of the world - have been duped into believing that we are the helpless dependent offspring of a marriage between an all-powerful but neglectful government and all-powerful but criminal corporatists. This grand illusion has been foisted upon us over decades in so many ways I can’t begin to go into it in detail here.
The end of that illusion will feel, to many in the system, as devastating as a divorce does to a child. For people who’ve never gone through this kind of overwhelming change, the feeling of panic must be very large. For those who have but haven’t seen the parallels in this national meltdown spelled out for them, that feeling might be even larger.
It’s important to remember that change is the only constant in life. We are competent to deal with the changes we face as long as we are able to be flexible in our thinking and deal with our problems pragmatically and with clear vision.
I used to tell my kids that there was a big difference between “scary” and “dangerous.” The Bogeyman under the bed was “scary,” but he couldn’t necessarily hurt you. A car isn’t very scary at all, but it can kill you quickly enough. We need to develop the same sort of understanding here: We’ve wrapped ourselves in illusions, but they were never really any protection to us. Now we face realities - and in many ways our position has become stronger because of it.
Behind the overarching illusion of the “Daddy/Mommy” myth are many sub-illusions - things we’ve been told [or were sold on] that help to prop up the situation as we’ve had it. These sub-illusions are things we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and our society that are destructive to us as individuals. In order to ditch the fear fostered by the Daddy/Mommy illusion, it’s also important to ditch some of these sub-illusions.
One of the biggest illusions we’ve had programmed into us is called by psychologists “learned helplessness.” It is an obstacle to our self-rescue at a crucial time when we already have obstacles a-plenty:
“Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to act or behave helpless in a particular situation, even when it has the power to change its unpleasant or even harmful circumstance.”
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“One of the most intriguing aspects is "vicarious learning (or modeling)": that people can learn to be helpless through observing another person encountering uncontrollable events.”
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“…The American sociologist Harrison White has suggested in his book Identity and Control that the notion of learned helplessness can be extended beyond psychology into the realm of social action. Organizations or nations, for example, could experience negative events or failures that lead them to collectively believe that change is beyond their control.” ~Wikipedia
In short, as I said above, we’ve all been programmed, starting in childhood.
We’re taught that magical mythical powers of superheroes are required to combat Evil, which is always ALL Evil - while Goodness is ALL good. Shades of gray do not exist in our strangely Borderline Personality hero-culture. We recreate living human beings as idols, and project our fantasies of perfection onto them. This, incidentally, makes it easy to defrock an opponent in the popular programmed perception - any misstep becomes an indication of All-Evilness, the idol topples and is destroyed.
We allow the spin doctors to turn the very real, very human heroism of Martin Luther King and Gandhi into pseudo-mythologies that return them to the Superhero bin. There they become comforting figures of magical good, men whose accomplishments are beyond the ken of mere mortals - and therefore beyond what the likes of us could attempt.
In school, historical heroes are scrubbed and whitewashed and bejeweled in myths. In third grade my daughter was learning that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. I’d returned to college and was also studying Columbus, and my daughter began reading from my books as well. She asked her teacher about the second voyage, where he hunted the indigenous people with dogs, murdered them, and stole children to sell as slaves. The teacher, indignant, shouted her down, saying that had never happened, and had her marched to the principal’s office for persisting. Her curiosity and desire to learn had taken her out of acceptable bounds. That she was speaking the truth was of no matter to either the teacher or to the principal.
She was interfering with the programming.
There are many other ways we are subtly given “spun” truth, or programmed.
We’re taught to believe that if one is poor, it’s not because the system is rigged and the people who already have too much of everything have a distinct advantage, it’s because we’ve failed to work hard enough or are somehow not good enough. Our “station” in life is fated, magically, by Forces Unseen, or the beneficence of the Gods of Trickle-Down. If we’re rich, it’s because we deserve to be, because we’re somehow better than others - never a matter of leverage or luck - and if we do something wrong, it’s ok, because our money buys forgiveness. This enviable position also keeps people striving to become wealthier.
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