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olderthannetfic · 3 years

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I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

#Anonymous

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previouslynebraskan · 3 years

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Why humans are assholes

Hi, my pen name is Gwendolyn, and welcome to my TED talk on empathy

*side note, I suck at writing, and my train of thought is derailed frequently. So buckle up, and I’ll be surprised if you make it with me to the end, as we don’t know organization.

First off, I’ll disclaim something terrible about myself. I’m a Christian. Even worse. I’m a rosary rattler. A Catholic! Oh and you thought it couldn’t get worse? I’m not even a good one. God and I are only on speaking terms when I need him (which is pretty frequent, but not the point). Church feels like an obligation most weeks, and just because I know the rules and believe in the rules, doesn’t mean that I follow them.

Alrighty! Terrible things out of the way. Let’s begin. Humans are assholes. Most people, especially the population of Tumblr, will agree with me. Between human atrocities, selfishness, and down right lack of care, humans are just assholes. I am too. I am human. Ask my siblings. Like any good older sister, I wanted nothing to do with my siblings, and when forced to see them at school, I was unprecedently mean to them. Ask my husband. I am ridiculously selfish, and only do things when it suits me. And yet, there is an entire history of the human race, with worse individuals than myself. And a lot of people might see that, and think, cool, I feel better about myself, because I’m not Hitler. I feel better about myself because I wasn’t a member of the KKK. Well, personally, I don’t. The next disclaimer I am going to make about myself, I’m a self-diagnosed empath. I’ve never been to a therapist. I don’t currently have plans to either, but I’ll let God decide that path later. The reason I bring this up, and the reason I mentioned my religion at the beginning, is because I truly believe that if not for my first disclaimer, my second might not exist.

I am a crier. And I get annoyed at criers. But I don’t cry at reasonable things. No. I cry at other people’s feelings. Let’s bastardize the golden rule real quick. For those who are unaware, “Treat others how you want to be treated.” Now, I’m sure many people recall going through a phase where they could translate that in their still learning brains to “I can treat people however I want because I wouldn’t care if they were that way to me.” Now back to the golden rule. The bastardization is, put yourself in someone else’s shoes. How many of us got told this by their parents at a young age after not playing nicely with another kid? Apparently, God took it upon Himself to write that verse on my heart. And it went something like this: I cried when my mother told me that her grandmother (whom I had only met twice and had no actual recollection of) died. I was inconsolable when my grandfather died. So much so that even now, almost fifteen years later, it still stops me in my tracks, my heart hurts so much. I cried when Michael Jackson died. I didn’t really even like his music that much. I’ve cried at almost every movie I’ve ever seen. My sister’s speech at my wedding included the moment where she had to chaperone me on a date with my then boyfriend, and we went to Frozen. Now yes, I cried at the scene when her parents die in the shipwreck. But it gets worse. Elsa is out there, just ran away, no plans for shelter yet apparently, and she begins to break out into song. At first I’m fine. But then I can feel my heart, as she sings, “well now they know.” I start bawling my eyes out. And all I can give in response to my sister’s quizzical look of “What the fuck is wrong with you???” (Yes I cursed, I told you, not one of the good ones. Fuck off), was: “She’s just so happy!” I wouldn’t necessarily say I was sad at that time. But I could feel the relase that an animated character was expressing on the big screen. I could feel the weight come off of her shoulders, and I cried. I mourned for what she went through, but shed tears of joy that she had found peace. Tonight. I was watching Facebook videos instead of taking care of my nightly routine of getting ready for bed. And a Mengele twin told her story of survival. When she mentioned looking around for her father and older sisters, I felt that. When she said she could still see her mother’s outstreched arms, I could see that. When she mentioned the panic of trying to save her sister years after liberation, trying to find records of what was done to them, her rage and anger. And then her forgiveness. Do you know how strong someone has to be in order to forgive? To let go of the pain in your heart, knowing you’ll never get revenge. You’ll never get an answer. And you just let it go? That strength is super human. This week, as we pass the 20th anniversary of the tragedy of 9/11, my hometown did a wonderful commemoration. I cried. My aunt gave me a look of disgust because I was crying, again. I cried not only for those who lost their lives, but for their families who would never be whole, for the heroes who stepped up, then and now. I am a proud Navy wife. My husband is out sacrificing his time, so that I don’t have to. And so that I can worship my stupid religion that I cling to, so I can walk around saying inappropriate words and wear not enough clothing. But he made that choice. There are a lot who didn’t. Earlier this week, someone posted the transcription of the phone call of flight 93. The moment that he said that the passengers wanted to sacrifice their lives, for the sake of our country, I hurt. And then he asked the person on the other end of the line to pray. Another video this week, an ex soldier, who fought early on in Afghanistan was telling a story about one of his soldiers. They were getting ready for a raid that would likely kill them. His soldier asks, I know we signed up to fight, but why are we doing this? The man’s response was, for the people up in that tower who didn’t. He goes on to explain the story of a young mother. Two kids. Went to work like any other day, and her last attempt at human decency was to hold her skirt down as she jumped out of the burning tower, so the people below couldn’t see up her skirt.

Crpl. Page was a Marine from my state who just passed away. He was two years younger than me. I never knew him. But I grieve for his family and friends.

See the worst part about being an empath in a world where human’s are assholes, is there’s never a shortage of people’s feelings to feel. I’ve been told that you can experience an emotion so strongly that your body’s only reaction to the volume of what it feels is to cry. And that resonates with me. I feel joy to such an extreme when I’m with my family, celebrating time together. I feel the sorrow of people missing loved ones, and their hearts breaking. And there are times when I wonder if it’s a gift? Or if it’s a curse. It’s a gift to be able to go to someone and say, I can feel for you and your situation. I don’t feel sorry for you. I feel your pain as though it were my own. But it’s a curse to feel the attrocities of humanity and just sit and wonder why it had to happen. Why it had to come to this. I got told I was crying for attention. I wasn’t, but that didn’t matter. Supposedly, behavioral psychology could “fix me” if I wanted it. I could be trained to control my emotions, and process them in a way that wasn’t so consuming. It would definetly help my self diagnosed depression. But let’s posit that God made me this way for a reason. He gave me this gift with a purpose in mind. What then? The problem is, I don’t know how to effectively use it without letting it ruin my life. I can never be a therapist, because I would be able to take on the feelings of my clients. And while I do very much believe in tough love, I also belive that if you just have the right push in the right direction, great changes can be made. Would the Holocaust have happened if Hitler had better relationship with his mother? (this is a personal piece, I am reflecting on history classes I haven’t taken since high school. I’m not fact checking this. Don’t at me.) Would Columine have taken place if those kids had been in a better place mentally?

You know what the awful thing is...? Look at all of these events. Look at all of these heart wrenching dates in history. And then look what came out of them. Out of 9/11 came one of the most unified fronts America has had in a long time. Out of World War II came men of valor. A chemical reaction occurs when you take an object, and force it to experience a high degree of change. And that is what gives us assholes grit. Our experiences make us tougher, and make us better. And maybe less of a crybaby in my case. Or more of a cyborg who doesn’t experience emotion for fear of being consumed by them.

Ramble is over. For those of you who persisted and tried to keep up, good job and I’m sorry. For those who didn’t, don’t worry, I wouldn’t blame you.

Some effort is better than none at all, and if all you are capable of is existing today, then I hope you do, and I know you will do it beautifully.

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normal-thoughts-official · 3 years

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https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHDBpb/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHCTwq/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHUxHb/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHDxww/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHCtVm/

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeHHCvo3/

She's hilarious but there's two videos where she starts to speak more mumblingly

ok first of all these are brilliant and i'm losing my mind and i love you, thank you for curating these to me.

i will transcribe them in a bit but i just felt the need to leave this "little" (it's long sorry) note:

as someone who's been raised catholic i just want to say that she is pretty wrong about almost everything she said about catholics, and i say that as someone who hates catholicism with my whole mind body and soul and who's been traumatized by this stupid fucking faith to the point where i can't get into a church without breaking into sobs dauihdasiuh. the catholic guilt is real but catholics are absolutely allowed to divorce and use contraceptives, and also have sex before marriage. the first one is met with some guilt esp from women altho honestly i think it's more due to mysoginist reasons than religious reasons, and the second and third ones are commonpractice and if you say that it's wrong and bad everyone will think you're a fucking weirdo

and even with the divorce thing, while the guilt is there (im pretty sure half the reason my mom doesn't divorce is because she would feel guilty about it, although again, i feel like that's got very little to do with religion and way more with internalized mysoginy), i cannot stress enough that divorce is allowed, almost everyone i know has divorced parents and they're all catholics. the church's official position is kinda weird (as of now pope francis basically said that it's "morally necessary" in some cases but he also referred to ppl who divorced and remarried as "imperfect", but like, it hasn't been forbidden for years, so much so that people get second marriages at catholic churches literally all the time, and i kinda feel like ppl overestimate how much ppl care about what the pope says. at least here in latam, cuz we've always kind of freestyled religion since it was imposed on us anyway, but like... in my experience the average catholic practitioner is INCREDIBLY less conservative than the vatican and i feel like most people don't even know what the pope says or doesn't say. and i'm saying that as someone whose grandfather almost became a priest and only gave that up because he fell in love with my grandmother, and he's been a ferverent catholic his entire life. also two of his kids divorced, one married a divorced woman, one is gay and living together without marriage with his divorced boyfriend, one never married, and one had two kids before marriage which necessarily means that they fucked, and none of that was ever a problem to him. oh, also, my dad had divorced AND he was a buddhist when him and my mom married. currently he is a spiritist)

i think it might be possible that u technically have to ask for "permission" to the church to remarry in church, but in practice i think it's more of a ritualistic thing than actually asking for permission, cuz i've never met a single person who had them say no. it was pretty much "hey local bishop guy so my husband sucked and we divorced can i marry again" "sure lol". obviously it sucks that you even have to ask, but it's nowhere near as strict as people seem to think

the contraceptive thing is also absurd. like i cannot stress enough that my family would absolutely flip if they found out i DIDN'T use contraception. that was always something that my family reinforced very strongly, ESPECIALLY my grandpa. i've never met a single catholic who does not teach their kids to use contraceptives. my high school was catholic (literally named the Holy Cross, fun times, although they didn't impose the faith or anything. in fact almost half of the students in that school are jewish, but like, still, there was a priest in the school board) and we were taught to use contraceptives, put the condom in a banana and the whole pizzazz during biology class

like yeah the bible says not to but it also says not to mix different fabrics and that doesn't mean it's actually a thing that's reinforced in most catholic communities doaihdaj at least not here in latam. in here non-catholic christians are actually way more hardcore about the puritanism rules than catholics are, particularly evangelicals, which are kind of overtaken the catholics' traditional role of being colonialist fuckers as they are mostly from the US so they come to further US imperialism through religion here. watch out catholic church they're coming for ur crown

and even outside of puritanism, "non practicing catholics" are absolutely a thing like ppl who are catholic but don't even pray or go to church, much less care about that shit douahdsaohj so like the stereotype that all catholics are like the very small minority of hardcore catholics is like the stereotype that every muslim lives by the ultra-conservative muslim rules. it's not true and it's stereotypical and taking the minority ultra conservatives to be the rule when they are not

there's also the fact that there are many different currents of thought inside the catholic church (a little bit like with judaism although way less flexible than judaism is), some of which are very conservative, some of which are progressive. here in latam in particular the teology of liberation is extremely popular (it's the one my family subscribes to, and i'm pretty sure it was actually born here in latam) and it's pretty progressive. for catholics, that is

and like mandatory disclaimer that i am coming from my own experiences with latam catholicism, which i feel is different from other catholic countries - my polish friends for example have experiences with catholicism that are a lot closer to those stereotypes than mine ever were - but since most of the catholic population in the world is brazilian (like me), and second place goes to mexicans, i feel pretty comfortable taking it as a ruler to measure general catholic practices

with that being said, however, the catholic church can choke and die in a fire as it is a symbol of colonialism first and foremost, its proselitism is one of the worst things ever, and even the progressive currents are still way too damn conservative for my tastes. i just don't feel comfortable transcribing something that i know is incorrect and stereotypical (and that in some cases is used to further oppression like with the Irish in the UK or armenian catholics, and i've even had some US-diaspora latinos hear some incredible things from gringos who assumed they were catholic, or, in their beautiful words, "had latino religion". but obviously in most cases catholics are the oppressors, especially here in the third world)

also, her assessment in the third video is absolutely correct. A/B/O IS just conservative gender roles born of christian and catholic imposition transposed to a fictional world where the genders have slightly different names, which is why i, as a rule, hate it dauhdsaiuhdauhda and even though the assessment that catholicism is thaaat much more conservative than other christian religions (it's absolutely not, it's Exactly As Conservative) isn't true, catholicism is still where most if not all of western conservative rethoric is born of, and ugh, it's so refreshing to see someone understand this and put it into words so well

so yeah keep that note in mind but anyway, transcriptions:

[Video transcription #1: in reply to a tiktok question, which says, "now i'm thinking about the catholic guilt that would come with it oh my god". user @Omarsbigsister is saying, "good morning", she then covers her mouth as she starts to laugh, before continuing, "I guess I'm the religious omegaverse tiktoker now. I did not know catholic guilt was more than just sex, I thought it was just about sex, but nO. people who are catholic, if you don't know, they get guilt over every little thing, they get guilty when they eat, they have guilt when, like... [dismissive gesture] they have fun... it's messed up *cut* [mumbling i don't understand, sorry] in which you HAVE to be bonded before... *sticks tongue out* *cut* and catholics, from what i know, uhm, cannot get divorced, so you can't be unbonded, you're stuck for life with that alpha or omega, and then you can't use contraceptives so if you have a heat or rut, good luck, you cannot escape it, and on top of that, they preach abstinence, right, so if you're having a heat or rut in your teen years you just gotta deal with it alone like you are not allowed to be bonded, so, that would be really intense."

#2: in response to a question, which said, "follow up question: if in the real world hijabis are women, in ABO universe would hijabis be omegas of all genders?". the user is shown stroking her chin in contemplative silence for a long time, before she says, "actually, both men and women have to wear a hijab, it's just more visible on women, but men also have to cover from like, the neck all the way down... so like when you see them [mumbling i don't understand, sorry] that's their hijab. *cut* Islam is actually treating men and women, like, fairly somewhat equally, so, I feel like in omegaverse alphas, betas, and omegas would all be held to the same standards, and alphas and omegas would also be held by the same standards but then culture would ruin it, just like western culture has ruined it. for your other question. 'would muslim families prefer betas more, and would betas be spiritual leaders', i feel like everyone prefers betas more, but then also Islam came to like, uplift women [a written note then shows up, which says, "like girls are seen as a blessing to have as kids"], so like omegas would be seen as like, a blessing to have as a child.

#3: in response to another tiktok question, which says, "fun fact bestie you cannot get divorced in the catholic religion even if your spouse is abusive and horrible to you so in omegaverse how would that work?". she replies, "the reason that Abrahamic religions seemingly fit so well into the omegaverse universe is because catholicism specifically and christianity, uhm, all the gender norms and all the cultural norms especially in the west came from catholicism and christianity, they were forced on people, and then you know, people might not be religious, but the norms stay. but now you have omegaverse which is basically just a bunch of like youth exploring the youth through this, like, werewolf fanfiction trope, using all these gender roles that you have in society on their head, so, really, what i'm saying, is that... omegaverse is just catholicism fanfiction"

#4: she looks at the camera and says, "getting islamophobic comments is one thing, but getting islamophobic comments that say that muslims cannot be in the omegaverse".... she then breaks into laughter for a solid 30 seconds

#5: she is shown reading out loud, in a mock-outraged face, a tweet that says, "about to murder tiktok they try to make Ramadan a 'quirky' trend. it's a religious holiday. stop it, get some help. /srsly /g.", then a follow-up tweet, which says, "saw a tweet saying on tiktok they are asking questions about how ramadan would work in omegaverse. i'm done with y'all, just say you disrespect muslims and go". then another tweet by a different user, which says, "i tried to read, i got secondhand embarrassment-" they then break out of character and say, "oh, that's fair," before going back, "if it wasn't ramadan i'd be boxing those people right now. those people should be ashamed to even think that way wtf". then another, which replies, "well i'm not celebrating it, so as a non-muslim, i'll happily box them". then, back to her normal voice, she says, "i really was just making a silly little tiktok and seeing that stuff really hurts... i'm just kidding, i can't keep a straight face. you like minecraft youtubers, what are you gonna do to me? what are you gonna do to me?"

#6: in reply to a tiktok ask, which said, "prince philip was an omega". she slowly films herself as she takes a walk, finds the nearest trash bin, and tosses the phone there, before putting the lid over the box. end ID]

#i hope u dont take that as me being mad at u anon #honestly i could care less if ppl offended catholics #i just dont like spreading misinformation and once i started writing i couldnt stop #the videos are still amazing and spot on tho except for the first one #long post #discourse #catholicism tw

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loretranscripts · 5 years

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Lore Episode 25: The Cave (Transcript) - 11th January 2016

tw: body horror, cults, death, kidnapping

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

During his historic journey aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin spent over a month on an island off the coast of Chile known as Chiloé. It wasn’t his final destination, but he still managed to work and collect information and specimens, including a small, endangered fox known now as “Darwin’s zorro”. He also witnessed the after effects of an earthquake and made note of a rainbow that transitioned from the typical semi-circle to a full circle, right before his eyes - but it was the people he encountered that seemed to impact him most. He later wrote: “They are a humble, quiet, industrious set of men. Although with plenty to eat, the people are very poor, and the lower orders cannot scrape together money sufficient to purchase even the smallest luxuries”. He also noted seeing a pair of black-necked swans, but thankfully Darwin didn’t have the same view of birds that the local people did, and still do, actually. One local historian recalls how, when he was a boy, a hunch-backed heron flew low over his fishing boat. When he told his father, the older man grabbed his shotgun and waited for the bird to return. Why? Because for as long as anyone could remember, the people of Chiloé have believed that some birds are more than they appear. Some people, it seems, believe they are warlocks. Seeing one was a bad omen, hinting that someone close to you would die. All of us are ruled by authority to some degree, whether it’s through our government, our religion or our family ties. Often, it’s all three. But there’s another governing body, one that’s as old as time itself, and on Chiloé, it controlled people for centuries. Sometimes, you see, people are ruled by fear. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

The Incas called it “The Place of the Seagulls”. They stayed away from the area, believing it was the border between their empire of prosperity and safety, and the cold, dark wilderness to the south. Chiloé isn’t a large island, perhaps less than 100 miles from north to south, but it’s certainly the largest in the collection of small islands there off the coast of Chile, and to visit it is to go back in time: green hills, mountains in the distance, dark waves of the south Pacific lapping on the shore where colourful houses are built on stilts to stay above the mud and the rocks. Darwin described it as beautiful in 1835. He wrote of the mixture of evergreen trees and tropical vegetation, with the rolling hills and thick forest – and all that green, Darwin postulated, was due to the enormous amount of rainfall. Grey skies and wet soil are a constant of life in Chiloé, then as it is now, and while most people have never heard of the place, the unique churches there have an architectural style that’s earned them classification as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There are churches, of course, because Jesuit missionaries built them shortly after arriving at the beginning of the 17th century. But don’t let these European artefacts fool you; the culture the Jesuits encountered when they arrived was far outside their realm of experience. The Chiloé of old was home to a vast collection of myths and legends that informed almost every aspect of life, and because much of the economy and culture of the island was built around the fishing industry just as it is today, many of those stories have elements of the sea in them. One example is the legend of the ghost ship known as the Caleuche. According to the stories, the Caleuche patrols the waters off the coast of the island, moving both above the water and below. The ship itself is a sentient being and has the ability to sense when someone from the island has drowned. After they die, these people are brought onto the ship by two sisters and their brother, where their new life can begin. That life consisted of both an eternal party aboard the ship, as well as working as sailors in the transport and unloading of illegal cargo for the island’s merchants. Even today, there are many in Chiloé who claim to have seen the ship, still patrolling the cold waters offshore.

There are other legends that haunt the island as well. Stories speak of the Trauco, a sort of forest troll or little person who lives in hollow trees, deep in the forest. Their task is to protect the trees, but they have also become a convenient scapegoat for unwed mothers. The Trauco, so they say, is irresistible to virgins who wonder into the forest, and those women frequently return home pregnant. La Pincoya is said to be a woman who appears to fishermen along the coast. She is described as young and beautiful, but her hair is covered in wet kelp, and the locals consider her to be an omen, although the outcome depends on the circumstances. If she appears facing the sea, your fishing nets will overflow; if she’s facing you, though, those nets will be empty; and in the rare instances when she appears right in front of a person, legend says it is best to close your eyes and run as fast as you can, lest she seduce you and lead you down into the sea. And one more legend is that of the basilisk, a creature that appears elsewhere around the globe. In Chiloé, though, the basilisk is more than just an enormous snake. Here, it also has the head of a rooster, and hatches from an egg. Some stories tell of how the basilisk will nest beneath a person’s house. During the night, it will slither out and suck the air from the lungs of the people sleeping inside. For as frightening as some of these creatures and stories might be, though, none of them compare to the legends of the Brujo de Chiloé – the warlocks of the island. They have struck fear into the hearts of the locals for centuries. They have shaped many aspects of their culture. They have been blamed for tragedy, for loss, and even for illness and death. Most frightening of all is the simple fact that, unlike all the other legends found on the island, the Brujo were real.

We know the Brujo were real because they were brought to trial in 1880. Almost overnight, what was once little more than a whispered legend - as sort of Chilean bogeyman, if you will – took on flesh and bone, and what the investigation uncovered was truly shocking. Let’s step back, though. It’s important to understand where the warlocks came from, and the short answer is that we don’t really know, but there are ideas, and many of them hold promise and truth. The most common theory is that something powerful was formed as a result of the collision between the indigenous culture and the Catholic faith of the Spanish when they first arrived. The ingredients for this new breed of legend had been there for a very, very long time, though. On one side, we have the machi – these were the traditional shaman of the Chilean culture, the healers, the wise people. Their realm was that of revelations, interpretations of dreams and serving as the oracle for their community. On the other side, there was the kalku – these were the practitioners of black magic, considered to be the witches and warlocks by most people. Unlike the machi, who sat at the centre of their society and were documented religious figures, the kalku were more mythical, spoken of in stories and whispered about at night. The kalku are described as machi gone bad, those who became more interested in selfish gain than serving the community. I know this will be a gross over-simplification, but think of the machi as the Jedi and the kalku as the Sith, the light side and the dark, and as Han Solo recently said, “It’s true. All of it.”

Enter the Spanish conquistadors. They arrived in 1567 and brought countless stories with them of European witches, but the culture in Chiloé has always been very male-driven, and so the idea of a female witch was converted to the male warlock in the public narrative. This melding of religions has actually happened in many countries across the centuries, where the Catholic faith would meet ancient beliefs and rather than wipe it out, would blend with it, unintentionally becoming something new. And that’s how the Brujo were born… maybe. Some scholars make reference to a story from the 17th century of a Spaniard named José de Moraleda, who met them machi and wanted desperately to impress them. He challenged them to a magical duel, and after they brought in one of their best machi, Moraleda was defeated. As a prize, the Spaniard handed over to them a book of spells that he claimed had been gathered from around the world. It was with that book of spells, the legend says, that the Brujo built their cult. Some still refer to it by its original name – the Recta Provincia, “The Righteous Province” – and according to them, this secret group manipulated the culture on the island for two centuries. Initiation into the group was complex and drenched with the occult. The first step was to wash away any remnant of Christian baptism, and they did this by bathing in one of the local rivers for 15 nights in a row. Some of them were instructed to murder a relative or a close friend, and then, when all of that was completed, they had to run around the island naked while invoking the devil’s name. The Brujo maintained their power over the people of Chiloé through an odd mixture of supernatural rumour and mafia-like control. They would most commonly force local farmers to give them produce or money, but they were also known to bribe local authorities and even created a shadow government that ruled in the places where the Spanish didn’t reach, and rather than use violence or traditional weapons to enforce their policies, they used the threat of a curse. Ultimately, it was this game of blackmail and protection rackets that brought an end to their reign over the people of Chiloé, and so in 1880, over 100 members of the cult were arrested and interrogated. Many were released when they turned out to be nothing more than machi looking for nothing more than a community to belong to, but some were held for trial on the charge of murder. The darkest revelations from the trial, though, were never believed. The supernatural creatures, the book of spells, the secret, hidden cave where the cult maintained their seat of power – all of this was passed off as folklore and superstition. However, eye-witness testimony says otherwise.

The trials revealed many new details about the Brujo and their beliefs, practices and inner workings. Some almost sound like they were pulled right out of a children’s book, they’re so simple and benign, while others are downright chilling. For example, one of the men on trial in 1880 revealed that each warlock carried a pet lizard with him. This lizard, according to the man, would be tied to the warlock’s forehead and, because it was magical, of course, it gifted him with powers. These warlocks were even said to communicate and interact with the ghost sailors aboard the Caleuche, using seahorses as aquatic carrier pigeons to pass messages back and forth. Other stories spoke of how the warlocks recruited new spies for their sect. According to the legend, these warlocks would kidnap young women and would give them a special elixir to drink. Once ingested, these girls would vomit until their stomachs and intestines lay on the ground at their feet. Then, lightened of their load, they would transform into birds and do the bidding of their master. None of this, though, compares to what the Brujo were said to have kept in their cave. One of the men on trial in 1880, an elderly man named Mateo, claimed that in the 1860s, he had been asked to visit the cave to feed the creatures kept there, and although his testimony was rejected by the court as fantasy, some have been left wondering. The cave, it is said, was difficult to locate, and rightly so. It contained multiple magical items, including the books of spells the group had received from the Spaniard Moraleda, as well as a bowl that was said to show the future to those who looked into it, and because these were objects of power for the warlocks, they needed to be carefully guarded. The entrance was a door hidden beneath the grass and soil in a rocky canyon near the coast and, with it, a metal key. Mateo told the court that he opened the entrance to the cave only to find two creatures inside that nearly defied description. One was called the chivito, a humanoid creature that was briefly described as “goat-like” and walking on four legs, but it was the other thing in the cave that Mateo had no trouble describing because, at first glance, it appeared to be nothing more than a bearded man. This man, though, was deformed – not mildly or by birth, but intentionally and drastically. He was called the imbunche, and although the one that Mateo witnessed appeared to be old, he said that they typically began as infants.

Now, this next part isn’t for the faint of heart, but it’s necessary to understand the level of cruelty and barbarism that this cult practiced. According to writer Bruce Chatwin, who visited the island in 1975, the locals still maintain a good amount of folklore around the creation of the imbunche. The warlocks would kidnap a male, six-month-old child, Chatwin recorded, and then deliver it to the one known as “the deformer”, who lived inside the cave. This man’s job was to shape and disfigure the infant’s body. Its head would be twisted daily until, after many months, it faced backwards. Limbs and fingers would be disjointed, and even its ears and mouth would malformed by the deformer. The final characteristic, according to Chatwin, is the right arm. It would be bent backwards and the hand slipped in to an incision made on the right shoulder blade, and the wound would be sewn up, leaving the arm permanently affixed to the child’s back. Why this was done is something that history has forgotten over the years, but the impact is just as powerful today. Left to guard and inhabit the secret cave of the warlocks, the imbunche was seen less as an act of torture and more as the creation of an essential part of the cult’s society. When one imbunche died, another would be created to take its place. This is the level of darkness these real-life warlocks were capable of, this is what powered the fear they used to enslave and control the people of the island, and this is what many of them confessed to on the stand, that spring in 1880. As a result, many of the accused were sentenced to long prison terms. These were men who had killed, who had cursed neighbours and blackmailed businesses for protection money, and yet the courts couldn’t make their rulings stick. Just one year later, nearly all the warlocks were released. The reason? It was impossible to prove they had belonged to a secret society of black magic, as horrible as the stories had sounded. No one, they thought, could be that evil.

In a world where authority often falls to those with the most wealth, the most weapons or the most connections, it’s unusual to find cases where some other power allows people to rule. But if the story of Chiloé teaches us anything, it’s that fear can be just as powerful as any government official - fear of death, fear of poverty, fear of the unknown. Those who called themselves part of the Brujo in 1880 were card-carrying members of a cult that wielded fear like a weapon. Thankfully, the trial helped to put real faces to the shadows that had plagued the people of Chiloé for centuries. Whether or not they received punishment for their crimes was secondary – the warlocks had been exposed, shattering their illusion of fear. But while many saw the trial as the end of that nightmare, there are some who aren’t so sure. In 2006, the local court there in Chiloé issued a restraining order against Manuel Cardeneus and his brother-in-law. Due to a physical altercation they had had with the 66-year-old farmer named José Marquez, they were prohibited from coming within 10 meters of the old man. When asked why he attacked the farmer, Cardeneus said it was because of an illness his father had been suffering through. Pain had become a constant part of the man’s life, and it had gone on long enough. Cardeneus claimed that his father’s illness had begun after an encounter with Marquez all the way back in 1992. The pain hadn’t stopped since then, and after consulting with a local shaman, they were told why. According to the machi¸ the farmer had cursed their father with black magic, which begs the question: did the trial of 1880 really wipe out the cult of the warlocks, or did some of them slip through the government’s net, living on to spread and grow their sect into the 20th century and beyond? After all, neither the cave nor its occupants were ever found.

[Closing Statements]

#lore podcast #aaron mahnke #podcast transcripts #folklore #cults #dark history #chile #south america #25

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formerlyjannafaye · 6 years

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100 Questions

I was tagged by @janes-mike and @el-and-hop and @caseyk112 like 100 years ago and I just finished it now! Oops.

1. What is your nickname? Janaynay, Fayzers, Jan

2. How old are you? 31

3. What is your birth month? February

4. What is your zodiac sign? Aquarius

5. What is your favorite color? Rainbow

6. What’s your lucky number? 2

7. Do you have any pets? not at the moment

8. Where are you from? Canada

9. How tall are you? 5′4

10. What shoe size are you? 8

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own? this is so embarassing, I probably own like 35 pairs of shoes (but in my defense, we experience extremes in all 4 seasons during the year) and I am a shoe addict.

12. Are you random? sometimes? but not really.

13. Last person you texted? my dad

14. Are you psychic in any way? i feel like i am really good at reading people and i have a really good memory when it comes to people so maybe a little?

15. Last TV show watched? New Girl

16. Favorite movie? Hard question! ET, Get Over It, Moulin Rouge

17. Favorite show from your childhood? Mr. Dressup!

18. Do you want children? I have one! I’d like one more, I think.

19. Do you want a church wedding? I had one.

20. What is your religion? I am a Christian, which I almost hate to say because Christians are represented so badly today and I am ashamed of this group so often. To clarify, I think Jesus is the bomb and so I try to emulate how he treated people. I’m also a feminist, pro marriage equality, pro choice, pro creation care/caring for the environment, I believe in science, I don’t believe in hell, and I hate violence. So...do with all that what you will.

21. Have you ever been to the hospital? Yes, I go there a lot with my work.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law? I literally sweat when a cop car passes me and I’m a goody two shoes, so no! Haha

23. How is life? Its alright. I am really tired today which always affects my mood negatively. And I just watched Infinity War last night so I’m depressed, y’all. (edit: can you tell I started this over a week ago LOL)

24. Baths or showers? Showers (you could not pay me to get into a bath! germs!)

25. What color socks are you wearing? none, its too warm out

26. Have you ever been famous? Once I met the guy who won Canadian Idol and my local grocery store put up a picture of us together in the store and had it up for years. Haha!

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity? I used to really want to be famous, but celebs get a horrible deal these days. They have no privacy and our world thinks they owe us everything and really they owe us nothing so I would never ever want to be famous. I like being able to look like crap daily and not have it in magazines.

28. What type of music do you like? I like a wide variety of music, the only music I don’t like, really, is misogynistic rap and country. I am a choral and accapella music nerd, I love it so much.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping? Yup.

30. How many pillows do you sleep with? Two.

31. What position do you usually sleep in? On my side with my top leg thrown over so I’m in a weird stomach/side position but its sooo comfy.

32. How big is your house? Its a good size! Big enough for us and then to host people that come to visit us and our yard is huge!

33. What do you typically have for breakfast? I suck at breakfast...toast or a granola bar.

34. Have you ever left the country? I have been to Germany, South Africa, Cuba, Costa Rica and the USA.

35. Have you ever tried archery? Many years ago at summer camp.

36. Do you like anyone? Well I’m married, so yes.

37. Favorite swear word? Shit. It is sooo satisfying to say.

38. When do you fall asleep? WAY too late every night. Between midnight and 2 am.

39. Do you have any scars? Yeah I have some from when I had the chickenpox as a kid and had no self control and scratched them off.

40. Sexual orientation? Straight.

41. Are you a good liar? I think I am a horrible liar, because I value authenticity so much and lying makes me anxious.

42. What languages would you like to learn? I would love to learn Spanish since its so beautiful. Really I just would love to not only speak English!

43. Top 10 songs? Oh my! What a question! Imma be safe and just say the top 10 songs I am listening to most often right now: Fall in Line by Christina Aguilera ft Demi Levato, Don’t Go Breaking My Heart by BSB, Lost in Japan by Shawn Mendes, Bittersweet Symphony cover by Boyce Avenue, Love You Long Time by Pentatonix, Dive by Ed Sheeran, Nancy Mulligan by Ed Sheeran, New Rules cover by Pentatonix, Casanova by Allie X, Gravity by Sara Bareilles.

44. Do you like your country? I do! I am mad at our leader rn, and appalled that Ontario elected a Donald Trump wannabe as a premier (like WHY HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING ONTARIO PERSONS UGH) but overall I love being Canadian.

45. Do you have friends from the web? Yes! Its the best!

46. What is your personality type? I am an ESFP, an extrovert with introvert tendancies, and I am an enneagram 4 (seriously, google it. That is me to a T).

47. Hogwarts House? Hufflepuff 4 LYFE

48. Can you curl your tongue? Yes.

49. Pick one fictional character you can relate to? I am Anne from Anne of Green Gables, just not as smart. Just as dramatic and short tempered, though.

50. Left or right handed? Right

51. Are you scared of spiders? I don’t like them or want them near me.

52. Favorite food? Chocolate. Chips and Dip. Dill pickles.

53. Favorite foreign food? I love Mexican food so much I can’t even pick one thing. Also naan bread is the BOMB especially when dipped into dal makhani. Uuuuuuugggghh I wanna eat that so bad rn.

54. Are you a clean or messy person? I am pretty clean, messiness makes me crazy.

55. If you could switch your gender for a day, what would you do? Pee standing up, see what its like to not have to deal with bathroom lines, street harassment, etc.

56. What color underwear? Grey.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready? 20 mins, but usually longer because I don’t like to be rushed so I take my time.

58. Do you have much of an ego? I don’t think so? I’m a walking pile of insecurities.

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops? I used to bite them but I have TMJ and my jaw is a piece of garbage that cannot withstand biting anything hard without popping all out of place and pain. Fun times.

60. Do you talk to yourself? Yup.

61. Do you sing to yourself? CONSTANTLY.

62. Are you a good singer? I have a pretty decent voice.

63. Biggest Fears? Losing people I love, dying, clowns, bats, cockroaches

64. Are you a gossip? I like being in the know but I don’t like pettiness. That said I sometimes find I have to focus REALLY hard to bite my tongue.

65. Are you a grammar nazi? Absolutely.

66. Do you have long or short hair? Its too long! I need a haircut.

67. Can you name all 50 states of America? Maybe? I might forget a few. The real question is can any of my American friends name the Canadian provinces (the CAN equivalent of states? I DOUBT IT yet we learn the states in school. SMH)

68. Favorite school subject? English and French

69. Extrovert or Introvert? Intoverted extrovert

70. Have you ever been scuba diving? Nope and I don’t plan on it.

71. What makes you nervous? Rooms full of people that don’t like me, small spaces, driving in winter.

72. Are you scared of the dark? Less than I used to be, but I don’t like it.

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes? I do daily but thats because I have a toddler and teaching/correction is important in some moments. But you also have to let them fail which is challenging to do.

74. Are you ticklish? Nope. Only my sister can tickle me and its so annoying when she does!

75. Have you ever started a rumor? Not that I can recall?

76. Have you ever been out of your home country? Yeah a few times

77. Have you ever drank underage? I don’t think so, I was 18 by the time I drank anything, I think.

78. Have you ever done drugs? No drugs scare the living crap out of me.

79. What do you fantasize about? Having more time to myself, living alone like a hermit and not having to work, having perfect hair every day, having another kid, living somewhere warm, saying snarky things to my MIL’s face.

80. How many piercings do you have? None.

81. Can you roll your R’s? Yes.

82. How fast can you type? Fast-ish if I’m on a roll but I don’t use the proper hand technique. I get by though.

83. How fast can you run? Run? Moi? HAHAHAHA

84. What color is your hair? Ash brown with a faded rainbow in the back.

85. What color are your eyes? Green.

86. What are you allergic to? Winter mold. Spring is the worst. And I can’t go barefoot on grass unless I want to have itchy swollen feet that I want to scratch off forever.

87. Do you keep a journal? I have one that I’m supposed to write a line a day in but I am the WORST at it. Once I get behind I get so unmotivated.

88. Are you depressed about anything? I feel like I’m sleep walking through my life sometimes, and depression takes away my ability to care enough to be motivated to do anything about it. I swear apathy is the worst side effect of depression for me!

89. Do you like your age? It is honestly the best. I love being 30! I care less about the insecurities that consumed my life in my early 20s. I have more body confidence . I’m more secure financially than I’ve been at any point in my life. And I still feel youngish. Haha.

90. What makes you angry? White privilege, misogyny, Canadian and American politics, Christian people who don’t act loving and don’t seem bothered by it, when people don’t return their shopping carts in parking lots, when people can help others but don’t, cancer, narcissists.

91. Do you like your own name? I have always loved my name. I only know one other person with my name who spells it like me!

92. Did you ever get a foreign object up your nose? Odd question, no.

93. Do you want a boy or a girl for a child? I have a boy, and if I ever get the opportunity to have another kid I kinda hope its a girl. I’m really close with my mom so I always imagined having a daughter to hopefully be close with too. My son is a mini me in every way, though.

94. What talents do you have? I have a semi-photographic memory (so helpful for studying), I learn song lyrics super fast, I can sing any song for you in the correct key it was recorded in (what would you call that? pitch memorization?)

95. Sun or moon? I love sitting in a sunbeam like a cat. But the moon is super comforting to me. Both.

96. How did you get your name? My mom wanted me to have a different name in a sea of Ashley’s and Brittany’s (I was born in the late 80s).

97. Are you religious? My faith is very important to me and relates to all areas of my life, including my job, so yes? But I don’t feel like I need to be in your face about it, that’s not my style.

98. Have you ever been to a therapist? Yes and honestly everyone on the planet could benefit from it! Its the best!

99. Color of your bedspread? White with blue and goldish flowers on it.

100. Color of your room? Light grey.

I feel like everyone already did this but all the same I’m going to tag @earlgreyteagirl, @reddie-to-mileven-it-up, @stevemossington, @maxmayfield and here’s some people who I know already did this but I want you to see my answers haha so here goes @hannahberrie @summer-in-hawkins @jane-el-hopper @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold @thezoomermax @puzzlingsnark @fatechica @mikeweezers

#am i late to the party?#you know it #but running late is my style #sigh #survey

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premakalidasi · 6 years

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In defense of spiritual eclecticism, syncretism, innovation, human spiritual evolution, multiculturalism, even the dread “Neo-.”

This is going to be long, because just like my rant from the other day, this involves many, many things that have been boiling inside of me for months and months. And seeing as nobody seems to be addressing them thoroughly, and there being far too much mud-flinging and superiority and kneejerky extremism on all sides, people only seeing one side of the issue, I can’t keep it in any longer. Bear in mind this comes from someone with three decades-long lived experience with *both* “the East” and “the West,” both Western Paganism and Tantric/Bhakta “Hinduism,” from someone who’s female (yes, this makes a big difference, as you’ll find out), someone who’s lived in various European countries (some of them whiter than white, some of them very multicultural) for far too long, and someone who’s an extreme nondualist Goddess-devotee. (Yes, paradoxes abound. Such is Nature.) But let us begin.

It’s about this whole culture of who has the right to do what, and how-- while it’s understandable that people have their traumas and their personal prides and traditions and whatnot--it’s still deeply flawed.

It’s about the fact that the more this ridiculous anti-innovation, anti-evolution culture in spirituality bullies people into "traditional" practices, the more falsely or poisonously "authentic" stuff people will come up with to claim legitimacy. And the more the “authentic” thing is associated with dogmatism and conservativism, the more conservative that tradition will get.

If "neo-" is used as a swearword, a badge of shame, the more dishonest and the more delusional people will get about their own "traditions." The more the fallacy of "authenticity" (there’s no such thing; it’s all subjective) is thrown around, the more people will chase after and cling to initiations--claiming, of course, that they were initiated by a master in the Himalayas or a grandmother passed on an ancient lineage, etc. The more they are told that Modernity and Innovation and Western Progressiveness is Bad, the more they will seek out authority figures in the name of Tradition, authority figures of all colours of the rainbow. In Islam, you get anything from loopy and shallow Sufis to fanatical terrorist preachers; in Hinduism you get anything from far-right nationalist groups like Hindutva to cash-making cosmopolitan gurus; in Paganism you’ll get reconstructionist Pagan groups run by Neo-Nazis all over the place because the most liberal yet intelligent, the most eclectic Wiccan-type hippies (the nicest and wisest “spiritual” people I’ve known in the West, BTW, comparable to the most chilled-out and brainy nondual/universalist folks in other religions) are shamed underground.

Teachers, teachers! Everybody wants teachers because you have to be a part of a ~lineage!~ And the lineages will, magically, pop up to meet the demand (sorry, I mean “emerge from thousands of years of hiding”). The teachers will include “self-realised,” selfish, repressive masters who will proceed to suffocate everything "stubborn" in the disciple who could've experienced something incredibly insightful if allowed to do things her own way, could've brought something new and beautiful to the world--but she’s more valuable to the guru as a kitchen maid in his ashram because that’s her ~dharma~. The ancient way, you know. Chop veggies and repeat your mantra, it’s great meditation (and free labour for the organisation). Or, on the other hand, you get the sorts of teachers who have had a legitimate, 100% real, lineage-bound empowerment from those Zen masters who’ll initiate anyone for laughs, and who’ll allow the student anything and everything, freedom to the point where the poor buggers will actually not get any guidance whatsoever (they’re there only to stroke the teacher’s narcissism). However, these teachers will happily charge you 750 euros for a weekend intensive and all you end up doing is a most basic level chakra meditation and an “secret initiation rite” copypasted from a text the teacher found somewhere on the Internet.

So much for your hallowed initiations and traditions; people have always abused them and always will, and there are always people who will not even be able to access “legitimate” teachers and lineages, due to being born into the wrong country/caste/sex/you name it, so are they to just sit there quietly and wait for a new lifetime; better luck next time? Bullshit. They’re the ones who can speak from a point of view that’s outside the tradition exactly because they’ve been excluded, and bring fresh blood to it, or *gasp* start a whole new tradition on their own. And this is *vital*--so many of the world’s greatest religious movements have sprung exactly from the voices of the dispossessed; those who didn’t speak Sanskrit or Latin and who were barred entry to places of worship because they were, shock, horror, fertile. You will, and should, always have people who bring something new to the table, for they are the life and soul of the ever-evolving experience of human beings on this planet--and these are the dread newbies you bash!

Spirituality, religion, beliefs, traditions, holy books--they have always evolved and continue to evolve, because evolution is Nature's law. In trying to stop innovation, you are trying to stop Life itself; from plants growing, from genes mutating, from species evolving, from human beings becoming more conscious and enlightened.

There always have been and always will be inventors, innovators, self-initiated adepts, solitary practitioners, cultures that pick and mix from one another in perfectly happy non-abusive exchange and you can't do shit about that because it happens, just like Nature happens. All the great spiritual figures were innovators, all of them--we wouldn’t have known about them if they just shut up and knew their place. Moses revolutionised Hebrew belief; Jesus revolutionised Judaism; Mohammad revolutionised Arabian religion. Gautama looked at all of the world’s bullshit and laughed his arse off. We wouldn’t have had two of the biggest female Hindu gurus of the past century had they waited for someone to initiate them.

Had they done the right thing and followed stridharma, been the good little wives Hinduism expects all women to be, millions would never have known their grace, the grace of God as Mother.

Think of what brought you here: to what you're thinking and doing today, and just how many innovations and borrowings and syncretisms created it. *Whatever* it is that you are now thinking and doing springs from an innovation that was made somewhere down the line--several innovations and modifications, in fact. The clothes and accessories you wear, the tools you use, the food you eat, the language you use *all* contain elements from several different times, traditions, cultures, individual insights, inventions. Because someone thought “no, that old way of doing the thing sucks; here’s a better way of doing it.”

Now, I absolutely do not dismiss the power of a tradition or mean to say teachers or holy books are useless. They help--but in the end, that's what they are, *help.* They’re walking sticks, visual aids, audio descriptions for the stumbling, clumsy soul. They provide frameworks, structures, language, guidance to understand what’s going on; they’re passing on a cumulative stream of learning and experience. They’re there to help you grow, sometimes by pruning, but that’s where the benefit ends. But when they become ends in and of themselves, tradition for the sake of tradition, when they begin to destroy human beings' capacity for something new, begin to stagnate by sticking to outdated rules simply because they're ~traditional and therefore better~, when they operate only to limit the uses of human power by rigid hierarchies (in which only a couple of people have access to God), they stop from helping the individual and the human race to evolve. How many potential mahatmas have these structures suffocated, how many mystic poets? When they turn to crushing, erasing of the spirit instead of cultivating it, into blocking access to divinity unless you have thing Y or X (read: happened to be born in the wrong country/culture/ethnic group/sex), they turn lethal. These things do not make humans better; they do not make the world a better place, to put it mildly.

And the more you apply this old vs. new rubbish, the more you fall into the trap of dualism. And in dualism, you will always be a loser, even if you think you’ve reversed the positions of the oppressor and the oppressed. This happens on social media every day, and it’s ridiculous how people can’t see it’s just the same thing, only reversed, and the fighting and the pain will never end. If you fall into the trap of group X versus group Y, culture Z versus A, you are yourself perpetuating the divisions that screwed you over in the first place: the exact same thinking that devalues you if you are a woman, not white, gay, of the wrong caste, et cetera. Bitching and moaning about white people, straight people, men, posh people, whoever you think is the oppressor today, and practicing cultural isolationism, superiority and separatism does not do a thing for you; it's starting a new war. In this war, for any group who clings to a victim identity, a martyr identity, there will never be an escape from victimhood.

No, really, think about it.

If you choose to base your entire life, your entire way of thinking, solely in opposition to whoever you think is oppressing you (in effect, letting yourself be defined by the enemy), the pain will never end. There will never be a day on which it is again ok to tell a woman she's beautiful without it being objectification, to have heterosexual sex without it being normative, to have an interracial marriage without it being slavery, to learn a language without it being exploitation, to read another religion’s holy book without it being an act of stealing, to be happy with your body without it being sinful, to lose yourself in the beauty of a work of art from the other side of the world without it being an act of subjugating and tearing that country apart. If it's assumed that heterosexual desire is always objectification and abuse, the pain will never end. If having breasts means that they will always and forever be a target of abuse and belittling assumptions about you, and if it’s accepted as fact that only hiding breasts or not having them at all makes you worthy of respect, the pain will never end. If it's always assumed even the most respectful of cultural interactions, the very act of empathising with someone from another culture and trying to understand them, feeling love and affection for something that’s outside the small world you were born into is somehow colonialism and appropriation and exploitation, the pain will never end.

It’s exactly because you, yes, you, disgruntled person on social media, go on and on about Muslims or straight white guys always being villains, that you are leaving them no choice to be anything else. They’ll believe this, take pride in this, base their lives on opposition to you in turn and the pain, the violence, the sheer bloody idiocy will. Never. End.

The most annoying, most frustrating thing is that yes, you do have to give people a chance. Sorry.

I've had elements of my culture irrevocably associated with only person-less, heartless sex; I've been hypersexualised and feared because I am what I am. I have been told time and time again I don't belong in the country I feel is my home because I wasn’t born in it; I do not feel at home in the country of my ethnic origin because of its crushing, dehumanising culture of suffocating, belittling and abusing all who live in it. If I play with language in a poetic way, it’s seen as a mistake, a typo, a grammatical error because I’m seen as The Foreigner. I am far too much of the East for most white people and they only associate that with barbarism and abuse; yet I'm too fair-skinned to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the "authenticity" of my spirituality and my work--ironically, on the same community where native Bengali charlatans advertise their hotlines for solving astrological problems, using a picture of Kali to sell their mumbo-jumbo, the very same picture these guys would object to on a Western tote bag (because no white person carrying it could ever know more about the deity than the charlatan).

I'm speaking from the side that's never fucking fit in anywhere simply because the artificial rules for who's ~valid~ are a huge load of shit.

And I don't want others to experience that. I don’t want others to be judged simply because of where they were born and what they have access to; I don’t want other people’s agency to be questioned by people who don’t know anything about what led them to choose their own values. You know what I think when I see a young Greek-American woman talking about her having found the Divine through the Marvel Loki because she could relate to him better than any of the rapists on Olympus? (Those guys the militant male reconstructionists say are the only ~proper~ gods to revere?) “You have budding knowledge and a great amount of passion in you,” I think, “and your ability to recognise your own fannish love and enthusiasm as a great reservoir of love and of power, despite everyone belittling it and shaming it, shows great strength and insight.” She’s got it. She’s pragmatic. She’s felt alienated from so many places, but now, having turned within, having cast off shame, she has found something that works for her, and does so beautifully. Despite all the shame heaped upon her, she stands strong and knows that whatever works, works and that nobody has the right to tell her that her own experience is somehow wrong.

It’s easy to be a traditionalist if the tradition values you; it’s easy if it’s been built for you in the first place. It’s no problem at all. However, if you’re not an upper-class male, it’s an altogether different story. Women, queers, mentally ill people, poor and dispossessed people, people from those groups whose native religions have been destroyed by the dominant religions, *have* no religion left to speak of. They *have* to create something new. They *have* to excavate whatever little there is left and to build a practice that suits their needs from scratch. This is exactly what drove the Bhakti movement, what drove nondualist Sufis, what drove certain Protestant denominations, until they, too, became stagnant and overly obsessed with rules, becoming exactly that which their founders had fought against. But if you don’t know what it’s like to be in one of those groups, in the West in particular, where there is absolutely *no* spiritual niche for so many things and where a mahatma experiencing divine visions would be thrown into a madhouse--then you have to listen.

Which brings me to my next point, something I’ve seen incredibly hateful posts about recently on this site--and since I’ve got a foot in both sides of the argument, I feel like someone needs to say something to clarify even the basics. Let me explain what it’s like in the West.

First of all, my global friends: Westerners aren’t all stupid, and if they belong to the group that calls itself Pagan in particular, they do a *lot* of reading. Pagans are the most well-read people I know; often they are lifelong Renaissance people with massive bookshelves. They may fumble around, and quote from books that don’t know everything, but slagging them off for that is like beating up a baby of 14 months for pronouncing a word wrong. They have a thirst for knowledge, and they are capable of respect. Trust that. They don’t swallow everything without chewing it; they chew quite a fair bit--almost too much, really. So this whole idea of Westerners all being dumb and thinking yonis and lingams are naughty and not understanding anything, and only being obsessed with sex does not gel at all with the Western yogis and Pagans I know. The Western yogis, if anything, are often very puritanical to prove their chops, observing more fasts and more rigorous vegetarianism and meditative practices than some Hindu men I know.

As for the car crash that’s Kripal--I have literally not met a single person who thinks Kripal is anything except a complete fucking nutter and an embarrassment, BTW. So the whole idea many, many Indians seem to have of Westerners being like him... er? No? He’s laughed at. Headdesked about. The Westerner who’s Done The Research is going to be the *first* one to slag off sex manual “Tantra” (pick up any academic book on the topic in the last 20 years and you’ll find a section doing that) and is going to be far more likely to have a really good and balanced idea of what lingams and yonis are, far less repressed than some Hindus, actually--at least the sorts who deny there’s any sexual connotations to it at all. The Western yogis I know are perfectly capable of understanding the abstract nature of the lingam in the yoni, and don’t titter like the schoolgirls some Hindu writers present them as. They’ll be the first to shrug and say “it’s just the life force; there’s nothing to be ashamed about it.” Whereas it’s Indian writers in Wikipedia who are furiously censoring anything they might find unsavoury, destroying parts of their own heritage by erasing passages about, say, animal sacrifice in the Vedas, blaming it all on the Westerners. It’s a massive mess.

But back to my experiences with the Westerners. I don’t think a lot of Hindus who slag off Western Neo-Pagans, belittling it and thinking it little more than roleplay, understand at all where these people are coming from, because they’ve been born into a world where you can--at least to some extent--choose your own personal deity and where the amount and variety of religious imagery and practice is enormously rich. They’ve been born into a world where the Divine can have faces, shapes, stories with variety and colour and detail, all these things that, I’d argue, the human mind naturally leans towards. Not so in the West. Westerners, and to a certain extent the children of immigrants, have been born into a world where all that multitudinous, rich expression, all those different ways of seeing the Divine have been crushed, wiped out by Christianity, and only abstractions have been allowed.

The word “Pagan” there is something that’s been used as a slur, and that’s something that Hindus carry deep scars from thanks to Muslim and Christian rhetoric and all kinds of oppression and conversion attempts. But in the West, it’s used to denote anything pre-Christian, anything where the face of the Divine is not (ultimately) an abstraction. In Protestantism, people are constantly told that the Catholic saints and all the paraphernalia around them are pagan remnants (and they are), and are told that that’s wrong and that’s not allowed.

When the Westerners choose the word “Pagan,” they are siding with the indigenous religions in that they refuse the Christian missionaries’ view of Christianity being better. Let that sink in. They aren’t belittling non-Christian practices, like their entire culture does. They’re abandoning their own culture in favour of the side they see you’re on, the side they see as healthier, even if they’ve been told that this side is backwards and primitive.

In the West, in Protestant countries in particular, people are religiously *starved.* It’s all blanched, dead, abstracted. They’re starved of the full depth of human religious expression, starved of religious imagery, are (for the most part) starved of ecstatic practices like singing and dancing; they are starved of truly colourful festivals. They may have been brought up with no religion at all, or perhaps something that’s only observed during weddings, funerals, at the birth of a baby. Children have rituals, even animals have rituals, yet Protestantism has tried to strip them from humanity. Protestants have precious few rituals, dance, music; the further up Northern Europe you go, even the buildings are ugly and bare--mere boxes. Have you ever been to a Scandinavian Lutheran service? It’s probably going to be in a big, abstract, blocky building, clean white walls with hard angles, with no ornament even on the cross, and there’s maybe one candle burning if it’s an advent day. Ornament is sin; ornament is crime. So whenever these people catch glimpses of a past that was more colourful and had shape and form instead of mere abstractions--perhaps a folk dance, a ring of standing stones, a note in a magazine article saying a celebration has a pre-Christian origin, allowing them a peek into the incredible rich mythologies of the past, a lightbulb goes off on the tops of their heads and they recognise its *naturalness.* This is why so many Pagans say, whispering at the edge of a misty lake with a garland in their hands to offer to the deities, “it’s what I’ve always felt anyway; I’ve returned home.”

And what do the Westerners, the Pagan sorts in particular, see in Hinduism? They see that these traditions that they’ve themselves rediscovered have never died out in India! Oh, wow! They still do this bit! And that bit! They see that there’s still a part of the world in which God can still be seen as a woman, as with having an elephant head, in which God can move through human beings, and it’s *natural* to them, it makes sense, and they weep bitterly at these images having been taken from them. That’s all. They’re not out to rob temples: actually, they’re acting against *everything* their Christian, racist masters have told them to do; they’re *sinning* by saying “this makes sense” of a culture that’s been deemed barbarian, backward. In short, they’re practicing the exact opposite of the belittling kind of “orientalism” they’re being accused of. They’re respecting, even preferring that which their culture has told them is primitive.

So, to expand the view of these so-called cultural bandits that are Westerners studying cultures not their own: they aren’t out to rob anyone. They’re marvelling, feeling a deep ache in their guts because they’ve recognised something inherently real and true, something deeply human. They might be reading about Hinduism to learn what it was like in their own country before Christianity; finding parallels with, say, Roman religion. It doesn’t mean that they will necessarily be drawn to Hindu deities; they simply want to read more. They want to experience different ways of looking at the world--it can be an expression of empathy.

And have you any idea how difficult this is for women in particular to process, when they know for a fact that women receive even worse treatement outside the West? They are told, literally, that if they even so much as touch an “Eastern” culture they must be accepting the burning of widows, genital mutilation and veiling. How in the absolute fuck is that any kind of subjugating of a “foreign” culture, when you yourself, by even going there, would be victimised by it, literally groped and raped by it, the way Western women devotees are on a daily basis? Saïd completely fails to see that side of Western interest in the East, himself blinded by his own male perspective, just like the Orientalists he so loathes--he only sees women as objects of desire instead of independent thinkers with agency, not even pausing to think what might lead a Western woman to revere one of the few forms of the Goddess still worshipped in this world. When a Western woman goes Eastwards, she is seen to enslave herself. It takes guts for her to even peek inside. Let alone travel on her own, leaving her culture behind, to a temple where the Goddess’s gift of giving life to the world is celebrated in the form of her yoni, torn by the irony of the groping, violent fools trying to grab hers when they’re supposed to be revering a female deity.

The most natural of human impulses, of seeing the Divine power in many forms and shapes, is so deeply penalised and repressed that for a Westerner brought up Protestant, it’s a radical departure to declare herself a Pagan.

Yes, you heard me right. These people face discrimination from relatives, from countries that refuse to give a legally sanctioned status to any religion without a holy book (which is what a lot of indigenous religions, nature religions don’t have). They choose this path (whatever deities/traditions they end up associating with) out of a deep conviction in their hearts, based on deep knowledge they’ve gathered over the years--and they lose jobs, lose custody, get beaten up by fundamentalist Christians over it. It’s a serious, radical departure that means severing many ties; if one refuses Communion in Protestant churches, one will not be able to be married in a church, one might not be able to name one’s kids after non-Christian names because the state won’t allow “heathen” names. They will have relatives who will no longer talk to them, neighbours who treat them with hostility and may smoke them out of the area you live in. They will have great difficulty in accessing basic services, down to how they will be treated in the hospital to arranging for their burials. In the whitest of the white, small European countries, it means being harassed on public transport if you’re wearing a suspicious symbol or something non-Western; it means having a glass pint thrown at your head by a drunken Pentecostal at a rock festival (I saw this happen). A Western yogi was evicted by a fundamentalist Christian landlord for having a statue of Nataraja on his mantlepiece (which he’d garlanded and worshipped accordingly, BTW). Does that not change your idea of these people blithely ripping something off without a care, just having fun with these images, at all?

It’s not fucking roleplay. It’s not just a little bit of hippie or hipster dipping into something that’s cool--if someone’s truly chosen that path, especially if they are over 30, they are serious about it. There are idiots everywhere, of course; on Tumblr in particular, it seems that the dumbest people of *any* group are the loudest and the most visible, especially because the place is so full of poorly educated and entitled American kids (like they can help it).

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of intelligent Western people out there. You know why they’re quoting from those books that you scoff at? It’s because they’re doing their research. They quote from all these books because they *read.* They *study*. They are under tremendous, tremendous pressure from the Internet, especially from all the above militant guilt-tripping and hate speech against innovation and cultural interaction and Neo-anything to Do Their Research. They probably know more than most average people do, in any culture. I’ve met Western Hare Krishnas who can recite long Sanskrit stotras with better pronunciation than your average, lazy Brahmin priest whom the pious family grandmother has to correct. There’s no such thing as automatically being good at something when you’re born into a particular group or culture, just like a gay man isn’t necessarily good at designing clothes.

And this is before I even get into non-dualist Hindu gurus who welcome Westerners. They’re welcomed with open arms, quite literally in Amritanandamayi’s case, listen to all these universalist sermons preaching how humanity should not be divided by race, religion, caste, etc. (post-Vivekananda Advaita Vedanta versions of Hinduism, of course), and then get a rude awakening when they get slapped in the face by all these people who tell them that their devotions, their studies are a ripoff. So they bathe in the nectar of these spiritual insights, feel loved and go and do good work, and then some git on the Internet comes and kicks them in the face, saying they don’t know shit. And when they ask the gurus or the swamis about what they should do about accusations of cultural appropriation, the renunciates are so busy with their own work (making the world a better place) that they will just shrug and say “just block them.” Yeah, block an entire movement of hate spewed at them when they’re trying their best to be decent people and evolve, and to serve the world. (*Marriage problems*Jyotish*Black Magic*Love Marriage*Call 666-666-99 NOW*)

Not at all a schizophrenic situation, oh no. Constant tugging between conservativism and liberalism; people who don’t do their research blaming other people for not doing their research (even if they have). And vice versa; 14-year-olds on this website thinking they know all about cultural differences and how to solve them, because doing a chakra meditation, given to you personally by a Hindu guru who endorses it for the whole world is actually wrong if you’re white, and we should all just lock ourselves up in tiny little boxes and never interact.

So. This was a rant on two topics, really. But they are intertwined. On one side, you’ve got people obsessed with traditionalism, obsessed with the idea of only certain people having the right to do certain things, and on another, an endless ocean of nonduality, of a commitment towards humanity and evolution reaching out across all borders. I know which side I choose, and let me tell you, it’s not easy when you don’t want to be a sanctimonious tosspot but don’t want to be an extremist either. The Internet fuels extremism of all kinds; it throws the worst examples of the group you think is your enemy at you (and the agitators underline them, using this to serve their own purposes). If I were at complete peace and abiding in the Self, I wouldn’t be writing rants. I wouldn’t be an angry woman yelling at the screen when someone’s completely misinformed and a hypocrite.

What it boils down to--my anger included--is that people keep telling each other that they don’t trust them. And people don’t trust themselves. Hence the blind faith in traditions, gurus, social justice movements to the point where they override all reason. We are supposed to think that everyone on that other side is an idiot, because it’s easier that way. It’s so much easier to reduce someone to a degenerate Westerner or a primitive Hindu, or a backwards Pagan (or a shrieky SJW, for that matter). And people behaving in an extreme, reactionary manner give reality to these stereotypes, these reductionist ideas. Above all, we are told that we shouldn’t trust our intuitions, that we shouldn’t trust our learning, that we shouldn’t trust our knowledge and sense of right and wrong--that we need an adult to guide us. And to an extent, that’s right--you need help sometimes, when you’re too young to know how to wipe your own arse--but you have to grow up sometime and move on. You have to start your own path, and it’s going to be different from your friend’s even if you’re in the same congregation--you don’t like me telling you this, but we *are* all individuals and there’s no such thing as an absolute, perfect example of a Lutheran or a Bhakta or an Asatru or whoever because those are all propaganda. That’s dualism again--the concept of there being a right way of doing something and the wrong way of doing something, and that’s how wars start.

Whether on the Internet or outside of it, dualism is what starts wars. Not giving people a chance starts wars. Not trusting that spiritual innovation to be perfectly sound and good for a person or a group of persons is what starts schisms, more wars--all of this because people simply can’t stand being different from one another. It’s a bizarre form of extreme empathy, actually--feeling a horrible dissonance when someone is different from you, and a lot of religious people have the kinds of neurological structures that support that. They feel physical pain when someone Does It Wrong, simply because their pleasure at doing something right--which you or I can never imagine--is *so* intense. But the truth remains that the only way we can get along on this planet is to put up with each other, respect each other (sounds so bland, dunnit?), respect difference, plurality because it’s essential to evolution, and to give people the benefit of the doubt. The most radical thing to say is “maybe that person I don’t like is doing it right after all”--try *that* for a headfuck, a zen koan!

But without that, there’s nothing. The West needs to respect the East and not think it's all stuck-up and to see the people and things they can relate to (there are thousands); the East needs to stop being stuck-up and pretending there are no Westerners who respect the East (there are thousands). Traditionalists need to stop being so bloody crushing and oppressive and smug; super-liberals need to stop being so bloody lazy and smug as well and have a look at the good things those traditionalists have done.

You need to give that respect if you wish to be respected in turn. You need to take that deep breath when one of those idiot kids goes off on one again. You need to give others that space and not *assume*, but watch. The people you find most grating may very well teach you more than the people who think you’re just splendid and fabulous.

Evolution is Nature’s Law.

And you may not like it, I may not like it, but it happens--Life will find a way.

#apologies for typos i'm very tired and it took hours to type this #tantra #paganism #multiculturalism #nondualism #evolution #i will probably regret this too but right now i am so tired #i know so many good people from the side that always gets bashed #that i have little time for hypocrisy from people who don't do their research on the *west*#prema kalidasi #sermons

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quietmonologues · 7 years

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I was tagged by Amanda @junebugninja, Thank you!! 1st Rule: tag 9 mutuals you would like to get to know better. No pressure tagging

(I’m gonna break this rule *gasp* and not tag nine mutuals...I think all the people i want to tag have already been tagged hehe, and I’m always anxious about tagging, so any of my mutuals who want to do this, please go for it and say I tagged you lol)

2nd Rule: Bold the statements that are true. I am 5'7" or taller I wear glasses I have at least one tattoo I have at least one piercing I have blonde hair I have brown eyes I have short hair My abs are at least somewhat defined I have or have had braces PERSONALITY: I love meeting new people People tell me that I’m funny Helping others with their problems is a big priority for me I enjoy physical challenges I enjoy mental challenges (like riddles and stuff? Yeah those are kind of fun!) I’m playfully rude with people I know well (sassy is the word) I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it There is something I would change about my personality ABILITY: I can sing well I can play an instrument I can do over 30 pushups without stopping I’m a fast runner I can draw well I have a good memory (it’s alright) I’m good at doing math in my head I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute I have beaten at least 2 people in arm wrestling I know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch I know how to throw a proper punch HOBBIES: I enjoy playing sports I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else I have learned a new song in the past week I work out at least once a week I’ve gone for runs at least once a week in the warmer months I have drawn something in the past month I enjoy writing Fandoms are my #1 passion I do or have done martial arts

(The hobbies I have aren’t on this list!!! arghh!! lol) EXPERIENCES: I have had my first kiss I have had alcohol I have scored the winning goal in a sports game I have watched an entire season of a TV show in one sitting I have been at an overnight event I have been in a taxi I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year I have beaten a video game in one day I have visited another country I have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts RELATIONSHIPS: I’m in a relationship I have a crush on a celebrity I have a crush on someone I know I have been in at least 3 relationships I have never been in a relationship I have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them I get crushes easily I have had a crush on someone for over a year (it was on and off...) I have been in a relationship for at least a year I have had feelings for a friend MY LIFE: I have at least one person I consider a “best friend” I live close to my school (define close...) My parents are still together I have at least one sibling I live in the United States There is snow right now where I live I have hung out with a friend in the past month I have a smartphone I have at least 15 CDs I share my room with someone RANDOM SHIT: I have breakdanced (does spinning on the floor when I was a little kid count?) I know a person named Jamie I have had a teacher with a last name that’s hard to pronounce I have dyed my hair I’m listening to one song on repeat right now (Losing My Religion by R.E.M.!! Yeaaa) I have punched someone in the past week I know someone who has gone to jail I have broken a bone I have eaten a waffle today I know what I want to do with my life (I’ll do a half bold, I’m certain of what I want to be but....I don’t know lol it’s complicated) I speak at least 2 languages (Sure...my French still sucks but I’ve been learning it for like...11 years, and I’m still studying it so...) I have made a new friend in the past year

#about me #tagged #I don't know what my hobbies are tbh #i like knitting and reading books #i just chill at home for the most part #introvert life #tagged about me

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noise-eternal · 5 years

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Scenes We Have Missed

A turkish screamo band I discovered through a message to the blog itself actually, so I decided to have a chat with vocalist and lyricist Tan Banbakkal.

Hey Tan! Can you tell us briefly about the history of the band.

Of course. We were formed in 2016 in Izmir, our hometown. It took 2 years for us to release our debut ep ‘Broken but Blessed’ but after it was out, we got to play lots of shows in Izmir as well as other cities like Istanbul and Ankara. We performed everywhere we could find and we loved playing live, we loved the audience and they loved us back. So, with every show shit got even more intense.

This week we got back from our mini-tour in Ukraine. We played local shows in Khmelnitsky, Kyiv, and at Kharkiv Hardcore Festival. Best times we’ve ever had. Great people, great scenes. Before we started planning the tour, we had started recording our upcoming album ‘State of Dreaming’ and we’re looking forward to releasing it on 15th of April, this Monday!

Is your band name related to the sense of alienation and isolation one can feel coming from a country with not much, let’s say, “alternative” music?

We believe the band’s name is flexible in a lot of different aspects. So I can say that it is partially related to isolation. We actually didn’t think about a name in the very beginning. Our best friends were leaving the country to study and before it we were always connected and bounded. So it was hard to accept experiencing something we’ve never known before. So the name called itself and we dedicated all our love and efforts to making music for the ‘actual’ scenes we could have but never had.

Are there any other turkish bands you could recommend?

A tons of them! I’d say nowadays Turkish underground and subculture related musicians and artists are on the rise. There would be no end if I started writing them. Instead I’ll name some great labels from Turkey so that you can check all kinds of good music.

Mevzu Records (Our next release will be with them)

Table Records

M4NM

Pragmata

You live in Hungary now, how is it there compared to Turkey?

For a while, I’ve been just observing and getting people’s opinions and I realized that it is much more similar than I thought. Young people’s opinions about their and other governments, their worldviews, dreams, future plans… It was all similar yet living in Budapest much easier for me. I got rid of my anxiety and depression in a short time after coming here. Then imagine a large mass of oppressed and scared people. This is what Turkey looks like.

Almost every right is taken away from them. Always knowing that you can change everything, but always too scared to take a step. It makes you sad knowing these things and looking at people’s faces. So here (in Budapest), I would say people have the rights to speak freely without getting arrested and protesting without getting beaten. I think the government here avoid oppressing people in daily life but still, I hear a lot complaining.

Where are the other band members located?

Except me, they all live in Izmir.

You recorded Broken But Blessed 2016 but it didn’t come out until last year, how is that and what do you think about the release today?

So when we started the recording the ep at Frekans Studio we had problems with the budget as well as some other problems. We needed to postpone the release for a really long time. Then Kerem Inci from Frekans stepped in to help and everything got right. Mix and master process also took some time but then in the first month of 2018, it was time to release it. It was a great journey to remember and we feel blessed.

Looking back on the record now, I think it is a good record. We tried our best and came up with something. Like it or not it was the first thing to represent what we were. Now it has been 3 years since we started working on writing songs for the first ep and apparently, we are all changing and our music changes with us. I love the record, but I would like to hear some changes in the tracks. We learned from our mistakes and corrected them for the next album.

You told me vaguely when we spoke that the next release which is coming out on friday is conceptual in some way? Can you tell me more about that?

Yes, with pleasure. Even before we decided to make songs for a new album we had one or two possible tracks. Our recently released single ‘Frames’ was one of them. I tried to write lyrics which would be simple, repeating and honest. So I wrote about the time whrnbit got hard for me to bear and I wrote it in another person’s eyes. Lyrics are telling about the very last minutes of the person and what was on their mind. The Character commits suicide later in the song.

We started working on new songs and I wanted to write about this person’s journey within their subconscious/mind. Song by song, I tried to write about what kind of life they had, what experiences they had, why they chose this path and understanding death. I think listeners can consider this concept as a fiction story in search of discovering conciseness, but all the content and the lyrics can gain different meanings from person to person’s understanding.

What can we expect from the new release compared to the last?

Better composition. Energy. Louder and more aggressive music. More profound lyrics etc.

Based on the Orwellian sample (where is it from by the way?) to the first track, the fact that you’re turkish and play punk-related music I’m guessing your views on the politics in your homeland aren’t that positive. Can you tell me more about that? (Also have it gotten worse with Erdogan and the government in recent years or does it just still suck equally?)

It is from a 2003 BBC television docudrama about Orwell’s life. It’s called ‘A life in pictures.’ He wasn’t very much loved by the government so no audio recordings or videos of him survived until this day.

You guessed it right. Not only us but a lot of people think the same way as we do. The same ruling party for 16 years and it has never been good. I am not saying that the people are not nice or everyone’s literally trying to survive, but none of the actions the government took so far were positives. The whole country is in confusion, People are divided by race, religion, politic views and shit tons of other stupid things.

Sometimes it gets harder to find the strength to get out of bed and simply live there. The main problem is feeling like you already got used to it, accepted it, and it was everything you knew all along. Depression is like a blanket over Turkey, smothering everyone below. It’ been there for years, even when our parents were at our ages. I want it to change. I want people to change. Not politically or anything but I just want them to feel happy without worrying about the future or anything.

You recently got back from a tour in Ukraine, how was the reception and how are tours down there?

People are extraordinary there. We witnessed really crazy stuff. For example, in Khmelnitsky, local band Rene Maheu was performing when the crowd started doing some cult-like movements. It was incredible. Kharkiv Hardcore was something else by itself. I’d never guessed there would be such a passionate scene. Everyone from every city we met was really cool and kind. We were hosted beautifully and had a great time there. We hope to go back as soon as possible.

Touring is cool and fun and if you don’t have a friend who knows Ukranian or Russian language, it is really hard to get to places. Because mostly there are no English signs and timetables, it is easy to get confused and lost. We missed one of our trains, for example, but other than that, if you are in an alt/hc/punk related band, don’t miss it out. Everyone and everything’s in its place, on its time and organized.

#turkish #screamo #post-hardcore #intervju #interview

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dwestfieldblog · 4 years

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AFFIRMING YOUR BIAS

A DEFAULT MODE NETWORK

Apparently 100 seconds to midnight....not enough time to run to shelters, boil an egg or have sex, unless you are a rabbit. '2020'...One of those gathering years when conspiracies appear very real and laughing at the credulous takes a back-seat on the bus to seeing the utter plausibility of paranoid imaginings. Logic looks coldly and clearly at irrational fear and starts to doubt its own sanity. Ah ha, ha haa...

Brexit parties hard in London as we dance towards the 'golden age' that Boris has promised (and it is not as if he has ever lied or exaggerated about important things very often before). British Pride at its best, posters already up in the tower blocks ordering the foreigners to speak English. The Leavers seem unclear on the point that having given the EU an enema and left ourselves at the mercy of unbalanced American business deals to be signed over a barrel, (arf) we are also signed up to the AIIB, the Ancient Illuminated...(ahem, excuse me) the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Well, wouldn't you rather be ordered about by China and lose your sovereignty to the Communist Party? The ones who harvest organs from the living, run concentration camps and massacre their own students. All the UK 'nationalist fascists' (those either in denial or proud of it) don't seem to mind that much, as long as Europe is not telling us what to do. 'We're gonna take back control of our borders'. Yeah right. Nice British compromise over Huawei eh? Meanwhile...

Reading about the Social Credit System in China and wondering how long before other more democratic countries take this idea up. Remembering Zappa in Joe's Garage dystopian album in 79, warning teens not, to do anything which could affect their parent's credit rating...well, in freer countries, the SCS could mean lack of access to various jobs, not being able to borrow money, less access to internet, limited acceptance into education, longer prison terms...Communists have a nice punishment for those who disagree with their philosophy...have them sacked, arrested for being unemployed and placed in one of those special detention centres for a 're-education'. The same excrement as has been since 'God' punished Adam and Eve for getting too smart. Do as you are told or else. Be quiet and obedient, listen and follow those in control regardless of whether they seem to be doing good work - and respect your betters especially if they are not. Calm down Dave, peak later.

Speaking of which...Nice interview with a young British guy who used to belong to the Korean Friendship Association (just the North part) who was expelled last year for asking, during a visit to Cheese Boy's empire 'How come in a Socialist society, the leadership is passed from father to son'? This might seem like a very reasonable question but the bloke was booted out, accused of 'outrageous disrespect' And a 'Colonialist attitude'. Arf. I might well send a letter to the NK embassy in London and ask them if they could clarify this point.

Fnord.

My favourite WTF story for a while was the fascinating tale of an Ethical Vegan in London named Jordi (from Spain) who went to court to prove a claim against his former employers, The League Against Cruel Sports, after he said their pension fund had connections to companies involved with animal testing. They sacked him and he claimed discrimination due to his beliefs. His ideas on the absolute sanctity of animals include not travelling short distances on public transport...in case the bus squishes any birds or insects in its path. Or eating figs in case there are any larvae from wasps still in them. Banknotes which contain animal fat should not be handled. Guide dogs for the blind are offensive due to the exploitation of the animal in serving Humans. Wool, leather and silk are right out. Etc. He won the case. (Sanity is expected to appeal.) The judge ruled that the philosophy of ethical veganism merits the same respect as any religion. Well, why not eh? If folk can accept invisible sky wizards, talking snakes, a boat with all the animals of the world on it, burning bushes and virgins giving birth, why not make a philosophy out of yet another extreme? I will demand the right for pink fluffy unicorns to vote and a million march for mermaids. Oops...Well, flap, roll and flop...Great at fellatio..

At what point does an opinion become 'real'? When it is agreed upon by serious minds and turned into law? Or when focused thought is directed into possibility waves with Will and imagination. 'The magick of our science...' As of yet, there is no proof of a 'God' existing, but millions have died badly due to fervent belief in such and the opinions of clearly imbalanced humans through history. Thumb sucking, security blanket clutching folk, desperate to justify their unsane behaviour by blaming it on a higher power. God/The Devil made me do it. Sure He did...The Goddess says think for yourself, harm none and do what you Will.

Politically incorrect boys and girls, need some Kuddles, True love falls to fly and rises to crawl, when I think about you I cut myself...Meanwhile again...back to the foul cesspool/ endless comic material of prime ministers and presidents...

'In Reality they are not after me they're after you. I'm just in the way'. No Donald, 'They' are for the people, they are just against you. Usually American presidents follow orders from the industrialist power brokering king makers who financed their campaigns, rather than taking advice and obeying orders from a Russian in Moscow. But that seems about the shape of the last four years. Perhaps Donald is in love with Vladmir, he does seem to admire strong men a little too much. Virtually everything the orange lunatic does in his childish attempts to undo anything Obama did, serves as the longest suck job in history. Someone has access to THAT video in the hotel...'Russia, if you're listening...' Stick it on you tube and give us a good laugh for a change. Nice to see Nancy ripping up the reality tv State of the Union address...(No Republicans, I'm not a Democrat or a Libertarian.)

'YOU CANNOT BE ACQUITTED IF YOU DON'T HAVE A TRIAL AND YOU DON'T HAVE A TRIAL IF YOU DON'T HAVE WITNESSES AND DOCUMENTATION'. Well said Mrs Pelosi.

Does this statement actually seem unreasonable to anyone other than The Duck's hardcore fanatics? The king is naked and a bare faced LIAR, rambling endless deflection and projection. Whenever he accuses someone else of something negative, he reveals the real subject is himself. Whenever he praises himself, his heart means the opposite. 'I am a very stable genius'. Said the deeply unbalanced moron. 'He's crazy, shifty, a liar, weak...' etc etc etc. Reptile, you know what you are. Feel it. But free now for revenge and re-election due to 'the silent, the pliable and the complicit.'

Donald has been spending a lot of time preying on praying Evangelicals and anti abortionists (a 'March for Life'). Smart political move. When such millions of folk are so easy to fool with bullturd, he knows he has a ready made multitude of gullible voters. All he needs to do is to 'align' with them and they are bent over, spread and puckered. (Reminds me of the Christians buying Constantine's shtick.) Do you suckers really believe anyone who says they agree with you? Don't you expect some genuine display of compassion and peaceful behaviour rather than endless aggression, selfishness, petulance and greed? (I mean, if you are actually Christians who feel compassion and forgiveness and that none are beyond Redemption.) Rather than just hoisting placards which read 'Not Your Body, Not Your Choice'. From this I infer that the actual females behind and under these, follow the opinion that God (who gave us free will, if you follow this stuff) has amendments which state Free will is sacred. Except in the cases of abortion and....fill in the blanks with deeply held opinions.

This teenager was raped by her aids carrying junkie uncle...and must have the baby? That sounds nice and Christian (or any other major religion). From my very first blog sixteen years ago I have been endlessly ranting the same dammed thing...it seems a genuine shame that those who would call themselves religious cannot be a little more HOLY and decent. Rather than foaming at the mouth like wild eyed, hate filled fundamentalist swine. (He writes, teeth grinding and himself stabbing the keyboard in impotent rage). Pretending to be 'religious' is a nice pastime for the guilty.

Another placard showed a picture of Trump with the words. 'Most Pro Life President Ever'. Do none of these young women at the rallies see any irony in supporting a man who boasts of grabbing pussies and that he 'would hit on' his daughter if she wasn't his? Does he really seem to be FOR life and the dignity of females to you? Women are supposed to have a little more instinctual intelligence than men. (Or is that imposing gender roles? Arf.) Shame on you for being so easy to manipulate. 'Easy to fool people when they are fooling themselves'.

'A part of religion is about direct experience of the divine and the rest is just crowd control'. John Cleese (JC)

And I Love the way the fascists/populists financed by the Kremlin on all sides bang on about the 'Liberal Elite'. I have never seen or heard of such people. The Liberals in Democracies have always seemed to be fairly well meaning, goodhearted but overwhelmingly weak apologetic folk. Not very much like a power elite running the world behind the scenes in the 'Deep State'. Farage in the UK after the recent election, having lost most of his seats by not running against the Tories (hoping for a chair at the Big Table) crowed about having 'destroyed' the Liberals in England. I could have done that with a cynical stand up routine and and a flick of my little finger. On my left hand. Not exactly Thanos Nigel...(But then, I am not Bill Hicks eh?)

And so...Atlas Shrugged, Heraclitus burped, Putin raised an eyebrow and his entire government resigned. (Boris promised a 'New Dawn' for Great Britain. Well, he would, wouldn't he?) I truly enjoyed the annual press conference with Putin, where Bald head was asked what he thought of Johnson's previous comments that he resembled Dobby the House Elf from Harry Potter by replying; 'People say one thing when they are trying to get into power and something else when they are in power'. Just for a couple of seconds I had a sense of respect for this clarity of honesty.

Meanwhile Johnson (whose party received a good old amount of Roubles last year) and (bald head No.2) Cummings have begun their master campaign...Things don't look good for the BBC for reporting the news and asking uncomfortable questions. The Constitution of Britain and the balancing powers of Parliament are under threat too, as are various Human Rights Laws. Good old Tories, still the Nasty Party. 'Imagine what this country could be in ten year's time'. Boris, I am.

And bloody Momentum still don't want to let go of their type of 'leadership' yet...even after their Useful Idiot/Strawman puppet Jeremy lost the North. Damn right, English people tend not to vote for those who sympathise with actual terrorists. Unless.... Oops...Insert smiley face here. And a Bosh of a skeleton breastfeeding a priest, just lie back and think of England...this won't hurt a bit. It will hurt a lot.

Step by step as Boris and Trump surgically carve away various rights and laws which impede them from furthering their power and break up unions of friendship among the West as Russia and China watch with the dead eyed smiles of sharks. Hmm..

'Constitutions are utterly worthless to restrain the tyranny of governments, unless it be understood that the people will compel the government to remain within constitutional limits. Practically speaking, no government knows any limits to its power except the endurance of the people.' Spooner

Most, but not all of you people are being used by those who understand your psychology. You do not. You are only a means to end, to achieve and maintain power for them. Serving those who see you only as units of measurable force for them to direct. And you seem to love it. Vicariously enervated in righteousness and dumb enough to admire your intelligence in following those you believe will empower and free you. They don't, they won't. Never have and never will, as the song said. Sleepwalking, marching in a deep state of hypnosis into a slaughterhouse.

Some of us are trying to improve on communication, connection, empathy, random acts of kindness, respect for ones self, sisters, brothers, planet. Experimenting with techniques of mind expansion, using the mirrors of science and art, maintaining a good sense of humour, watching our belief systems for signs of cruelty and stupidity, and admitting when we behave like idiots, humble but not humiliated.

For all the religious fundamentalists, politically correct and political extremists against any attempt at evolving, due to fear or greed, I strongly, almost violently suggest this: CRAWL ON YOUR BELLIES BACK INTO THE OCEANS AND LET THE REST OF US MAKE THIS PLANET SOMEWHERE GOOD TO LIVE AGAIN.

Not important how long I live, more a case of how much I enjoy being alive and whether I can help others while I am here. Hope to see you in the springtime.

RIP forever in intelligence and fine humour Neil Peart and Terry (He's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy) Jones.

'What's hit is history

What's missed is mystery

And the miraculous image

Of sound washed ashore'

J. Balance/Coil

Despite outward appearances, it is not unrealistic to be optimistic...

LOVE.

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delightfulranchdeputypanda-blog · 6 years

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Extra #2: My thoughts on Rules for Men/ Religion ( WARNING: This is a compilation of like two unedited entries from my person “diary” so please ignore the emojis and typos)

Okay so revisited the notes about suicide and this philosopher named Durkheim from like whatever many years ago in Paris who studied patterns in suicide. So he discovered ☝🏼 rates in suicide. 👇🏼rates in suicide Single. Married Men. Women Wealthy. Poor Protestants. Catholics So if you analyze this you realize single rich men that don’t really have religious guidance or anything to set a moral compass for them are more likely to commit suicide. And obviously there are always exceptions but it makes a lot of sense. 1) So then our professor (literally love him! May Allah fill his heart with Iman ameen) had us think about American society and we as a class came to the conclusion (I didn’t really participate much so I cannot take credit for most of these ideas) that American men only rely on their wives and girlfriends for emotional support like they have beer buddies and hunting buddies and blah blah blah but their only emotional support system is their significant other. Whereas, women are more like to call up their girls and mom or close mother figure or even guy friends every now and then and spill all the teas. Okay so that one I didn’t relate much to religion but while they were discussing it I was thinking about the dynamic between friends and how desi people, well men in particular are ride or die for their “brothers” you know like yeah you have the groups that are guarded and don’t talk about feelings but as far as I know most of the desi men in my life have shared emotions with their friends as much as women, if not more. Also, they are not afraid to cry. I’ve seen all my uncles cry and even my dad. I have seen my grandpa cry. I have seen random babas on the street cry too. Based off of my experience men in Pakistan or even here (before they get influenced) show a lot of emotion and that is how it should be! 2) Then we talked about wealthy neighborhoods and how there’s usually one family in a large house and parents usually work a lot and only see their kids for short periods of time. Whereas, in poorer families, a lot more people live together which means you’re more likely to interact with more people throughout your day. Okay, then we talked about how neighborhood atmosphere right so in rich neighborhoods your walls and fences are taller and more gates and less interaction with people around you. However, in poorer neighborhoods, fences tend to be shorter fewer gates and neighbors converse with one another and on weekends especially like holidays and stuff people have bbq and block parties and share and connect with each other. Then I thought well what about golfing buddies and country club events and things. But then I realized the nature of those events is different (I used to volunteer to serve at events held for charity and got a chance to observe the difference in class systems). The way people carry themselves and the way they speak is very like like .. hm like not authentic it’s like robotic almost like even the jokes and laughs sound rehearsed. Then I thought about back home and what I had learned about my religion about how Islam promotes neighborly-ness. And how we are reminded to share and be inclusive. [side note: this got me thinking about race and how it doesn’t exist inshallah I’ll write about that another day and why I think it was created but as far my limited knowledge about my religion goes I’ve never heard color mentioned the lectures I’ve been to only talked about people of other religions and believers v. Nonbelievers but nothing about race]. 3) then we talked about religious guidance that catholicism forbids suicide and Protestants had various beliefs and each group was different and different branches and stuff so no one was on the same place. Then our professor said okay let's say you don't like people and you don't talk to neighbors or friends but you like working on you and you come to church because you’re obligated to do so then what? is that enough? People said no because yk you’re not getting the proper interaction you need to exist. And I started drifting and thinking about how even with prayer it’s better to do it as a group like unison amplifies prayer. But I disagree with the class a little I think both are necessary a balance between individualism and the responsibilities that come with that like working on being a better you, knowing yourself, your goals, strengths, weaknesses, etc. And at the same time working in a group and helping others grow and reach their goals and stuff. And it makes sense for me to think that way because when I was little I had one teacher tell me to not think of myself and to do for others before I do for myself and then another told me to do for myself before everyone else. [mini story time: So I came home confused (I was like 7 and opposing views were hard to understand) and I asked an Imam that used to live in our house if I was really really hungry and had only one small piece of Roti and I saw a baba with no food what should I do and he asked me what I thought so I remember saying that I would like to say that I would just give him the whole piece because he needed it more but I don’t really know what I would do and if I was a baba too and we were two babas that were both hungry with no other food for who knows how long then I think I wouldn’t want to give him the whole piece and then I think I would just break it in half and he didn’t say anything back to me he patted me on the head and then left for namaz lol ] so idk what to make of that but I think that moment in time signifies how important balance is to me. And inshallah I plan on educating myself more so I can know the answers to my questions but the more I explore my thoughts and the more I think about positive actions, I end up back at the same influence, my religion. I’ve always just done stuff because someone else wanted me to but I never prayed when I didn’t feel like it [which sucks I know but is the truth because I felt like it was worse lying about reading namaz(I felt like I wasn’t really reading if I was daydreaming in some parts and speeding through others) than not reading it at all] but the more I explore my thoughts and my goals for myself I make these little connections and they remind me of a very particular dua that I remember making as kind of a kid [mini story time: it was dark and raining and I was sitting in the veranda looking at the rain (I was like still 7 almost 8) and I remember thinking I should say Subhanallah right now because obviously Allah created this but I didn’t. then at the age of whatever age I was when I went to Pulliam after my grandpa died it rained again and I asked Allah to help me love everything as much as I love the rain] and I don’t remember the intentions of my words or what I meant by that but the more I take the time to think the more I remember and the more I try to grow I realize that dua has been answered. I love life, I grew to love people and school, and now I’m growing to love my religion. And I want to hold to this for as long as I possibly can I keep writing because I’m trying to bottle this love and appreciation because I’m scared it’ll go away or something. But yeah The point of all this is that humans need integration to be able to exist and I’m grateful to be created by a god that gave me a guideline to overcome challenges and every task that I’m asked to perform in the end only befits me and creates the happiness that we all seem to be chasing.

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viralhottopics · 7 years

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The Day I Decided My Daughter Will Not Choose Her Own Friends

We helicopter over our kids wardrobes, nutrition, sleep schedules, hygiene, science fair projects and then pride ourselves on how hands off we are on social issues.

By Leslie Blanchard

I will never forget the day my daughter told me that Bethany, a girl in her 4th grade class, was annoying her.

What is she doing to you? I questioned, instinctively protective.

Shes following me around on the playground and sitting by me at lunch! she quipped, as if that would sum things right up and get me squarely on her side of the matter.

You mean shes trying to be friends with you? I asked incredulously.

I realized immediately that I had a problem on my hands. I was raising my own worst nightmare. Smack dab in the middle of my brood of five kids, was a charismatic, sassy, leggy, blonde, dance-y, athletic girl oozing confidence … and apparently annoyance, directed toward another little girl that wasnt lucky enough to be her. Inconveniently for my daughter, her own mother WAS Bethany in grade school. Freckled of face and frizzy of hair, I was an Army brat, always the new girl clamoring for a friend, drawn to the natural confidence of girls like my daughter. This conversation found me vacillating between heartache and fury, but one thing I knew for sure: Mama was about to put her money where her mouth had been all these years.

The battle of two very strong wills ensued at my home the next morning. It wasnt pretty, but I prevailed. My daughter attended a private Catholic grade school, where on any given day, she and a handful of her cohorts ruled the roost. One quick phone call to Bethanys mother that same evening confirmed my worst fears. My daughter and her posse were using everything short of a can of Cling Free to rid themselves of the annoying Bethany.

Im sure there are parents out there who will say I overreacted. But, I firmly believe weve got to start to address our countrys bullying epidemic right at the heart; by re-defining bullying at its very core. To me, the rejection and complete lack of interest my daughter and her clique displayed toward Bethany was the beginning of a subtle type of bullying. It is true (confirmed to me by Bethanys mom and teachers), that there was no overt unkindness or name-calling, etc., just rejection; a complete lack of interest in someone they wrongly concluded had nothing to offer them. After experiencing childhood myself and raising five of my own, Ive been on every side of the bullying social dynamic, and I am convinced this is where it begins. A casual assessment and quick dismissal of an outsider.

We would serve our children well, in my opinion, if we had a frank conversation with them about Social Darwinism and what motivates human beings to accept and reject others. It happens at every age and stage of life, race, creed and religion. It has its roots in our own fears of rejection and lack of confidence. Everyone is jockeying for their own spot on the Social Food Chain. I feel like I have experienced demonstrable success with my children by tabling this dynamic right out in the open. Parents need to call it by name, speak it out loud, shine a bright light in its ugly face. We need to admit to our children that we too experience this, even as adults. Of course its tempting to curry favor and suck-up to the individual a rung of two above you on the Social Ladder, but every single human being deserves our attention and utmost respect. In spite of this, we have to constantly remind our children and ourselves that everyone can bring unexpected and unanticipated value to our lives. But we have to let them.

Its simply not enough to instruct your children to Be Nice! Youve got to be more specific than that. Kids think if they arent being outright unkind, they are being nice. We know better. Connect the ugly dots. Explain the Darwinistic social survival instinct thats often motivating and guiding their impulses. I promise you, they can handle it. They already see it on some level anyway. They just need YOU to give it a voice and re-direction.

As for my girl, I instructed her that she was going to invest some time and energy getting to know Bethany. I assigned her to come home from school the next day and report three cool things she found out about Bethany, that she didnt previously know. My strong-willed child dug in. She did not want to do that. I dug in deeper. I refused to drive her to school the next morning, until she agreed. It seemed that, at least until now, I had the car keys and the power. Her resistance gave us time to have the Social Darwinism conversation. I walked her through my ATM Machine Analogy. I explained to her that she had social bank to spare. She could easily make a withdrawal on behalf of this little girl, risking very little.

Lets invest! I enthused and encouraged.

She got dressed reluctantly and I drove her to school. She had a good daywhat was left of it. But, she was still buggy with me when I picked her up, telling me that her friends mothers stay out of such matters and let their daughters choose their own friends! (Such wise women.) And then she told me three cool things about Bethany that she didnt previously know.

I checked back in with Bethanys mother by phone two weeks later. Its called follow through. (I dont think enough of us are doing that. We helicopter over our kids wardrobes, nutrition, sleep schedules, hygiene, science fair projects and then pride ourselves on how hands off we are on social issues. If I had a dollar for every time I wanted to say, Seriously? You micro-manage the literal crap out of every thing your child does from his gluten intake to his soccer cleats, but THIS you stay out of? No wonder theres zero accountability and a bullying culture!) Bethanys mother assured me that she had been welcomed into the fold of friendship and was doing well.

Bethanys family moved to another state a few years later. My daughter cried when they parted ways. They still keep in touch through all their social media channels. She was and is a really cool girl, with a lot to offer her peers. But the real value was to my daughter, obviously. She gained so much through that experience. She is now a 20-year-old college sophomore, with a widely diverse group of friends. She is kind, inclusive and open to all types of people. When she was malleable, impressionable and mine to guide:

She learned her initial instinct about people isnt always correctly motivated.

She learned you can be friends with the least likely people; the best friendships arent people that are your type! In the world of friendship, contrast is a plus.

She learned that there are times, within a given social framework, that you are in a position to make a withdrawal on behalf of someone else. Be generous, invest! It pays dividends.

But, most importantly, she learned that, while I may not be overly-interested in what she gets on her Science Fair project, couldnt care less if shes Lactose Intolerant or whether her long blonde hair is snarled, shes going to damn well treat people right.

Parentsyour kids are going to eventually develop the good sense to wear a jacket and eat vegetables, invest your energy in how they interact within society. If we insist on being the hovering Helicopter Parent Generation, lets at least hover over the right areas.

About the Author:Leslie Blanchard is a wife and mother of five, who tattles on her husband, her own mother and her children by chronicling the insane and mundane in all of their lives in a fairly public way. Collectively, her family more or less rues the day they purchased her an iPad. Now that shes officially a blogger, Leslie lies in the tub, neglecting her considerable responsibilities and muses about marriage, motherhood, friendship and other matters of life outside the bubbles. Read more from Leslie on her blog A Ginger Snapped: Facing the Music of Marriage & Motherhood.