Negligible #1: The superior white men

We’d like to be able to find some statement of such great power that it would stop these universal haters and ungrown white men in their tracks and turn them from sickness to health. Acknowledging the magicalness of that thought, I guarantee that therapy’s words can at times give a person a sudden new awareness of himself, altering his inner landscape and his approach to the world. More often, though, we are only a hand shaking the topmost leaves of his tree and the trunk remains unmoved.

It feels almost compelled to insult and have hateful contempt for these desperate, rageful adolescents. Their greatest agony, which they project into the atmosphere, is that they were punished and love-starved children who had to grow up. They were crying, brutalized infants and youngsters who were taken from themselves: They had to get older. Hurt, they needed to be helped in the crib, held by mommy in their childhood bed. But they had to grow up, leave their true but invisible real self behind, and live like adults. The pain of this discongruity is a death that goes on forever. It may as well be the eternal hellfire of the Bible.

“Strong” men need to become weak to get better. They need to have their pain touched by a father-figure, a mother-figure, so they’re not carrying their burden by themselves. I’ve seen this happen in therapy: a solid man – a medic returning to Afghanistan – whose face transformed to his six-year-old when he remembered the compassion he had missed, the coldness he received, a little boy. But I, like you, can hardly imagine that happening to the members of the masses in their camo and gear, raging together, feeling the womb-like warmth of fellow haters. They don’t want my warmth.

So we see around us as much pandemonium and failure as there are atoms in the world. Man-children carrying into the grim battle of job or rally hundred-pound loads of their closed past; those who live on poisonous ideas – hate blacks and immigrants and Jews – as if they were the green ground and clean air. I wish there were a way to broadcast to all of them the truths of being a human being, truths that struck each one personally. I know there’s no such way. But this world could use a little magic.