New Town
I moved to a new town.
It’s mostly conservative. Almost entirely, in fact.
The first obvious thing I’ve noticed is that the conservative people here are not Trump-obsessed, even though through conversations they evidently support his policies. But no Trump signs in fields. No MAGA hats, shirts, bumper stickers. Not like in the more liberal areas of my past, where one can usually find large blue Trump signs standing in the corners of rural fields.
I didn’t expect that.
I’m realizing that since these particular conservatives are not surrounded by liberals pressing in on them, they don’t need to push back, hold the line, or display their allegiance.
These are just free range conservatives, living their lives, and happily so.
There’s also no demonstrations stopping traffic, no hand-written or covertly-funded signs alerting me to the latest civil crusade on the inhumanity of this or that. Not even really that many traditional stars and stripes fluttering in the warm breeze.
No, the only signs are those for lost dogs, bake sales, cheesy farm-related phrases designed to offer some tongue-in-cheek guidance.
And when I’ve talked to people — and let me tell you, Texans are very friendly and, I believe, fully expect at least ten minutes of authentic direct-eye contract exchange — they aren’t pushing any agenda. Not even the anticipated and braced-for religious one. However, they will, on hearing where I’ve hailed from, raise an eyebrow and politely ask how the current environment is suiting me.
“Great, so far,” I have responded. Because that’s the truth.
It has been nice to not have to focus on things that I cannot reasonably change anyway. It’s been nice to not have constant guilt piled on my shoulders. It’s been nice to hear the birds chirping instead of the shrieking of raging middle-aged women trying to fill their empty nest with purpose, or metrosexual men who’ve long since forgotten what their strength is actually for.
It’s just been nice.
I’d like to balance that “nice” out by saying something negative, but honestly, I’ve got nothing so far. I’m sure something will eventually raise its ugly head, but for now, it’s just been nice.
It’s almost too nice, too peaceful, too normal. Like any trauma survivor, I find myself seeking out the drama of the news media — even though I know what that’s ultimately worth.
My adrenals don’t know what to do with all the unused hormones backing up in my overly calm system.
Of course, while my personal existence is peaceful, I’m aware of what’s going on in the world, in the middle-east.
It’s a lot to consider, as a human, isn’t it?
On the one hand, killing people is obviously wrong, so therefore bombing anything is obviously wrong.
But, on the other hand, is killing people who are trying to kill other people still obviously wrong? How far do we go to protect people? A life for a life? A life to prevent many lives?
I employ a live and let live philosophy, but if someone else decides that I should die, well, there’s really only one response to that. And no, it’s not to give up my life to allow them their preference.
In the case of Iran I’ve been watching them, first from the UK and then from the US — for decades — attack the West and be quite open about their hatred. I mean, literally chanting “death to America” and such. I don’t pretend to fully understand their reasoning, other than it is a religiously motivated hatred. I probably should research their argument more, but there’s something about their “you must die” mentality that instantly negates that effort.
It’s tempting to simply label that sort of thinking as evil. But, I don’t believe that evil really exists.
What does exist, however, is the very human ability to normalize behaviours. And we are all prone to it.
The everyday people of pre-war Germany could have been you, or me. Just people going about their lives. Then an ideology was presented to them, forced on them, and slowly they normalized the expectations of that ideology. People who previously had pets, played in the street as children, lifted butterflies out of water, brought flowers to brighten an elder’s day, slowly came to view other humans — Jews, for example — as much less than human. So much so that many eventually found themselves in the extreme position of emotionally or physically torturing them, and laughing while doing so.
What used to be relatively normal people then doing abnormal things. When embedded within a group with an authority figure, with that group behaving in a particular prescribed way, the newest members of that group were easily convinced over time to behave the same way.
The Milgram experiment demonstrated that human tendency very well.
If you find it difficult to even think about the cruel acts of WWII then consider yourself lucky that you do not currently include such atrocities in your list of group norms.
To be fair, it’s not always just human behaviour. I should point out that Methamphetamine (invented in Japan decades earlier) and mass marketed to the German public two years prior to the war by pharmaceutical giant Temmler — a drug that over time causes psychoses, severe mental disorders characterized by a loss of contact with reality, often involving symptoms like hallucinations and delusions.
And it wasn’t just routinely given to the German military (Hitler and his top generals were all on a cocktail of strong drugs throughout) to allow them to fight non-stop for days at a time, but was actually regularly taken by the general German population. Pervitin was the brand name and it was advertised to the public as a stimulant that could help with studying, staying awake, maintaining focus.
Japan did the same. The general population of Japan, prior to, and during the war was regularly taking Meth as a way to get ahead of competition.
Office workers, students, housewives and professionals took it like it was Aspirin — no prescription needed — not understanding the effects it would have beyond those immediate “benefits” advertised.
So, with both Japan and Germany distributing Meth to their populations, and especially their soldiers, on a mass industrialized scale, I think we can perhaps understand better why they suddenly thought it was a good idea to invade and try to take over the world. And perhaps why relatively normal people were susceptible to slow conversion to extreme abnormal behaviours.
I don’t know why this fact isn’t more discussed. Big pharama invented a drug and hoisted it upon an unsuspecting public right before the war started — a drug that causes the very problems witnessed, and the insanity that followed. Perhaps the public loss of faith in the pharmaceutical companies from such a revelation would have been too much for their profits to take?
Of course, to be clear, other countries such as the US and UK also used drugs during this time. Benzedrine was marketed in the West as a nasal decongestant, though was an amphetamine and ultimately used as a stimulant by the military. However, this basic amphetamine form was much less potent than the methylated version in use by Japan and Germany. And it was little used by the general public during this period.
But, drug-induced psychoses aside, it’s important to consider how easily a human can be changed over time through repeated exposure to any consistent message. With a command-based society, such as you appear to have in Iran, you have a top-down authority dictating the norms. The norms there are vastly different from what we have here in the US, and seem to include extreme behaviours that the civilized world has long since abandoned as inhumane.
Here in the US, of course, we are moving from a command-based (dare I say, patriarchal) now to a reputation-based society (matriarchal), where you have increasing social reputational pressure to conform to specific behaviours and dictating the norms. That’s a more subtle behaviour influencer, though just as powerful, but unfortunately more difficult to identify and oppose when it overreaches.
In all cases you are being manipulated to behave a particular way, and maybe with that in mind consider taking back that power and review your own actions today?
Regardless of political persuasion, how are you repeatedly viewing or describing the “other side”? Maggots? Libtards? Those terms are dehumanizing in just the same way as the Japanese called the POWs they tortured “logs”, or the Germans to those “Stücke“ — literally “pieces”. Even without the drugs, don’t fool yourself that you aren’t on a similar path, the same slope — that you aren’t incrementally normalizing inhumanity. You most certainly are. With each repetition, you aren’t hurting them — you are hurting yourself.
But then again, that’s the nature of being a human being, isn’t it?
You have the tools to adapt to anything. Brain neuroplasticity. Compartmentalization. Denial. Confirmation bias. Cognitive justification. You can handle almost anything simply by getting used to it. You can survive in the worst of places. You can do the worst things possible. And you make sense of it, somehow, even if it means permanently damaging yourself in the process.
But that amazing adaptation skill is also the reason that, throughout history, people have allowed themselves to descend to the very lowest of what we could consider human.
When Europeans arrived in the Americas they were shocked to find most natives were not just in near constant state of war with each other, with raiding parties and all out wars, but routinely torturing each other when they won a battle. The Europeans called them Savages, because from the European perspective, they were indeed brutally savage to each other (and didn’t hold back when it came to fighting the colonies either). The European norms were tough, but the native America norms were much, much harsher. But for the native population, that was just life. You live, you fight, you lose, you get disemboweled or burnt alive.
Just another day at the office. It wasn’t evil, it was expected. It was their normal.
In the same vein, with the relatively civil Europeans, slavery at that time — and for thousands of years prior — was the absolute norm. Yes, it’s hard to imagine, in this day and age, making sense of owning another person. But that, again, was their normal at that time.
So, we humans can adapt to almost anything. From the bad to the worst. For the perpetrator and the victim, you could say that’s our super-power, but it’s also our weakness. Because of this inbuilt trait, we must be on constant personal vigilance to prevent our morals from slipping, because it is a slope that gets steeper the further one goes down. And I’m not sure that there’s a way back beyond a certain point.
The people leading Iran seem to have decided a long time ago that the people of the West are worthy only of death. They have slipped down that slope and no longer see fellow humans. I’m not sure they can come back to humanity. At least not easily, and not without help or support.
So what do you do with a person who wants to kill you because of their beliefs and no time to help them return to a more moral and humane position? Let them harm you and consider it part of their healing path?
What if they only harm some of your group? Maybe a few deaths here and there. Nothing personal. Distant. Maybe even just soldiers — you don’t support war, so maybe they “had it coming” anyway? How are you justifying the deaths? Or, what about the tens of thousands of Iranian people who have been killed within the country? How do you justify those? Are they less than human? Less than you? Maybe they deserved it? Maybe they were all bad people?
The world is a hard place, made harder by people’s choices. The people who lead Iran made choices to make the world harder than it needs to be. Harder for the people of the west and harder even for the people of their own country. No one deserves to die, but some need to die simply because they won’t stop trying to kill others. As inhumane as it is to kill another person, sometimes it is the only humane action.
That’s just basic human survival. Hey, you live peacefully, you live long. You live trying to harm others, you eventually lose the privilege of living a life altogether. Whether you live in the US or you live in the middle-east, that’s a basic understanding.
The only people who challenge that understanding are people whose lives are not in danger — yet. And that’s a privileged position made possible by those who did not have that privilege, but instead had to take action. In other words, someone else paid in blood for someone to be able to take that privileged position, and that should not be forgotten.
The US waited 47 years to take the action they are taking now. That’s an awfully long time to let a bully beat you up before you fight back. In some ways it is admirable to take such a soft approach, in others ill-advised — as anyone who has been bullied knows, it never gets better. Years of warnings and “don’t” statements, as though they were afraid of empty threats — as though they shared the same norms.
But being pushed to the point of violence is never pretty, never fun. No one wants to be in that position. Everyone wants them to just behave, to not threaten, to not attack. It’s angering to be forced into that position, to be the seeming aggressor. It’s not who we want to be. It’s not who we are. But they make it necessary nonetheless.
I started this piece as a report on where I am now and how it feels to be here. This feels like an isolated location, away from the worries of the world, and some might say it is like hiding one’s head in the sand. Maybe. Or maybe it is simply an understanding, an acknowledgement that all the protesting and ranting and demonstrating is not going to change anything other than one’s stress levels.
This conservative area has a historically high number of volunteers for the armed services. People here sign up to physically fight for their causes, instead of screaming, blocking traffic with a sign and then posting themselves on social media. That’s who they are, protecting what is important to them, defending their values, and that’s how make a difference in the world.
It’s impressive to me, at least.
At the end of the last post I offered a poll out of curiosity, to see what readers might want to see more of. It seems most want a bit of everything, which makes sense I suppose, since that’s what I tend to do anyway.
On that; I’m creeping up on creativity. It’s a slow process. Painful. I don’t think the muse has my number still, so it may take time. I have had an idea emerge for a series of visual pieces, but doesn’t match my intended style — I will need to clarify my thinking on that.
And writing; in limbo for the moment. Though no shortage of ideas. The people here in this small town are in many ways fully formed fictional characters. There’s more than one story wandering these streets.