“A bit of pain every day, keeps arrogance away.” David Jackson
We are here.
Yesterday was a bomb of contrast. Full moon eclipse! Writing flow is free, words coming through.
Lost a file. Worked hours trying to recover it rather than the 1/2 hour it would have taken to redo it. Crazy. Sensing that I am over with respiratory treatment . Felt vital, wrote, organized, etc. I am now exhausted. Glad to be here.
Felt the meme to be: “Clear vision: Life without lipstick.”
And so we move on into a dark time.
“And what do you feel the outcome will be?”
“And what do you think the outcome will be?”
“And do you see any difference in these questions?”
“Or do you even want to know?”
I’m not asking that these questions be answered, but I am pointing out how our focus on one dimension obstructs our vision of another. Especially when both are charged, significant and deserve our attention.
Also, when we are focused on our concerns, we expect responses that conform to our feelings. The other does not, or is not, necessarily focused on the same questions with the same thoughts and feelings. Their response doesn’t concern itself with the nature of your questions and expectations. If you are not aware of this, your response will be driven by defensiveness and self justification, adding emotional chaos instead of emotional control into your response.
Your intended, or even more so, desired outcome, is denied. It is lost, blocked, and the dialogue disintegrates into a polarized argument in two directions.
What is the outcome? What could it be other than polarity, conflict, contradiction and emotional exacerbation?
The point of this is to seek to understand what happens next when this argument is taken to the streets as active protest?
This means active participation in social aggravation and conflict. Protest confrontation, force, intensification of emotionally driven frustration and anger, plus reactive response instead of measured response. Thus leading to what the point was, looking at the polarity of the questions we are asking that are generally lost and blindly condensed in an emotional energy condition-driving explosive reaction and possible violence. (I wonder if this isn’t at the core of what ‘authority’ understands to be the ‘danger’ of assembly?)
“Are you aware of this unconscious pathway of outcome?”
“Are you concerned about not only what your outcome or goal is, but also about what those allies and friends might experience from what you provoke in reactions?”
This is not to say protest isn’t a necessary part of active social life and living as legitimate actions of society. It does mean that one should know something about the methods and consequences it can and does bring about. There might be a more productive way to bring important issues to the attention of those who have the power to manage and control justice. The ’people’ don’t, their representatives do.
Most anyone can see what is unjust, but the question of what to then do about it is the motivation of social life. “Answers”, if there are any, are arrived at in a long trail of reactions and responses of all those who feel, believe and think they know, all from different perspectives of understanding and knowledge. This is a human condition.
What I am describing is the ‘normal’ character of the pathway to protest. This may in fact be what provokes the opposite of the very thing you value in an activity perceived as non-violent, when misunderstood.
This awareness appears inaccessible to a mind loaded with conviction and feelings of self righteous indignation, disgust and frustration, devoting itself entirely to reactivity that provokes emotions in which the ‘action’ it creates only exacerbates resistance.
Being non-violent is not an intellectual decision, especially when it provokes violence unconsciously.