What's Next? 15

I heard something interesting in an educational video about trauma that I saw today.  Basically, people are not going to remember you for what you said or what you did but how you made them feel  when they were around you.  This was spoken in the context of how to improve the way we deliver care and services to people who are living with mental health concerns.  This also has a broader and more general application.

First, a word about schadenfreude and me.  The definition of schadenfreude is pleasure derived from someone else's suffering.  Not very nice, actually.  I remember watching TV some twenty-one years ago, or so, with my racist father.  There was a news report showing some people in South Korea falling as a balcony collapsed.  My father said that it looked almost funny.  I replied, I'm sure it isn't for them.  We'll say he wasn't terribly pleased with his darling son.

I find it only too easy to be like my father sometimes, but I try to carefully select my target.  I punch up.  People of other races are never in my cross hairs, neither are the poor or disabled nor anyone who is vulnerable.  I prefer to pick on the wealthy, the powerful, the influential.  My most recent target was the archbishop of the diocese of the Anglican Church where I happen to live and her lovely lawyer.  I still generally do not have compunctions of conscience about getting such idiots upset or angry.  They often deserve it.  Especially when their arrogance blinds them to the humanity and essential worth of people they consider to be less than them. 

I admit that I sometimes enjoy stirring the pot.  Okay, a bit oftener than merely sometimes.  I like creating drama.  It makes life less boring.  I don't necessary enjoy conflict, especially when it backfires on me.   I have to admit that I also have little compassion for the privileged, especially when they are whining over their first world problems. 

This doesn't mean that I love them less.  I often think of Jesus confronting the pharisees, making scorched earth of them for being such psychopathic bastards and moral cowards and hypocrites.  Rather like Anglican archbishops, I would imagine (so sue me, Melissa!)  His words, and his tone, were anything but kind. 

But I have to believe that he was kicking their ass also because he loved them.  He wanted them to do better, knew they could do better, and it was the cry of his love raging against their stubborn and obtuse arrogance.  If he merely hated them he probably would have just left them alone.

I do wonder what kind of role that activism is going to be playing in my future.  I am certainly no longer interested in participating in public demonstrations.  I cannot endorse the kind of black and white thinking that gets propagated.   But I am neither content to simply sit back and quietly rot my way into a festering retirement.  i don't know what I am going to do yet, but do something I must and I will eventually figure it out.  I always do, and I always will.  Time will tell, Gentle Reader, time alone is going to tell.