Folks, I want to start by saying this is not political. Yes, I will talk about what is
happening currently in the US, including politically, but right up front, I
want you all to understand that this is not because of Trump or because of 9/11
or because of ISIS, or because of Oil that people are thinking and acting the
way they are right now. It’s because the
attitudes move in cycles and as the cycles happen, they cause events which sort
of mirror the attitudes. For instance, hateful attitudes usually create violent
behavior. What I would like to do is
make some social commentary on patterns that seem to be emerging…patterns I’m
very familiar with for a few reasons, which I will get into later.
Say what you like about any of this, and I know a lot of you
out there think that people saying neo-fascism is on the rise are alarmists,
but see, that’s only if you have a very myopic world view. When you consider the political climate
worldwide right now is so very similar to what it was almost 100 years ago,
it’s starts becoming clearer.
Fascism is defined as extreme right-wing, authoritarian or intolerant views. The problem is that intolerance can be a slippery slope.
Look, everyone is intolerant. Of something.
I’m intolerant of willing ignorance.
I’m intolerant of harming others. However, I wanted to explain to those of you who may not
understand the reason why some of us in the world are very, very concerned about
the intolerance we see, because the intolerance has become a very real problem.
Look, quite simply, this has very little to do with Trump, or Merkle, or any of the other neo-fascists rising to power. I care very little about Trump. Hatred and intolerance were here before him and they will be here long after him. He is not the cause of it; quite the opposite, the intolerance, fear, and hatred are what contributed partially to his winning.
He won; OK, great. I didn’t vote for him, but he won, so if he
fails, we fail. And really, the country
was founded with checks and balances that will hopefully keep it from getting
too out of whack…all he can do is sign papers…it’s up to the rest of the
population as to what we do with the policies that are presented in the next 4
years…or hell, for the rest of our existence as a Nation as far as that
goes. Honestly though, Americans as humans
have not been doing a very good job of doing the right thing lately.
So I thought I would take a walk down a few very dark paths and
let you see a little of just what Intolerance can look like, because there is
always collateral damage in hate. I want
to give you a glimpse into the less seen type of collateral damage; the damage
that is done by being raised in a hateful environment.
I was born into an abusive family. Old agrarian roots that go way back
to…honestly I don’t even know, several generations of farmers. My generation is
the first in my family not to farm, if not full time, at least some of the
time. My dad was the youngest of 8 kids,
and from what he tells me, his oldest brother, who was his primary educator,
was a bully, and abusive to most everyone around him. I heard stories of him kicking his wife down
the stairs because he felt like it.
This was the man who instilled many ideas in my dad’s head. My dad dropped out of high school in 10th grade and worked on the family farm full time until he joined the Army.
This was in the 60’s during the Vietnam era, however, he was
not deployed. But the way he boasted
about the military you would think he was a lifer. He took the military training to heart and
felt it was his duty to raise me as if I was in the military. Any complaint I made was countered with “in
the military we didn’t blah, blah blah.”
Great dad, I’m fucking 4, not in boot camp.
He used this guise of “toughening me up” to take out his own
anger on me, just like his brother. He
also convinced everyone else to join in on the put downs and charged my sister
with having to “keep my head from getting too big”. The thing about angry people…they are always
angry, so he always had to find a reason to put me down or hit me, or
contradict me, or yell at, or manipulate.
I should probably mention my dad was a white supremacist.
Not the hood wearing, cross burning kind, but not far from
it, either. He had sympathetic attitudes
towards the KKK and various Fascist ideas.
Very authoritarian, punishment for me was always severe, physical
intimidation was daily, which wasn’t hard when I was a very scrawny, sickly,
asthmatic kid and he stood 6 feet tall, had 23” biceps and weighted in around
325lbs. I saw him once lift 225 lbs over
his head in a military press like it was nothing…a man who literally never
stepped foot in a gym, but pushed around stainless steel containers filled with
around a ton of liquid chocolate all day every day from the time he left the
military until he retired.
So yeah, I dealt with abuse; physical, emotional,
psychological and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hold some of those bigoted ideologies
for part of my life. I have since
rejected them, but, as ashamed of them as I am, I did hold them. It’s hard not to when you are told as far back
as you can remember that the only “real” people are white, the others are sub
human and physiologically different from white people, and therefore somehow
inferior.
When I was 9, my mom left him…but I didn’t. I stayed with him. And she married another guy that was almost a
cookie cutter duplicate, aside from being slightly more educated than my dad,
but every bit as bigoted. I was
literally surrounded by what today would be considered Alt-Right ideology.
But even at a young age, I didn’t understand the arguments,
but back then I thought it was because I wasn’t old enough or smart enough or
whatever to understand it. And when you are constantly
being asked “What’s the matter with you?
Quit acting so dumb” you tend to think you aren’t smart enough. You don’t stop to consider, oh wait, it’s
because the ideas are BULLSHIT.
Finally, when I moved on to college and got away from my
All-white graduating class, and heard some logical, rational arguments, I
realized that the things I had been told about various minority groups by my
parents were based off ignorance, fear and hatred.
Which was no different from the ignorance, fear and hatred I
saw at the Holocaust Museum, portrayed in Schindler’s List. Or in the story of Mr. Leo Mantlemacher, a Holocaust survivor I had the fortune to sit down with and hear his experiences first hand.
I met
Leo in 1994. I was taking composition
102 at Harrisburg Area Community College.
I had seen Schindler’s List over the weekend, and a few of us were
discussing the movie before class. The
professor overheard us and mentioned that she was friends with a local researcher who was
involved in a project to record the stories of Holocaust survivors to be kept
in a library and preserved after they die. She offered to get us in touch with him to interview one of the survivors for our final paper. I jumped at the chance, and eventually sat down with Leo for three hours to hear his story.
For me, I see Leo’s story as the final swing of a sledgehammer
against a wall of ignorance that was weakened by all the other experiences I had. It finally opened my mind to how absolutely
arrogant and ignorant I was to ever think that anyone could be better or worse
than another.
Leo, I found out a few years ago, has passed away, but his
experience was not wasted…at least not on me.
Like I said, it was the final sledgehammer blow to my skull
to split my mind open and allow me to move beyond the ignorance, which I have
done. But one thing I didn’t realize for a long time, was how much damage had
been done to my psyche. But we will put
that thought on hold for a second. Just
know that I have been a very angry person for most of my 41 years.
Let me explain something about bigotry. This is also the problem I have with a lot of
religions. These ideas are exclusionary,
meaning, they create an “in” group and an “out” group. You’re either saved, or you’re damned. You’re either pure, or you’re a mutt. This segmentation Inevitably becomes good
versus bad. And of course, we always see
ourselves as the good guys, unless you are a complete psychopath.
And those two ideas right there are what create what you are
seeing right now in the US and much of the world. The people who voted for Trump fall into two
basic categories; people who like him despite his bigotry (the good guys), and
those who like him BECAUSE OF his bigotry (the psychopaths).
The people who voted for him despite the bigotry, well, you
all are the ones that really need to hear what I’m saying because, those who
opposed him pretty much all see how dangerous he is, and the ones who support
him because of his bigotry already live it.
Maybe I’m making too much of an assumption. I’m assuming you all know what White
Supremacists are like, but maybe you don’t. I take it for granted having been surrounded
by them for a large part of my life. Simply
put, if you think white people are better than anyone other type of people for
any reason, valid or not, you are a white supremacist. However, it goes deeper than that and If you
are not familiar with the mentality of white supremacists, it’s one of violence.
Violence pervades everything they do. The reason their arguments don’t make any
sense below the surface is because they are thinly veiled excuses to carry out
the hate and violence…because it’s easier than dealing with the real source of
the hate and anger, which is inside themselves.
See these people have the biggest entitlement complex of any
American. That is why they bitch so much
about how everyone else is so entitled…because it takes away from THEIR
entitlements. They don’t think they
should have to put forth as much effort because they’re WHITE. Everyone knows they are better and should
just hand them everything because they’re white. After all, “They built this
country, fought and bled for this country and now they go to work, pay their
taxes, beat their kids, and go to church like a good American.”
That’s fine, but so do non-white people. Like I said, the arguments don’t make any
sense below the surface because they are justifications to hate. When you feel anger constantly, it chews you
up if you don’t let it out, so you look for any and every opportunity to
project it on something other than yourself.
If you can find an object to actively hate, to aim that anger at
like a laser and just make it your life’s purpose to destroy it, even if it’s
something that can’t be destroyed (especially if it can't be destroyed), you can "function" in society because you
aren’t always on the edge of blowing up on someone, you have your anger honed
in on something else.
The only other option is to work through the anger, find the
source of it, understand it, and heal…but that takes a lot of time, effort, and
admitting things about yourself you really don’t want to admit. Generally, this is not something most people
are willing to do, especially in a society designed to distract us from getting
healthy and working through our problems, because psychologically fulfilled
people aren’t as easy to convince they need other things to make them happy,
like phones, and cars and make up, and gym memberships to solve their problems.
Why are these the only options? Because even after the abuse is over, the fight inside never
stops. Because the only way to survive
is to fight…somehow. You develop skills
to, in some cases, literally keep yourself alive.
This is the part that got very confusing for me for a long
time
My past developed something that I have struggled to
integrate, the need to fight. See, for
me, fighting, violence, weapons…these were all attached to the same hatred that
I was trying very hard to escape from. I
felt they had no place, in my mind; in the healthy mindset of a functioning and
rational, free thinking individual. So it took me a very long time to come to terms with this.
But like I said, the hate doesn’t stop unless you work
through it, and working through it means facing the exact shit you ran from as
fast and as hard as you could and swore to never even throw a glance in that
direction…it’s counter-intuitive, and honestly, terrifying. I may not have ever made the final step without having met my Krav Maga instructor, Jack.
It wasn’t until my recent venture into Krav Maga that I
began to actual be able to fight through it.
As I said, I was a fighter afraid to fight. I tried karate when I was a kid, and I was
not ready for it. I was struggling with
asthma, trying to deal with the emotional turmoil of a very, very messy custody
battle between my parents who hated each other and used my sister and myself as
pawn in their power battle. This added
another layer entirely to the anger and frustrations.
In college, I decided to take a fencing class, and joined
the fencing team for a while.
This was my first step into real combat training, as
impractical as it might have been. It
taught me defense, blocking concepts, the fact that you don’t need a lot of
force to prevent a lot of force hitting
you.
And of course, counter attacks, or riposte.
When I left college, I began collecting various techniques
over the years from different sources, acupressure, random techniques from
military and law enforcement friends, other Martial Arts practitioners, and the
like.
In 2002 I stumbled onto my first Krav Maga class during my
short period living in Norristown, just outside of Philly. I had no idea what to expect. It was 3 hours. 3 hours of front choke breaks, learning to
punch and kick correctly, how to deal with fire arms pointed at my face, chest
and back…blocking kicks and punches.
I loved it, but I was broke at the time and couldn’t afford
to keep up the lessons. Then I moved
back to Harrisburg shortly thereafter.
That began the search; a search that went on and on for 15 years.
There were no schools teaching Krav in the area. And then one opened…but they were mixed
martial arts with some Krav. That was
the closest.
Starting around 2000 I started hearing grumblings from some
of my ultra-right wing friends that were sounding a little…well, not cool. I was tapped to join a Militia group back in
2001, which I declined, but I kept an ear to the ground as to what that crew
was up to. It made me realize,
especially after Obama was elected, that these guys were getting more and more
pissed because they were feeling shut out.
And I know what happens when white supremacists get
angry…they get violent. And then entered
Donald Trump. I knew we were in trouble,
because he was embracing all the frustrations of the ultra-right neo-fascists, and
I decided it was time to spread out my search.
It was becoming more important. Not because of Trump, per se, but because he was emboldening the far Right. They were getting more boisterous and beginning to act out.
That’s when I found a place call FitMax Krav Maga in Media,
PA, just outside of Philly and about ½ hour from Norristown, where I used to
live and have ever since wanted to return to.
I reached out to the owner/instructor, Jack, and asked if he
was familiar with any schools in the area, as I had been searching since
2002. He said no, but offered to train
me and prepare me for the instructor course through Krav Maga Global. I jumped at the chance and honestly, I had no idea how much I needed what he was offering. I have since found my
home that I have been searching for my entire fucked up life.
I will admit, at first it was difficult. The violent thoughts were bringing up old
shit that I had buried…not racist shit by any means, but anger about the abuse
I had suffered. These were lessons I had heard when I was young, but they were no longer attached to the hateful destruction like they were when I hard them long ago. Krav started digging up the old feelings that haven’t ever been
resolved…and like a cyst, they have just grown and gotten more and more
painful, more complex.
I needed a new perspective.
But it wasn’t until I let go of the old one, the one that
said violence is bad, and realized that I was created for a purpose…and of course with lots
and lots of therapy, I started to see the bigger picture.
I had a natural aptitude for motion when I was younger, and I was engrained
with a very violent nature. These two
things make for a decent fighter. And
knowing the hatred that is the energy source boiling the pot of violence
towards non-whites in this country right now, having held it in my own mind and
saw its eyes staring me back in the mirror for almost 2 decades…and seeing no
more deserving target than a group of people who choose to dehumanize other
groups for simply being who and what they are…I have realized I have a very, very specific purpose in
this life.
No, I can’t fight every single white supremacist, but I can
train, train hard, be an example of motivation for others, harden and prepare myself
so that when I do encounter one who is acting out in a violent manner…I can handle the situation.
If you are a white supremacist but can
act like a civilized human, then bigot on with your bad self, I guess. I mean, I have no other way to be able to
frame it up. I don’t like you, I’d just
as soon your vocal chords rot and your rotator cuff gets destroyed from
throwing your sieg heils, but to wish you dead…no.
Well, that’s the thing…maybe I
do. I know I shouldn't...but I’ve been too beaten up and broken by these fucking bastards
that it's honestly extremely hard for me to have anything but contempt for their entire ideology and anyone
who holds it. So don’t for one moment
think that I have any interest in suffering your words or deeds, because, just
like you greasy fuckers who hold white supremacist attitudes, I am just looking
for a reason to tear off my gossamer thread-leash keeping me shackled to decent
social norms and open your veins to bath in like I was raised to do.
People who deal with hate and have been
through a period of abuse start to have to disconnect from people emotionally. They start to lose their ability to care
about another human because…why would they care?
If violence is being acted out on them, they no longer trust people
because they have seen and been through the worst depravity there is; the
ability to harm another living human being.
To approach a violent person who has no real empathy or
conscience to speak of in a non-violent way is to open yourself to attack.
Nonviolent people
are hilarious to violent people. They
appear juvenile, they are seen as weak, pathetic and not worthy of the skin
they inhabit…for one simple reason…they aren’t willing to fight for their place
in the world, and if the thin veneer of society were to fall, destroying
nonviolent people is almost euthanasia because they see it as “in the wild,
you wouldn’t survive, so we’re doing you a favor, strengthening the gene pool
and saving you from a much worse fate.”
I have literally heard that exact argument more than half a
dozen times in my life.
I’m a violent person who is really good at pretending I’m
not…. so if you start acting on those feelings of hatred in my presence, I no
longer see any real reason not to, and many, many reasons in favor of, stepping
in. I may get my ass beat. I may get killed. But I will not stand by because fighting hatred is the
culmination of my life events.
My story
is one of violence, I don’t pretend otherwise.
I have tried to ignore it, pretend like it isn't who I am, and that has only caused my own alienation. I have accepted that I was raised violently
to be violent, that was not my decision…but I have decided to only be violent for the right fucking reasons, and the right reasons are to
fight the attitudes I once held because I know how deep and how dark they can go.
Not many people come
back from where I've been without losing themselves…somehow, I did…but it took a big chunk of my humanity. I do not want to see others lose their
humanity the way I lost mine.
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