The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

=> i think, therefore i yam

i think, therefore i yam

Posted by Farid (Moderator) - Friday, December 26 2003, 12:15:25 (EST)
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I didn't start out to be an "enemy" of Christianity, or United States policy or British history. I had no idea where my discusions with Andy would lead to or my involvement with the Assyrian community and its leadershit. You learn about Life by throwing yourself into it...not reading about it or talking to the experts. It was the same with my involvement with the Juvenile Justice system, courts, social workers and the awful conditions children are subjected to in the name of "helping" them.

I had no idea where the thing would lead to. All I wanted to do was volunteer my time among lawyers and such to see if Law School would be worth the effort...did I really want to be a lawyer etc. I was sent to work as an investigator with the juvenile branch of the Public Defenders in Seattle and that's how I came to be inside the jail they kept childen in till they "disposed" of their cases. That first week I was like a man dropped on another planet. Every day when I left the Juvenile Court and Detention Center I wanted to stop strangers on the street and ask them if they had any idea what was going on in "that building"...what young children, whose only crime was choosing the wrong place to be born were being subjected to...and I didn't mean in the way of torture or willfull cruelty...just what kind of "System" had been set up and what it was actually doing.

It would have been more humane and better for the society as a whole to just shoot the kids. But to add further neglect and what amounted to punishment for acts any of us would have committed either as a result of the treatment they'd been subjected to or in order to run away from it in a desperate effort to save themselves...and then to imprison them for weeks away from the sun and moon and fresh air...to lock them up in crowded rooms with no windows while social workers hunted around for alternate homes which didn't exist and all the while the kids got angrier and more cut-off from their feelings and then their surroundings, only this time there was no escape except further into the shadows and caverns of increasingly unsettled and hostile minds...to do this for weeks and months and then for a few years too and THEN release them into the commuity when they reached the magic and entirely arbitrary age of 18 when they could legally go live under a car and die from neglect unless they got arrested again and sent through the adult version of this same sort of institutionalized abuse and neglect, just to make sure they REALLY got the message that they were useless scum who must be made to pay for something they in no way brought upon themselves except for later when the only thing left for them to do, hatched in increasingly damaged and unsettled minds, was to fight back...fight at the mountains and the sky and Life and the ocean and all of Civilization because they didn't have a clue as to what "went wrong" with the Universe that it chose to fight with THEM and that they should have been forced to lead the life they did...and the only real battlefield they had to wage this war upon was their own already battered and bruised bodies and psyches...and that it was a battle they would lose in the end like they lost everything else...but not before producing two or four more children they would throw out upon the community the same way they'd been dumped and the numbers and the cycle would only grow and grow until by shear force of numbers THEY would begin to dictate how WE lived..we the normal and good and decent folk who walked by that juvenile jail daily, blissfully unaware and prefering it that way, of how we were undoing ourselves all the time we were abusing them.

It isn't that I or anyone else has the answers. It's our failure to ask the question again and again...to re-phrase it and then go looking to ask better questions, all the time knowing there can be no final answer to anything...no perfect state to be discovered because it goes agaist Nature to be perfect. But NOT to ask...NOT to look...NOT to question also goes against every positive impulse in our own Nature that got us any of the benefits we enjoy today. That act by itself, questioning everything, IS "Human Nature". To ever be satisfied with whatever answers you think you've found is to step outside of Life and curl up and die along the roadside.

I went into working with juveniles as someone lowering himself into a mine...willing to risk everything...my own pet beliefs, the esteem of family and friends and sanity too. I started by throwing over everything The Man wanted me to do...said I MUST do. Obviously these things hadn't worked...what was the point of my repeating them. But there IS a point...just as there's a reason our Nimrods want you to join them...in both cases it's so they can crush you...shatter any illusons you may have that things can be done better...or just differently. An insitution...even and maybe ESPECIALLY a failed and failing institution has a mortal stake in maintaining itself nonetheless...it's all the people who work within it understand or are willing to...and the best way to finally undo an "enemy" is to embrace him and take him or her down with you.

I did everything "wrong"...I pissed everybody off...I broke all their rules. But never in such a way that there were clear grounds for dismissing me, though I came close several times...had to... and I was fortunate to have the support of the Chief Public Defender, John Darrah, who went on to become a judge. Investigating "cases", it became clear that the children were all having their Constitutional rights violated...they were being charged with "crimes" of status...of age. Most of them started out by being "Incorrigible"...meaning their inept and abusive parents could no longer force them to submit. They either fought back against Authority or ran away from what were never really homes. And for this they could be locked up...because there was no legal way for them to be on their own...and there was nowhere to send them to, except the county detention facility where they invariably graduated to real crimes, though usually very minor. They were still without homes and options except for the state prisons and they'd be sent there just to make sure they'd be thoroughally pissed and disillusioned when they got out as adults...which they never really became.

I had no answers to offer...but surely there were a whole host of questions to be asked...and in asking them I at least found better questions.

It's the same with all this "banter" about Christianity and the feeling that at heart there's something dreadfully wrong and calculatingly so with it and our assumptions about it. Same with our claim to being Assyrians...and then direct descendants of Ashurbanipal and then the ONLY real Assyrians because although they all gave up on Ashur...we gave him up for something BETTER...something that gives us the exclusive right to claim to be the only real Assyrians left. In both cases...if you just step back far enough and really take a look at what these ideas ACTUALLY have led to, you'll know something is very wrong...you may not know what...or what to do about it...but surely no harm should come to you from asking and poking around...although of course great harm WILL come your way.

Andys have always been there to sooth your doubts and assuage your troubled minds...to coo in your ear that although things aren't perfect...it is indeed the "Best of all possible Worlds" and it wouldn't be this way if it wasn't "meant to be this way". That's pure unadulterated bullshit, for "Spreading" of which Andys have always gotten free room and board for the rest of their "divine" and "Christlike" lives on earth...my arse.

I never set out to "shake his Faith". I'd be as disappointed as hell in him if anything I said made him doubt Christianity and give up Cannibalism as a means to Real and Perfect Love and Everlasting Life. The point isn't to replace one demagogue with another...the point is to try to rekindle a human mind and conscience, two things together which make up Human Honor. That's all Christ...and thousands of others, have tried to do...get people to think again, or for the first time. It's the one thing that makes us human. This mind of ours...which is our single uniquely human atribute...for we can't run, or swim or fly to save our lives and are weaker than the common ant. We were not ever meant to tread a circus path from birth to death performing the rituals imposed upon us...I don't care HOW beneficent those rituals...how carefully planned out and lovingly and intelligently applied. There is nothing for us Humans to do...if we would become Human...than to question...to use this majestic, awful, sublime and terrible handful of cottage cheese we got from somewere for what it was intended for...to think.

And when you think, you ask questions. That's all thinking is really. The first person to think about Mechanics didn't think up a forklift or hydraulics...he or she began by asking...by wondering, if there was any way to lift an object heavier than human muscle alone had managed to accomplish till then. That's a question...it isn't an answer...not yet. And the question will never be answered finally and conclusively. By its very nature Thinking begins with and is rekindled by asking questions.

Go ask one. And, "would you please drop dead"?, don't qualify.

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