I watched Twelve Years A Slave last night. Which I’d been putting off, because I knew it would throw me for a loop. And it did.
While there’s some comfort in being able to sob during a horribly upsetting movie in the privacy of my own home, it does bring up the fact that slaves had no privacy whatsoever to do their grieving in. And that refugees from war and abused people and homeless people and people who roam the streets because they just don’t have enough mental competency to hold a job still have no privacy whatsoever to do their grieving in.
Way back when he was in middle school my son Tim came home one day, threw himself into a chair, threw his back pack down onto the floor, and said, “I’m ashamed to be white.”
Yup. Got it. It’s hard to look squarely at our country’s history — at any imperialistic country’s history — and realize that the way of life one takes for granted is based on the pain and suffering of so many others, both past and present. [Books you need to read: A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, by Stephen Kinzer]
But we can’t stop looking. It’s absolutely necessary to look. It’s absolutely necessary if human consciousness is going to develop any further. The way the human shadow affects the ego, we can’t do anything about the evil around us until we begin to see the evil in our own hearts, until we can start making the connections between “out there” and “in here.”
I’ve heard holocaust survivors say that part of “survivor’s guilt” is living with what they had to do to survive. Maybe you helped get others ready for the ovens, or stole food, or turned someone else in. Maybe it’s just that you had to stand by while so many others perished. In Twelve Years A Slave, the principal character Northrup has to stand by and try to show no emotion while other slaves are beaten, sexually abused, lynched, and oppressed in every conceivable way, which probably ate into his soul even more than the horrors done to him personally. Nor can he take any of the other slaves with him when he’s finally released. He has to walk off and leave them to their fate, which he knows his release is going to worsen. Northrup dealt with his “survivor’s guilt” by writing a book, by becoming an instrumental part of the underground railway for runaway slaves, and by spending the rest of his life working toward the abolishment of slavery.
But how do I deal with my survivor’s guilt? There are so many things to feel guilty about now. How is one single soul supposed to cope? Human beings fuck up — and fuck one another up, and fuck their environments up — on such a regular basis that anything positive someone does manage to accomplish gets sucked down and completely buried in the general madness.
My son’s statement all those years ago no longer goes far enough for me.
These days, I’m not just ashamed to be white.
I’m ashamed to be human.
