Secrets, Shame, and Bullying

¡Hola! Everybody…
Here's something I once wrote as a response to bullying.

* * *

-=[ Shame ]=-

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

-- George Bernard Shaw

The whole fifth grade class was laughing at him… including me.

His father stumbled into the middle of a spelling test arguing loudly with our teacher. His clothes were ragged and he was unkempt. He was there to make a case for his son, Kevin, who sat next to me. Kevin and I were the smartest kids in the class. Kevin was painfully shy and no one really liked him to begin with, so now everybody, including me, was laughing at him because his father was obviously a dope fiend and he showed up in the middle of a spelling test totally out of his mind. He was nodding out even as he argued his son’s case.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember the shame. I can still remember vividly the shame on Kevin’s face, the humiliation in the knowledge that now everyone knew his deadly secret -- that his father was a “junkie.” I remember this because I remember my own shame too, because I felt hypocritical.

It’s so easy to join the mob, so easy to feel a part of the crowd at the expense of someone else. The mob mentality has no mercy. Just look at most of today’s headlines and you’ll bear witness to what the mob mentality, or the very human tendency to create scapegoats, can create.

The fact was that I knew too well that shame. My own father was an addict, and I remember when all my friends encircled me one day while chanting, “Your father’s a junkie, your father’s a junkie.” And I remember how I felt so ashamed, so humiliated, and so angry. I couldn’t resolve the anger and shame I felt about my father because I loved him so much and all those feelings were too overwhelming -- I didn’t know how to process all that. I just stood there in the middle of that circle tears of anger flowing until I lashed out at the first one to get close enough to me and I punched him in the nose. And that’s when the mob turned on me and I went home with a split lip and torn clothes.

Deep inside I hated my father for making me go through that, but I also adored him. He was so intelligent. I used to love to sit on his lap and put my ear to his chest and listen to the soft rumble of his voice as he taught me something or spoke. My father was like a God to me. And now I hated him and I hated myself for hating him because it felt so wrong.

I just didn’t know how to handle the inner conflict. So I guess somewhere, somehow, I internalized all those conflicting feelings and became ashamed of myself for everything: for my father, for my feelings, for my inability to fix it.

My father was a greatest storyteller and on some days, he would gather all the kids on our block and entertain us with stories. I guess it was a testament to his storytelling gift that he could keep us transfixed on that Lower East Side stoop and you could hear a pin drop. I was raised in a neighborhood where drug addicts were a common part of the urban landscape. As children we would place bets on how far a junkie would nod. Some junkies would nod so far, bent over by the waist, that you would swear they would tip over and fall. But they never did.

My father would nod when he told my friends stories. At first, we would sit there for what would seem minutes because invariably there was a punch line, a lesson, or a resolution to the story. At first, my friends wouldn’t say anything, but then my father’s nodding got worse and one day while arguing over a game or a rule, as boys are won’t to do, it came out: the outspoken truth that my father was a “junkie.” It was a hard lesson to learn at such a tender age.

Yet I sat there and laughed at Kevin just like everyone else did and even at that young age (5th grade), I knew it was wrong. I knew that I was being a phony because I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore, I wanted to be like the others, so I joined in on the cruelty. In making Kevin the scapegoat, the rest of us were saved from confronting our own shame. I wanted to reach out to Kevin, but he refused, perhaps sensing something worse: that I pitied him. Eventually I told Kevin my secret and while we never became close friends, in the fifth grade we stuck it out together. I did so even though even talking to Kevin made me an outsider, but that was OK, because I think it was at that time I decided I would always be an outsider. I reasoned that no one could really know me if I was an outsider, so fuck them.

And in that way, I began to build a wall of protection that kept others out so no one could ever know me -- a fortress surrounding my heart.

Shame is a prison. I don’t know for sure, if this was all the beginning, or the setting of the table for my own life, but the one thing I’m certainly of is that our secrets kill us, as surely as cigarettes or drugs. Secrets kill because embedded in our secrets lies our shame.

If you notice I’m not that particular about who reads my madness, but I am particular about making someone -- even a stranger -- feel excluded because I know that feeling intimately. It has haunted me for most of my life. Not many people can successfully accuse me of not having a sense of humor, but I abhor humor at the expense of another.

Even now, sometimes it’s easy for me to join in with the mob and feast on another’s soul so that I could feel better about myself. It’s the easiest thing because it trips that “You belong” mechanism. I've done it before and felt stupid after when the object of ridicule was kind to me.

But really: how many of us are laughing or forming cliques, or creating scapegoats because we too have secrets? How many of us can say we’re not turning away from our own shame at some level?

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...

Sunday Sermon [Self Righteousness]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It is in those moments when life gets most difficult that we have to remind ourselves to continue to relish the sweetness of its fruits…

* * *

-=[ The Unbearable Feeling of Separateness ]=-

Self righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.
-- Eric Hoffer

In the philosophical novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, author Milan Kundera challenges Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence -- the idea that the universe and its events have already occurred and will recur infinitely. The novel’s themes put forward the alternative; that each person has only one life to live, and that which occurs in life occurs only once and never again (hence the “lightness” of being). On the contrary, the concept of eternal recurrence forces a “heaviness” on our lives and on the decisions we make (and gives them “weight.”) Nietzsche believed this heaviness could be either a tremendous burden or great benefit depending on the individual’s perspective.

Following Kundera’s logic, life is insignificant, and decisions do not matter and therefore rendered light. “If we have only one life to live,” goes the saying, “we might as well not have lived at all.” The awareness of life occurring once and never again means our lives in themselves are insignificant. The insignificance of decisions -- our being -- causes us great suffering, perceived as the unbearable lightness of being. This insignificance is existentially unbearable when it is considered that people want their lives to have meaning.

I don’t agree with Kundera’s position, but I have to admit that the likelihood of our lives amounting to nothing but a grand Cosmic Joke( to which we all know the punchline) is an anxiety that lurks just underneath everyone’s consciousness (by the way, the book is an excellent read).

In my experience our actions and thoughts and words send out karmic ripples that affect us, those we love, and humankind in general. In fact, these ripples become so intertwined with past ripples and the ripples of others that we could never fully know the full implications of our actions. That’s why intention is so important. But here again, I have to concede the well-worn cliche that enough of the roads of hell are paved with good intentions…

I am not an upstanding citizen. I break rules, I swear, I am oftentimes vulgar, and I am no “giant” among humans. I never invented anything worthwhile, or have I liberated throngs of men and women. There have been many times I have acted immorally, cowardly even. I was not a good role model for my younger siblings and quite possibly influenced them in bad ways. I have manipulated, stole, cheated, lied, used women (and been used). At various times in my life I have been hopelessly addicted, a criminal, a failed pimp, institutionalized, and seen and done things most people never live to retell. When I die, a significant portion of those who will bother to remember me will remember me as an asshole, or even worse. And they will have good reason to. In short, I am no gentleman. Nor do I want to be one.

I am no longer the same man I was 20 years ago, and I do try live my life in an ethically and morally grounded manner. I no longer pillager and plunder, but these are precepts, not commandments, and life is a work of art, not a set of sums. I find that I am much happier when I make an effort to remember my transgressions. It makes me less self-righteous. I made a promise to myself many years ago I would never become one of those self-righteous reformed motherfuckers. We have met, at one time or another, a "former sinner" who today spends his or her time telling everyone else how to live, which God to believe in, and the so-called motherfuckin "Truth." Self-righteousness -- that essentially selfish human weakness of seeing yourself as separate -- is most evident in the hypocrite. If you do not believe me, take a closer look around you, read the signs.

Eric Hoffer proposed that self-righteousness (and fanaticism) are rooted in self-hatred and insecurity. He believed that a passionate obsession with the private lives of other people is merely a cowardly attempt to compensate for a lack of character in one’s own life. A core principle of Hoffer's was his insight that mass movements are interchangeable; he notes fanatical Nazis later becoming fanatical Communists, fanatical Communists later becoming fanatical anti-Communists, and Saul, persecutor of Christians, becoming Paul, a fanatical Christian. You can see this dynamic at work with the teabaggers which is a continuation of the right wing’s racist Southern Strategy. For the “true believer” the substance of the mass movement isn’t so important as that they are part of that movement.

I think as a society we exemplify the grabbing and holding for attention that comes from a lack of self-esteem. How else can you explain the right wing (or “reality” TV shows)? We do this even in our quest for a “relationship,” or love. Love is spoken about as if it could be possessed.

“Me! Mine!”

We watch people with boundary issues humiliate themselves on national TV and say to ourselves, smugly:

“I would never do that!”

We hear of the downfall of an acquaintance or friend we note:

“I’m better than him/ her!”

Most people, when they think of selfishness, think of the drive to acquire material goods, but there are many other forms of selfishness. Self-righteousness is about holding all the attention we can get, or denying others the possibility of sharing with us in any community. For the fact remains that if your most humiliation or shameful action were written on your forehead, you would pull your cap low. All of us would.

We like to represent ourselves as being noble or “right.” I don’t give a fuck about “right,” I am interested in exploring the many levels of truth. And if I were being truthful to my self, I would note I could never deign to tell someone else what’s appropriate or inappropriate. I was a fuckin criminal at one time, how hypocritical would that be? We like to present to the world this carefully manufactured, oh-so-socially-acceptable image, but God forbid if this pretentious exercise actually included taking yourself out of your comfort zone. Listen champ: what if the status quo you're so desperately trying to mimic needs to be changed in order for a just social order to exist?

The car: Big shit, so you're destroying our ecology in style. The diamonds? Mined by children who don't live past adulthood somewhere in Africa. That iPad? Put together by a pregnant woman in who committed suicide rather than continue to be subjected to work conditions that no civil society would accept. Appropriate? Who the fuck really gives a fuckin good goddam what you deem appropriate?!! Look in the mirror, motherfuckers.

This form of behavior illustrates my point on the drawbacks of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Simply put, some people see themselves as separate from the rest and they compensate for their perceived lack by labeling others as different or “less than.” Some define themselves almost exclusively by how much different (and better) they are than others. Is this a reality?

I will state right here that I’m not concerned with “convincing” anyone of my worldview. I don't give a fuck about what you consider appropriate. My concern is to explore and attempt to present the truth as well as I can. Most of the idiots who condemn without reason or rhyme will never be convinced of anything except of the forthrightness of their own foolishness. It's a lot like swirling your finger around your anus and proclaiming that stink perfume.

The essential point here, my “larger” heart tells me, is that all of life is fragile and interconnected. We have a more generous spirit when we are in touch with the fact that it is only when we look at the world purely through our ego-driven neuroses, that the world becomes fearful (or "inappropriate"). When we look at things from the perspective of self-righteous indignation we see only a void and the compulsive need to claim to be something better.

My heart also tells me that if there is inequality, then the status quo needs to change. What if social acceptability isn't so goddamned acceptable? My conforming within the confines of social acceptability doesn’t equal growth. Just because I act as a gentleman, doesn’t mean I am evolving as a man, as a human being, as part of the evolutionary process. And don’t tell me I can come to your table only on your terms. That’s bullshit -- hypocritical bullshit.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery fro civilization…

Secrets

¡Hola! Everybody…
I need a vacation!

* * *

-=[ Shame ]=-

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The whole fifth grade class was laughing at him. Including me.

His father stumbled into the middle of a spelling test arguing loudly with our teacher. His clothes were ragged and he was unkempt. He was there to make a case for his son, Kevin, who sat next to me. Kevin and I were the smartest kids in the class. Kevin was painfully shy and no one really liked him to begin with, so now everybody, including me, was laughing at him because his father was obviously a dope fiend and he showed up in the middle of a spelling test totally out of his mind. He was nodding out even as he argued his son’s case.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember the shame. I still can remember the shame on Kevin’s face, the humiliation in the knowledge that now everyone knew his deadly secret -- that his father was a “junkie.” I remember my own shame too, because I felt hypocritical.

It’s so easy to join the mob, so easy to feel a part of the crowd at the expense of someone else. The mob mentality has no mercy. Just look at most of today’s headlines and you’ll be a witness to what the mob mentality, or the very human tendency to create scapegoats, can create.

The fact was that I knew too well that shame. My own father was an addict, and I remember when all my friends one day encircled me while chanting, “Your father’s a junkie, your father’s a junkie,” and I felt so ashamed, so humiliated, and so angry. I couldn’t resolve the anger and shame I felt about my father because I loved him so much and all those feelings were too overwhelming -- I didn’t know how to process all that. I just stood there in the middle of that circle tears of anger flowing until I lashed out at the first one to get close enough to me and I punched him in the nose. And that’s when the mob turned on me and I went home with a split lip and torn clothes.

Deep inside I hated my father for making me go through that, but I also adored my father. He was so smart. I used to love to sit on his lap and put my ear to his chest and listen to the soft rumble of his voice as he taught me something or spoke. My father was like a God to me. And now I hated him and I hated myself for hating him because I felt it was wrong.

I just didn’t know how to handle the inner conflict. So I guess somewhere, somehow, I internalized all those conflicting feelings and became ashamed of myself for everything: for my father, for my feelings, for my inability to fix it.

My father was a greatest storyteller and on some days, he would gather all the kids on our block and entertain us with stories. I guess it was a testament to his storytelling gift that he could keep us transfixed on that Lower East Side stoop and you could hear a pin drop. I was raised in a neighborhood where drug addicts were a common part of the urban landscape. As children we would place bets on how far a junkie would nod. Some junkies would nod so far, bent over by the waist that you would swear they would tip over and fall. But they never did.

My father would nod when he told my friends stories. At first, we would sit there for what would seem minutes because invariably there was a punch line, a lesson, or a resolution to the story. At first, my friends wouldn’t say anything, but then my father’s nodding got worse and one day while arguing over a game or a rule, as boys are won’t to do, it came out: the outspoken truth that my father was a “junkie.” It was a hard lesson to be learned at such a tender age.

Yet I sat there and laughed at Kevin just like everyone else did and even at that young age (5^th grade), I knew it was wrong. I knew that I was being a phony because I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore, I wanted to be like the others, so I joined in on the cruelty. In making Kevin the scapegoat, the rest of us were saved from confronting our own shame. I wanted to reach out to Kevin, but he refused, sensing something worse: that I pitied him. Eventually I told Kevin my secret and while we never became close friends, in the fifth grade we stuck it out together. I did so even though even talking to Kevin made me an outsider, but that was OK, because I think it was at that time I decided I would always be an outsider. I reasoned that no one could really know me if I was an outsider, so fuck them.

And in that way, I began to build a wall of protection that kept others out so no one could ever know me -- a fortress surrounding my heart.

Shame is a prison. I don’t know for sure, if this was all the beginning, or the setting of the table for my own life, but I certainly know that our secrets kill us, as surely as cigarettes or drugs. Secrets kill because embedded in our secrets lies our shame.

If you notice I’m not that particular about who reads this madness, but I am particular about making someone -- even a stranger -- feel excluded because I know that feeling intimately. It has haunted me for most of my life. Not many people can successfully accuse me of not having a sense of humor, but I abhor humor at the expense of another.

Even now, sometimes it’s easy for me to join in with the mob and feast on another’s soul so that I could feel better about myself. It’s the easiest thing because it trips that “You belong” mechanism. I've done it before and felt stupid after when the object of ridicule was kind to me.

But really: how many of us are laughing or forming cliques, or creating scapegoats because we too have secrets? How many of us can say we’re not turning away from our own shame at some level?

Love,

Eddie

Moments

¡Hola! Everybody...
Ever had a really embarrassing moment... ?

* * *

-=[ Embarrassing Moments ]=-
“The one thing you can do is to do nothing. Wait…You will find that you survive humiliation and that’s an experience of incalculable value. -- Thomas Stearns Eliot

I don’t know why I’m posting this. Not too long ago, some friends were sharing embarrassing moments.

::sigh::

My life – I couldn’t write this shit…

Two moments come up for me. One is a little tragic; the other is somewhat funny (if you weren’t me).

I grew up in some rough neighborhoods with some really strange characters. One friend, who had just gotten out of prison, was staying with me. He didn’t have anywhere to go and he was a close friend, so I agreed he could come stay with me while he got situated.

One day, I came home from work, when he promptly appeared in with a pillowcase full of jewelry. I mean there was a pillowcase and it was literally filled with high quality jewelry. I noticed there was a piece with the Jewish “La Chaim” symbol on it. I explained its significance to my friend (who couldn’t care less). He gave it to me, actually let me have my pick of a few pieces as gratitude for my generous hospitality. I knew it was stolen goods, but my ethics as a young manweren’t all that evolved.

The next day I wore the piece to work and the girls I worked with were all admiring it. At that time, I was a notorious fabulist: couldn’t tell the truth if you paid me and I always exaggerated or modified. So I asked about the piece, I said it was from my “new girlfriend.” I thought this was a good move on my part because it made one of the girls I had my eye on jealous.

Then there was this homely girl no one liked. She asked to see the piece and when she turned the medallion over she began screaming.

I mean she began screaming -- like horror picture-Friday-the-13^th-you’re-killing-me screaming. This was in a corporate office. Everybody stopped. Everything stopped.

She took a breath and then yelled out for everyone to hear, “This is my chain! This is my jewelry!” and she commenced to her banshee wailing.

Not knowing what to do and feeling somewhat put upon, I affected an annoyed attitude and calmly replied, “You must be mistaken. This chain was a gift from my girlfriend.” I looked at her as if she were a leper and asked her to let go of my chain.

She wouldn’t let go and she turned the medallion over once again, pointing where her now deceased mother left her an inscription with her name on it.

There are over 8 million people in The Big City, people... That had to be the most embarrassing moment in my life up to that poin

But there’s another, more humiliating experience.

I once dated a court reporter for several years. We were together for a while. I was in love with her ass. Literally. Her ass was a work of art. made you believe that there was a God and it was a man. She had the most exquisitely shaped ass ever. She was also 5’11” tall in her bare feet. She had the longest, most beautiful legs. I stand at 5’7” (actually 5'6" and three-quarters). I was in love with her lower half. She had one horrible deformity however: she was also very politically conservative. She claimed to be a virgin and would not engage in vaginal intercourse. She would fellate me and eventually I convinced her that anal sex was a good resolution to our sexual haggling, but I couldn’t enter the va-jayjay (eventually I would).

Anyway, we would have these huge arguments over political and religious matters (Reagan had just become president). One day, right before we broke up, she told me that I would never amount to anything. She said I was the most brilliant man she ever met (and the only reason she put up with me), but like most brilliant people, I assumed the rules didn’t apply to me. My response was to tell her to go fuck herself and how being a sexually repressed hypocrite didn’t give her the right to pass judgment on me.

Fast forward to about ten years. I am standing in a November drizzle shackled in front of the Manhattan courts. I have just gotten off the bus from Riker’s Island where I was incarcerated pending my case. It’s the day I’m going to be sentenced. Obviously, I’m not looking forward to this day. People, “regular” people walking to work, are staring at me and the group of men like me who are shackled hand and foot. Wall Street, Chinatown, and the courts, are all within walking distance of each other in NYC, and there are thousands of people walking by. It’s humiliating. And I’m thinking to myself that I hope I don’t see anyone I know. And who do I see walking down the street? Yup, my ex, the repressed wanna-be virgin of the conservative mind-set.

I try to make myself invisible. I stare at me feet and slump my shoulders. She walks right by me and I’m relieved. She didn’t see me, I think to myself. Then I hear...

“Eddie?” She stops, starts walking toward me and she says again, “Eddie?”

“Eddie?!!”

I look up and we make eye contact and there’s panic in her eyes, she’s concerned. She tries to run up to me only to be stopped by a corrections guard who tells her to stand back. My fellow inmates are by now commenting on the “fine bitch” trying to save me and she's walking alongside me asking me questions I can’t answer. All I can do is shrug.

Later, I allocute to my crime as part of a plea bargain, . Not only am I sentenced, I have to stand up in a court of law and verbally admit to everything I have accused of…

That was a dark day.

Love,

Eddie

Self-Righteousness

¡Hola! Everybody...
When will we learn to look at our own shit before judging other people's shit? Scratch ‘n’ sniff ma’ufccas!

***

-=[ Self-Righteousness ]=-

Self-righteous indignation is the loud din created to drown out our own guilt.

Self-righteousness -- that essentially selfish human weakness of seeing yourself as separate -- is most evident in the hypocrite. If you do not believe me, take a closer look around you, read the signs.

I think as a society we exemplify the grabbing and holding for attention that comes with the narrow focus on self. How else can you explain “reality” TV shows? We do this even in our quest for a “relationship,” or love. Love is spoken about as if it could be possessed.

“Me! Mine!”

“I would never do that!”

“I’m better than him/ her!”

Most people, when they think of selfishness, think of the drive to acquire material goods, but there are many other forms of selfishness. Self-righteousness is about holding all the attention we can get, or denying others the possibility of sharing with us in any community.

We like to represent ourselves as being for equality, that we should all get along. But God forbid this getting along includes taking you out of your comfort zone, or if the status quo needs to be changed in order for real unity to exist. On the other hand, there are always the annoying “allegations,” the malicious gossip, the exclusion/ inclusion of certain individuals based on I don’t know what, the “the nerve of him/ her,” “he’s this or that… ”

Sssssssssssshhhhhh… hear that... ?

If you listen closely, you can hear the whispers. Those are definitely not coquis boys and girls! LOL

It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic, or at least sad. My question is this: why so much energy on obfuscation? What is the motivation there? Whenever I see the pointing of fingers and the moralizing, I am reminded of the Clinton/ Lewinsky affair and how it turned out later that the most vocal of the moralists, those who condemned and railed the most, had more than a few skeletons (“youthful indiscretions”) in their own closets.

The reason why I bring this up is that I feel this form of behavior illustrates my point of the drawbacks of hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Simply put, some people see themselves as separate from you or me, they perceive us as a threat, or as “less than.” For some people, they define themselves almost exclusively as how much different (and better) they are than others. Is this a reality or the consequences of a weak self-esteem and insecurity?

Point out racism and that makes one a racist because (OMG!) the sheeple believe the election of an African-American president means racism no longer exists.

Point out the connection between White Nationalist fascist ideology, Tea Baggers, and recent violence and I guess that also makes me a racist.

Lemme see: if I were to point out the emperor’s nakedness, then that would make a nudist too, right?!! LOL!

This is hypocrisy, plain and simple…

Fact is this: not one of these people knows me in any significant manner -- never even met me in person. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop the allegations, the gossip, and all the other bullshit. In terms of debate? A debate presupposes that you come to the table with an adequate understanding of the components of an argument. Something I don’t see in use around here. And no, just stating something does not constitute an argument.

I will state right here that I’m not concerned with “convincing” anyone of my worldview. My concern is to attempt to present the truth as well as I can. Most of the idiots who condemn without reason or rhyme will never be convinced of anything except of the forthrightness of their own foolishness.

The essential point here, my “larger” heart tells me, is that all of life is fragile and interconnected. We have a more generous spirit when we are in touch with the fact that it is only when we look at the world purely through our ego-driven neuroses, that the world becomes fearful. When we look at things from the perspective of the “mini me,” we see only a void and a need to be something better.

My heart also tells me that if there is inequality, then the status quo needs to change. Don’t tell me I can come to your table only on your terms. That’s bullshit -- hypocritical bullshit.

Love,

Eddie

Shame and Violence

¡Hola! Everybody...
I will be out in the field for most of the day. That's cool. The following is another “summer rerun.” It’s a edited (shortened) story about shame and violence. I’ve submitted it to an anthology on bullying. Let me know if you have any constructive insights...

* * *

-=[ Shame ]=-

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

-- George Bernard Shaw

The whole fifth grade class was laughing at him. Including me.

His father stumbled into the middle of a spelling test and began arguing with our teacher. His clothes were ragged and he was unkempt. He was there to make a case for his son, Kevin, who sat next to me. Kevin and I were the smartest kids in the class, but Kevin was painfully shy and no one really liked him to begin with, so now everybody, including me, was laughing at him because his father was a junkie and he showed up in the middle of a spelling test totally out of his mind. He was nodding out even as he argued his son’s case.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember the shame. I remember the shame on Kevin’s face, the humiliation in the knowledge that now everyone knew his deadly secret – that his father was a junkie. I remember my own shame too, because I felt hypocritical.

It’s so easy to join the mob, so easy to feel a part of the crowd at the expense of someone else. The mob mentality has no mercy.

The fact was that I too knew that shame. My own father was a heroin addict, and I remember when all my friends one day encircled me and chanted, “Your father’s a junkie, your father’s a junkie,” and I remember the deep feeling of shame, of humiliation, and of anger. I was much too young and I had no way to resolve the anger and shame I felt about my father because I adored him so and all those feelings -- I just didn’t know how to process all those feelings. I just stood there in the middle of that circle and cried tears of anger until I lashed out at the first one fool enough to get close to me and I punched him in the nose. And that’s when the mob turned on me and I went home with a split lip and torn clothes.

I hated him – my father – for making me go through that, but I adored my father so much. He was so smart. I used to love to sit on his lap and put my ear to his chest and listen to the soft rumble of his voice as he taught me something or had a conversation with someone else. My father was like a God to me. And now I hated him and I loathed myself for that.

I was too young and didn’t have the psychological resources. So I guess somewhere, somehow, I internalized all those feelings and became ashamed of myself for everything: for my father and for my feelings.

My father was one of the greatest storytellers and on some days, he would gather all the kids on the block and tell us stories. I guess it was a testament to his storytelling gift that he could keep us transfixed on that Lower East Side stoop, and you could hear a pin drop. I was raised in a neighborhood where junkies were a common part of the urban landscape. As children, we would place bets on how far a junkie would nod. Some junkies would nod so far, bent over by the waist that you would swear they would tip over and fall.

But they never did.

My father would nod when he told my friends stories. At first, we would sit there for what would seem minutes because invariably there was a punch line, a moral, or a resolution to the story. At first, my friends wouldn’t say anything, but eventually my father’s nodding got worse and one day while arguing over a game or a rule, as boys are won’t to do, it came out: the unspoken truth that my father was a junkie. It was a hard lesson learned at such a tender age.

Yet I sat there and laughed at Kevin just like everyone else did and even as a fifth-grader I knew it was wrong. I knew that I was being a phony because I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore, I wanted to be like the others, so I joined in on the cruelty. After, I tried to reach out to Kevin, but he refused, sensing something worse: that I pitied him. Eventually, I told Kevin my secret and while we never became close friends, in the fifth grade we stuck it out together. I did so even though talking to Kevin made me an outsider, but that was OK, because I think it was at that time I decided I would always be an outsider. I reasoned that no one could really know me if I was an outsider, so fuck them.

And in that way, I began to build a wall of protection that kept others out so no one could ever know me -- a fortress surrounding my heart. I made sure no one could ever know me...

Shame is a prison. I don’t know for sure if this was the beginning, or the setting of the table for my own life, but I certainly know that our secrets kill us, as surely as cigarettes or drugs. Secrets kill because embedded in our secrets is our shame. Eventually, my shame would guide me on my own journey to destruction, addiction, prisons, and intuitions, and it almost killed me. Shame fed my inner rage. A rage I learned to keep secret deep inside of me. A rage turned inwards that almost destroyed my life.

Even now, sometimes it’s easy for me to join in with the mob and feast on another’s soul so that I could feel better about myself. It’s the easiest thing – because it trips that “You belong” button. I’ve done it before and felt stupid after when the object of ridicule was kind to me.

But really: how many of us are laughing or forming cliques because we too have secrets? How many of us can say we’re not ashamed at some level?

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog [The Best Little Whorehouse in DC]

¡Hola! Everybody...
You know, I’m so sick and tired of hearing white lawmakers saying that if they said something similar to Doña Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment, their political careers would be over.

Huh?!!

We have, like over 200 years of crackers like Pat Buchanan, Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and many, many others saying fucked up shit about people of color! LOL! Shit! Current Sen. “Crackhead” Sessions is a US senator though he called a black man a “boy” and likened civil rights organizations to the KKK. Buchanan is a Holocaust denier and self-professed Hitler admirer! LOL A black muthafucka can’t even admit to knowing, let alone admire, a Farrakhan, for example, without having to pay dire political consequences...

And when are we going to put to rest the myth that whiteness is neutral?

I may not be able to finish this today...

* * *

-=[The C Street Boys: Guilt, Shame & Sex ]=-

Or: The Best Little Whorehouse in DC

It’s not widely reported in the MSM, but apparently there is a Christian-run neocon whorehouse in DC on C St. Almost all the neocon bad boys such as Ensign and Sanders -- both of whom called for Clinton’s resignation during the Lewinsky affair, by the way-- stay there. They fuck their mistresses there, sit down and “fellowship,” sharing the sordid details of the extra-marital affairs there. Who knows what those repressed freaks do there!

The question, I guess, is why do so many who set themselves up as morally superior, often act in a depraved manner when they think no one is looking.

While the answer to such a question cannot be distilled into a snazzy republican soundbite, I do feel that shame and guilt, combined with sex and power often makes for strange bedfellows (pun intended!).

Let’s start with guilt, or the feeling of being found out. Everyone has experienced guilt at one time or another. In fact, literally millions of people are burdened by feelings of guilt of all kinds, especially sexual guilt. But what is guilt, where does it come from, and more specifically, what is sexual guilt?

Guilt comes from an Old English term gylt which refers to a fine for an offense. In modern usage, guilt signifies the state of having committed a transgression, of being in violation of the law. Subjectively, guilt stands for the sense of having done wrong, of being blameworthy. It is a concern over the rightness or wrongness of one’s action. This concern implies a worry that one might be found out or caught, suffering consequences. This form of worry can be manifested even without a person having done anything wrong; the mere thought or intention to do so is sometimes enough to evoke extreme feelings of guilt.

Oftentimes, our feelings of guilt are disproportionate to their causes. It is as if we’re conditioned to have a guilt button that goes off at the slightest provocation.

Let me say that not all guilt is unhealthy. Guilt, like anger or jealousy, is a normal emotion. Psychologists like to distinguish between what they call situational guilt and modal guilt. Situational guilt comes from actually having a committed a wrong (as in causing a woman’s anus to be sore *grin*); modal guilt is the vague feeling of having sinned, which clings to a person like an unpleasant odor. Situational guilt is healthy, but modal guilt is neurotic. Modal guilt is a frozen feeling that creates a habitual pattern, which is dysfunctional because it blocks the free flow of your thoughts and actions.

Still with me?!! LOL there’s much more to guilt, it has deeper roots that reach down into the human condition itself, but it’s getting late.

Let’s move on to shame, or the feeling of being unworthy. While guilt and shame are closely related, there is a significant difference. Guilt is the bad feeling we get from having known we have done something wrong or bad. Shame, on the other hand, is the painful feeling that we are bad or unworthy. This distinction between doing something unworthy and being unworthy has come to play in the field of addiction and recovery. Shamed people believe that something is basically wrong with them as human beings, while guilty people believe that they have done something wrong that can be corrected. Another major difference is that shamed people are usually bothered by their shortcomings, whereas guilty people notice their wrongful acts. Finally, a shamed person lives in fear of being abandoned because they feel unworthy (and you thought it was your parent’s fault, huh? LOL)

Looked at in this way, one can see how shame may follow guilt or how it may feed guilt. The only way a shamed person can heal is by changing their self-concept so that she gains self-confidence or ego-strength. The two emotions combine to create a revolving door that keeps a person trapped in a perpetual spin. Therefore, we must deal directly with guilt and shame if we want to evolve and overcome sexual dysfunction. Whew! LOL

If you’re wondering what this has to do with neocons, well, just note that shame and guilt are the two most widely used measures of control in religious orthodoxy...

Still with me?

Guilt and shame are especially prominent in the area of sexuality. Many men and women feel guilty about sex itself; they think sex dirty or base. (Please note that many practitioners know that even those clients who deny having guilt feelings soon discover, when confronted with their unconscious that they are in fact sitting on a boatload of guilt.)

Many avoid having sex, or if they do have sex, it is in the form of a fast encounter in the dark. Such people almost never talk about sex, or have difficulty in discussing sexual matters openly. Their sexual frustration spills over into their marital and professional lives. Oftentimes, they act out their repressed sexual desires in highly dysfunctional ways; or become obsessed with sexual acts they consider taboo. This sex-negative attitude is most clearly evident in religious fundamentalist circles.

As those in the helping professions can attest, the forms of sexual guilt and shame and their permutations are almost infinite. Sex is most troubling to those who know least about sex, and sexual ignorance dogs the lives of religious puritans. As one of my professors phrased it, “Those who are religiously rigid tend to be sexually frigid.”

It’s no wonder the politicians who claim to hold the higher moral ground often fall short of their own standards. In having made sex a “problem,” Christianity has paid a huge disservice to civilization. Driving human sexuality into the dark recesses of their psyches, religious fundamentalists become a slave to it, rather than its master.

Love,

Eddie

The Shadow Knows...

¡Hola! Everybody... Whew! Because I suffer from an incurable curiosity, I turned on the TV machine this AM to a show I normally refuse to watch -- Morning Joe, on MSNBC. I wasn’t expecting anything new from these media jackals, but I was curious to see how far they would contort themselves in order to spin Gov. Sanford’s philandering and Gawd-awful press conference. I have to say I was disgusted. While readily admitting the sins of this neocon creep, their gist was, “They were out to get him.” “They” being everybody from SC GOP hacks who hated him for being a “maverick,” to a media all too willing to engage in “gotcha!” journalism. WTF?!!

* * *

-=[ The Unbearable Darkness of Light ]=-

That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

-- Carl G. Jung

Mark Sanford, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, catholic priests as serial buggerers of boys... Ahhhh... the long and storied tradition of right-wing religious hypocrisy! Reflecting on the most recent neoconservative moral crime wave, I am reminded of how simple conceptualizations of “good vs. evil” often lead to a perversion of morality. By separating evil from good, the light from the dark, we condemn our dark sides to the recesses of our unconscious and in that way they gain power over our actions.

Take the Iraqi war, for example. The rationale for that war was framed in simplistic terms of the “evil doers” versus us. It’s the “us” against “them” mentality. Such language means we’re busy creating an enemy, oftentimes an enemy with no grounding in reality.

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and all that was necessary is to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them!

::sigh::

It’s a child’s moral understanding of the world, people, that stands in contrast to a mature, evolved sense of morality that understands that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

I like to say that repression is a poor substitute for morality. Behind the repressed darkness lies that which has been rotting inside of us. You witness this when a member of the Morality Police is caught with their pants down (or their hands in someone else’s pants/ panties). A great example here is the Clinton/ Lewinsky affair (referenced these past 24 hours more times than I can count). After Clinton was vilified for the “BJ heard around the world,” it was discovered that his greatest critics, those who moralized most vociferously, were themselves engaging in adulterous affairs while they were sermonizing the rest of us! Newt Gingrich and Mark Sanford come to mind, both of whom had more than a few choice words for Clinton and anyone else caught fuckin their cabana boy.

One primary purpose of religion is to define wrong and right and to prescribe human moral behavior accordingly. Every religion has its way of slicing the moral pie into good and evil; the more razor-sharp the slice, the more “clear-cut” the ethics.

In a black and white universe of “evil” versus “good,” right and wrong are two distinct paths, one leading to heaven (and virgins!), the other to hell (anal sex with “been-there-done-that sluts” LOL!). The so-called true believers of any tradition say it’s an either/ or choice. As the Dylan song famously says, “You got to serve somebody. It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord. But you got to serve somebody.”

We vilify the dark at our own expense, because light and darkness aren’t separate, they define one another, the light contains darkness, and darkness contains light. In other words, we must learn to love even that which we like least in ourselves or suffer an existential alienation. Growth -- true growth -- means integration. Christians have not done well with integrating their dark sides. This is part of the reason we see so many Christian fundamentalists failing to live up to their own ideals.

Christian theology has not always done well in acknowledging the darkness. This influences the capacity for higher-level stages of moral reasoning. If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on achieving absolute purity and perfection. In this way, we fall into the trap of adhering to a perfection that leads to a rigid perfectionism. This form of speculation creates an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. A god thoroughly purged of anything that we consider dark. When we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, we take away from our ability to handle the darkness within us. And because we can’t handle it, we suppress it. And the more we suppress it, the more it takes on its own life, because we have not brought our consciousness to bear upon the dark. Before we know it, we’re in serious trouble.

Just ask mark Sanford...

Love,

Eddie

Shame and Violence

¡Hola! Everybody... Imagine having me as a student in your classroom. LOL! I went to university at a later age and I got my money’s worth. I challenged, and was often challenged in return, all my professors. If you didn’t have your shit together, I was mos’ def going to ream you a new asshole. Most

professors enjoyed my participation. Most professors were dedicated individuals deeply invested in intellectual development. Most...

::arches eyebrow::

In fact, I remember one professor catching me in conversation with one of her colleagues and she stopped and asked him, pointing to me, “Is this guy in your class?” When the professor affirmed that I was, she added, in these exact words, “Well, you better have your shit together because Eddie doesn’t play around!”

LMAO!

I loved that woman and she helped me tremendously.

I’ll be in prison all day, running my women’s prison workshop and running my men’s group at night. Make it a great day, it may be your last...

* * *

-=[ Shame, Guilt and Violence ]=-

“’How do you know so much about everything?’ was asked of a very wise and intelligent man; and the answer was ‘By never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to anything of which I was ignorant.’”

-- John Abbott (1821–1893) Prime minister of Canada

Some of you know that I work in the area of criminal justice. More specifically, for the last eight years, I’ve participated in the creation of a community-based model for supporting the men and women returning from incarceration. One of areas of interest is whether pure punishment, without regard to rehabilitation -- or in many cases, habilitation -- is an effective means of social justice. Of course, it isn’t. In fact, there’s an empirically strong case for shame as a major factor in violence and violent crime. I tend to agree with this, generally speaking. I actually see it all the time. Psychiatrist James Gilligan, who has worked in prisons for 35 years, describes an interesting experience. He was called in to resolve a running battle with a prisoner in which he would assault corrections officers and they would punish him. The more they punished him the more violent he became, and the more violent he became the more they punished him. Nothing they did (at least legally) could stop this man from assaulting the officers.

When Gilligan went to see this man he asked him what he thought was an obvious question, “What do you want so badly that you are willing to give up everything else in order to get it?” His answer astonished the doctor. Usually inarticulate to the point that it was difficult to get a clear answer to any question, he stood up, and with perfect clarity he stated: “Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem.” And then he added, “And I’ll kill every motherfucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it.” He went on to describe how the officers were attempting to strip away his last shred of dignity and self-esteem by disrespecting him, and said, “I still have my pride and I won’t let them take that away from me. If you ain’t got pride, you got nothin'.” He made it clear that he would die before he would humble himself to the officers by submitting to their demands.

According to Gilligan, this wasn’t true of just this man. In fact, several hundred violent criminals in this country provoke their own deaths at the hands of the police in exactly that way every year. Indeed, this phenomenon is so common that police forces (and this is not counting the clear cases of police misconduct) around the country have given it a nickname: “suicide by cop.” In World War II, Japan’s kamikaze pilots behaved in a way that had much the same result, as do contemporary suicide bombers in the Middle East and elsewhere. In the prisons and on the streets of the United States, such behavior appears to be committed by people who are so tormented by feelings of being shamed and disrespected by their perceived enemies that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies and their lives to replace those intolerable feelings with the opposite feelings of pride and self-respect, and of being honored and admired by their friends and families and at least respected by their enemies. Such people experience the fear that they provoke in their victims as a kind of artificial form of respect, the only type they are capable of achieving.

Articulating a powerful insight, Gilligan adds, “In the prisons and on the streets of the United States, such behavior appears to be committed by people who are so tormented by feelings of being shamed and disrespected by their enemies that they are willing to sacrifice their bodies and their physical existence to replace those intolerable feelings with the opposite feelings of pride and self-respect, and of being honored and admired by their allies and at least respected by their enemies. Such people experience the fear that they provoke in their victims as a kind of ersatz form of respect, the only type they are capable of achieving.”

Here’s the travesty: we recreate environments, at an enormous social and economic expense, that exacerbate these feelings of impotent rage. Our prisons are filled with people whop have become part of a human experiment in how to further destroy destroyed lives. In other words, we take individuals who probably weren’t functioning well to begin with (addiction, abuse, illiteracy, etc.) and make them worse. The icing on the cake is that we do this at an enormous economic expense and that money gets taken out of, yes, you guessed it, luxuries such as education.

There has to be a better way. In fact, there are better ways. Gilligan has run an extremely successful prison restorative justice program utilizing his insights, for example. It is also known that education and supportive services (vocational training, employment assistance, family reunification, etc.) cost a fraction of what prisons cost and are extremely more effective. I believe social justice needs to be brought back to the community, but that’s a fuckin’ crazy idea, huh?

Not too long ago, while reviewing some literature, a colleague sent me the following snippet:

In the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed at the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and everyone in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, recalling the good things the person has done in his life. Every experience that can be recalled with detail and accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths, and kindnesses are recited carefully. This ceremony often lasts for several days. At the end, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.”

* * *

Love,

Eddie

What Really Matters, pt. II [Noche Buena]

¡Hola! Everybody...
So! Through no design by me, I find myself writing Christmas-type shit. LOL

My mother was a zany woman who went through this adventure we call life with her kids in tow. The following is fiction. It is based on actual events and is the foundation of one of the stories in my forthcoming book of short stories tentatively titled Ataques de Nervios (Nervous Attacks) or 704 E. 5^th St. (or some shit like that). However, I have taken huge liberties with parts of the story, the characters, and time line.

* * *

-=[ Noche Buena ]=-

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

-- Bertrand Russell

It’s so cold she can’t feel her feet. She’s wearing only slippers in the midst of a raging Nor’easter. She’s afraid and her threadbare coat hardly protects her from the 40-50 mile per hour winds. It’s the night before Noche Buena and she’s alone, keeping vigil outside a home in the Italian section of Lower Manhattan, But she’s here because her kids are in need... there’s no one around and she despairs. Her feet ache...

Eddie left with Gangster and told her that if she saw anyone, she should whistle. Now she wonders if she can whistle, her face is frozen, and they’ve been gone so long. What if the police come?

Finally, they come rushing out the building with stuffed pillowcases and she starts to run with them she falls, she can’t feel her toes. Gangster and Eddie thankfully pick her up and they make their way hurriedly back to the Puerto Rican section, which takes too long and she’s crying, she’s in agony. Eddie stops to look at her feet and mutters, “shit!” under his breath.

They hurry home.

They finally get home and by now, she’s crying in agony. Eddie takes off the slippers and thinks she has frostbite. She cries, but tries to stifle her cries, fearful she’ll awaken the children. Unbeknownst to them, her oldest son watches through a crack in the bedroom doorway. He’s afraid.

They call Eddie’s sister, who takes one look at the stuffed pillowcases and looks down at the young mother, as if noting her lack of moral standing. Eddie asks her to look at her feet and the sister says it’s not frostbite, but that she should go to the emergency room anyway. The young mother refuses, afraid. Afraid of the consequences of the act she just helped commit and afraid of what they may say about her toes that throb with pain now.

They give Eddie’s sister a gold watch from the stolen loot, and she’s delighted. It’s an expensive watch, very pretty. She gives the young mother another condescending look and admonishes them for behaving in such an un-Christian manner. The young mother says nothing and thanks her for looking after the children.

That Christmas a good Christmas for us. There was good food, there were gifts under the tree, and my mother seemed so happy though we noticed that she limped a little when she walked. She had a brand new pair of boots, the only concession she made for herself. She made sure to get her precious children gifts from “Guzman’s” -- the toy store on Avenue C. I remember I got a James Bond attaché case, complete with gadgets and it even shot rubber bullets if you pressed a hidden button. I also got a chemistry set that I used for hours upon hours... She made sure we got our gifts before Eddie and Gangster would leave with the bulk of the loot, returning only when the money was spent on drugs. She didn’t even get herself a decent coat. However, we got warm coats, gloves, scarves, and long underwear.

I never knew why she was crying that wintry night all those years ago. I thought they were fighting... But I am not surprised at her sacrifice -- what she went through for what she thought would make us happy because somehow she always made it right, even if it meant compromising her values or her reputation. She didn’t care, only her children mattered. Still, she was ashamed and part of the reason why I have perfect posture is because she taught us to walk tall, with our heads held high.

Most importantly, she taught me what really matters...

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness (Shame)

¡Hola! Everybody...

I’m at work, but I would’ve loved to have had another day in bed. I’m still not anywhere near 100% and I might go home early. I’ve got a couple of items on a deadline that I need to clear up...

* * *

Shame

I kid around that I like catholic girls because their ingrained shame and guilt equates to deviant, hot sex. LOL But in reality, the Catholics don’t have a monopoly on shame and guilt. I believe we live in a shame-based culture. Our major religions rule by it and our political structures are grounded in it. In addition, shame is a major component of addictive/ dysfunctional behavior.

Most of us have some experience of shame in our past and most of us don’t like to talk about it. That’s what shame is all about. Essentially, shame is a response to violating someone else’s standards. When we feel shame, we are usually afraid of rejection or abandonment due to trespassing of real or imagined boundaries. For some people something seemingly trivial like farting in public (or even writing about it) might cause shame. Some mental health specialists consider shame to be the root of many personal difficulties, especially the codependent behavior observed in the families of addicts.

Ideally, shame should serve as an alarm system letting us know when we have offended other people, and that if we want to continue being friends with them, we may need to change our behavior. So maybe fluffing the sheets after farting is not a good way to keep a lover. Worse, broadcasting intimacies on 360 or the internet might not be a good way to garner friends and influence people. Some of us have no shame, which is not a good thing. However, many people are haunted by feelings of shame, which make them feel unworthy.

Almost all experiences of shame seeing ourselves as “small” and others as “big.” This is typical of people when they feel ashamed. If you temporarily try this out, you can probably experience shame too.

Shame has been described as “the secret emotion” or “the hidden emotion.” For most of us, it’s a minor inconvenience, but for others it is devastating. When people feel shame, they also feel ashamed about feeling shame, so they’re not inclined to talk about it. This is why I give people who try to do something about it major props.

Shame is the result of someone repeatedly giving us the message, “You’re bad,” often without telling us exactly what they didn’t like, and usually without giving us a clear idea of what we could do instead, or how to do it. Parents, teachers, and other authorities do this, often because they don’t know any better.

In a way, someone who feels shame does so because he was a capable and quick learner in an environment where shame was being taught. The good news is that that same ability can be used in learning to have a different sense of self.

In severe shame, it’s as if the person has only one standard for themselves. “I should please others,” is the ruling thought pattern. Putting too much emphasis on pleasing others can result in submitting to abuses without complaint. I see this behavior on 360 (and the internet in general) in abundance!

In transforming shame, it is important to recognize the difference between someone else’s standards and our own, and to be careful to our thinking caps when deciding which standards to use for ourselves. As we do this, we are also building a healthy sense of self, or what is often called self-esteem or integrity. This is who I am; this is what is important to me. In reality, we only begin to exist as individuals when we can stand on our own in this way. Until then, we’re just mirror images of someone else -- any one else -- and dependent on them for a sense of identity.

I know two people very close to me who have not been alone -- ever. A friend goes from woman to woman, looking for validation. I have yet to see him be single in all the years I know him. Of course, each woman becomes his focus until they fall from grace. Another person close to me has never been outside a relationship since her teens. A part of that, I believe, is this inner shame and the need to live up to external standards. Somehow, we have to find better strategies for living more effectively.

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness (Shame)

Hola Everybody,
Sheeesh, the networks get so horny to sell commercials that any potential hurricane, Nor’easter, or other natural disaster gets 24-hour coverage. The really funny shit is when it’s a dud, like this one. There’s no snow on the ground here! LOL! My sister practically built an Ark! LOL!

* * *

-=[ Shame ]=-

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.”
-- George Bernard Shaw

The whole fifth grade class was laughing at him. Including me.

His father stumbled into the middle of a spelling test and began arguing with our teacher. His clothes were ragged and he was unkempt. He was there to make a case for his son, Kevin, who sat next to me. Kevin and I were the smartest kids in the class, but Kevin was painfully shy and no one really liked him to begin with, so now everybody, including me, was laughing at him because his father was a junkie and he showed up in the middle of a spelling test totally out of his mind. He was nodding out even as he argued his son’s case.

I don’t remember all the details, but I remember the shame. I remember the shame on Kevin’s face, the humiliation in the knowledge that now everyone knew his deadly secret – that his father was a junkie. I remember my own shame too, because I felt hypocritical.

It’s so easy to join the mob, so easy to feel a part of the crowd at the expense of someone else. The mob mentality has no mercy.

The fact was that I knew too well that shame. My own father was a junkie, and I remember when all my friends one day encircled me and chanted, “Your father’s a junkie, your father’s a junkie,” and I felt so ashamed, so humiliated, and so angry. Most of all, I couldn’t resolve the anger and shame I felt about my father because I adored him so and all those feelings-- I didn’t know how to process al that. I just stood there in the middle of that circle and cried tears of anger until I lashed out at the first one fool enough to get close to me and I punched him in the nose. And that’s when the mob turned on me and I went home with a split lip and torn clothes.

I hated him – my father – for making me go through that, but I adored my father. He was so smart. I used to love to sit on his lap and put my ear to his chest and listen to the soft rumble of his voice as he taught me something or spoke. My father was like a God to me. And now I hated him and I hated myself for that.

I just didn’t know how to handle all that. So I guess somewhere, somehow, I internalized all that and became ashamed of myself for everything: for my father and for my feelings.

My father was one of the greatest storytellers and on some days, he would gather all the kids on the block and tell us stories. I guess it was a testament to his storytelling gift that he would keep us transfixed on that stoop on that Lower East Side block and you could hear a pin drop. I was raised in a neighborhood where junkies were a common part of the urban landscape. As children we would place bets on how far a junkie would nod. Some junkies would nod so far, bent over by the waist that you would swear they would tip over and fall. But they never did.

My father would nod when he told my friends stories. At first, we would sit there for what would seem minutes because invariably there was a punch line, a moral, or a resolution to the story. At first, my friends wouldn’t say anything, but then my father’s nodding got worse and one day while arguing over a game or a rule, as boys are won’t to do, it came out: the outspoken truth that my father was a junkie. It was a hard lesson to be learned at such a tender age.

Yet I sat there and laughed at Kevin just like everyone else did and even in the fifth grade, I knew it was wrong. I knew that I was being a phony because I didn’t want to feel that shame anymore, I wanted to be like the others, so I joined in on the cruelty. I wanted to reach out to Kevin, but he refused, sensing something worse: that I pitied him. Eventually, I told Kevin my secret and while we never became close friends, in the fifth grade we stuck it out together. I did so even though even talking to Kevin made me an outsider, but that was OK, because I think it was at that time I decided I would always be an outsider. I reasoned that no one could really know me if I was an outsider, so fuck them.

And in that way, I began to build a wall of protection that kept others out so no one could ever know me -- a fortress surrounding my heart.

Shame is a prison. I don’t know for sure, if this was all the beginning, or the setting of the table for my own life, but I certainly know that our secrets kill us, as surely as cigarettes or drugs. Secrets kill because embedded in our secrets is our shame.

If you notice, I have a pretty large friends’ list. I’m not that particular about who asks to join this madness, but I am particular about making someone – even a stranger – feel excluded because I know that feeling intimately. It has haunted me for most of my life. Not many people can successfully accuse me of not having a sense of humor, but I abhor humor at the expense of another.

Even now, sometimes it’s easy for me to join in with the mob and feast on another’s soul so that I could feel better about myself. It’s the easiest thing – because it trips that “You belong” button. I've done it before and felt stupid after when the object of ridicule was kind to me.

But really: how many of us are laughing or forming cliques because we too have secrets? How many of us can say we’re not ashamed at some level?

Love,

Eddie