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This page is under construction but the title question has been the leitmotiv of my (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) whole life and I have only partly succeeded in getting to a "Yes" answer.
This was my big existential question as a child, although, back then, I could not have articulated it:
All the way up until I went to Yale, the answer to this question was, with a very few and inconsequential exceptions (items: here and here), a resounding: negative. I expected I would not live, only undergo, until I would finally undergo dying; all I hoped for wa to not suffer.
My parents and school teachers and the rest of my childhood social surround not only chronically failed me but did not even give me hope of anything better. No sex, no objects of connoisseurship, no artistic or intellectual creating, not even a loving cat. What I had to look ahead but not forward to was only more or my parents telling me what to do, and my school teachers subjecting me to their assignments. I was a prisoner serving a "life" (←that word being understood strictly metabolically) sentence without possibility of parole in the Americn Dream SuperMax.
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What could there be to live for? Obviously: Haircuts and, starting in wasted puberty, shaving my facial hair and using chemical underarm deodorants to avoid insulting my warders with: BODY ODOR → everything to help make America beautiful (right). The Americanned Dream.
I had no affection for any of these people, nor did what they did appeal to me. Because they deployed coercive POWER over me, I feared them. Because I could not get away from them to any better place. I had to try my best to to defend myself (item: here). They were my: "Or else!".
In elementary school which was mostly a benign waste of my time, each morning I seem to remember we said "The pledge of allegiance". As far as I was concerned it could have been reciting some nursery rhyme, or, to be precise in the light of later learning: a Dada poem.
Love of country? My parents had not earned my affection (more info here); the feeling was transitive.
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Was I fated always to just have to put up with being impinged upon by "people": my parents, my teachers, The Selective Service System, you name it. I didn't pay the price they demand[ed]: the destruction of my soul and its replacement by their social conditioning to make me one of them: The invasion of the body snatchers; passum sub iugum. Or, maybe, they just did not have a clue, like an automobile running over a squirrel in the road with its left front tire and maybe it kills it or maybe, like I once saw, leaving it dying in convulsions in the middle of the road.
What did I want? They ignoranced me so badly that I did not know. What did I need? An appropriate intimate partner: easy on the eyes and at least as intelligent, reflective and sensitive as me, a job that daily further enriched my soul: my thoughts and feelings, and peace, including suficient capitalization to enjoy the two preceding items. As the IBM manager who had the famous IBM "Wild Duck" poster on his wall told me when I asked for an assignment that would be both prodctive for the company and growing for myself:
I never understood much of anything because they ignoranced me and [fill in the blank]. But in high school I did read a book the ending of which I liked: A man burrows to the center of the earth and sets off a huge bomb there which cleanses the universe of all the bad stuff on the planet's surface (including, by specification: them).
In 1969, after I had been found to have "albumen in urine" during my Selective Service physical examination, and went to the Penn State University student health department about it, a Dr. [given name repressed or never known] Franco, as if he was an oracle, glibly predicted what I would not be able to do, from what had been done to me:
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"...a world of stereotypes... which contained no real human beings but merely standard roles whose comportment was assigned irrespective of individuality, character, temperament or nervous disposition." (Gregor von Rezzori, "The snows of yesteryear", p. 93)
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Q: What did I need if I could not have come out of an appropariate birth canal (UTC+GPS)? A: Click here). The hard cold fact of this uncaring world is that if your parents don't provide what you need to flourish you cannot expect anybody else to because you are not their child and so their liability is very limited: they have their own problems. If society doea not to rescue children from their social surround of origin and give them a good life as the child himself (herself, otherself) will judge it, not just as society might judge it to be, it is [fill in the blank]. Rrose Sélavy.
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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