It’s amazing how very good and very bad things can be happening at the same time in the same place. You’d think that two different things can’t fit into the same space, but I guess space expands to make room for more? I like that about space; it doesn’t refuse anything. But yesterday I touched a little bit on slavery. The objectification of people. Well. Cheap labor. Even better: free labor. Umberto Eco wrote a very interesting essay on inventing the Enemy. Basically, anybody different from you can be the enemy, and once they’re the enemy you can do with them whatever you please, provided you’re stronger. Actually, they don’t even have to be different from you. Just the other. Your little brother could be trying to take food away from you and suddenly he’s an enemy, if you haven’t learned about sharing yet.
Historically, Jews and Negroes were the favored enemies. Arabs. Somehow I don’t remember if Women were included, though they should’ve been. The Inquisition was certainly mostly against them. And for some reason we can’t seem to be able to get beyond this need of an enemy. Even on a real simple level. I remember when I lived in Philly. The City of Brotherly Love, right? I’d be walking, and most Black men who saw me would automatically spit on the sidewalk. I instantly woke up a strong dislike in them, simply because of my color. I could under- stand it, but it didn’t make any sense. These guys had no idea about who I was. I was white, and that was enough. Now, in my oldness, I simply accept it. Not everybody grows at the same rate. Memories have a very powerful hold on us. Consciously or unconsciously. Growing up in a very harsh environment will change your life, or maybe it’s better to say that it’ll form it, and when you’re older, you see how it changed your life into somehow less normal. Growing up knowing all the atrocities the communists performed against your people leaves you with an anger and a hate that decades later will still explode any time Russians are mentioned. Even though most Russians today have nothing to do with what happened then. But somehow, they’re still the enemies. I call it “corruption”. A corruption of our thinking. The having been brainwashed, educated, as a child, to see humans a certain way. It takes a lot of solitude to begin to see these things. Like the pandemic induced quarantine. Gives you time to see who you really are, outside of society. But actually, it took most of my life to see that understanding Women, for a man, is possibly impossible. I remember our Dad always saying that no matter what he said, our Mom would always contradict him. Impossible to understand such a thing. So the only thing available, is acceptance. My whole life was about trying to understand Woman. And now, I simply accept Her Difference. It’ll still sometimes piss me off. But less and less. It takes the negative and the positive of electricity to make light. Two different things that work together. One without the other is useless. So slavery can be not people oriented. And then the enemy, suddenly, isn’t someone else. Suddenly, the enemy is your own ignorance.
