I Know the Torment of Growing Up in a Culture that Celebrates Ignorance

You must run and hide and survive because we need you

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You’ve got to keep your head down because you’re surrounded by enemies. The last thing you want is for them to look at you. They’ll look and they’ll wait for you to do something they don’t like.

Then they’ll attack.

They’ll attack with ridicule and volume but never reason. They’ll summon their chortling hoards and come after you. They won’t let you get away. Once exposed they’ll pester you. They’ll throw rocks at you. They’ll poke you with sticks. They’ll hit you with sticks. They’ll keep going until you’re destroyed.

They take a living body and render it into a smear.

I’ve lived through this. I’ve survived it.

It’s a sad thing to live in a society where ignorance is celebrated. A certain kind of person thrives in a world like that, a loathsome kind of person. They are people who celebrate pain. They laugh. They see little children in agony and they cry with laughter.

You have to do what you can to help the marginalized, but there are so many and there’s only so much you can do. You have to offer refuge where you can.

You have to disguise your intelligence. You have to play stupid. You have to pretend you don’t understand. You can’t chase accolades or recognition. If other people see, then your enemies will see too.

Keep your head down.

Stay light.

Flee, flee, flee.

Some people say you have to stand up and face them, and that’s true. You must stand up and face them eventually. But you have to pick your moments. You have to wait until the battle has tipped in your favor. You must always flee unless you can’t get away. You must always flee until you think you’re about to die.

Then you have to fight, fight, fight.

But otherwise wait. Don’t be drawn into a battle you can’t win. That’s foolish. That’s the path of ignorance.

When you’re a child, you’re like a baby bird in a nest. You can’t fly and the predators know it. It’s like you’re surrounded by cats and it’s so heartbreaking.

They know you have the potential to fly, but they don’t kill you. Instead, they gather all around you. They pester you. They take swipes at you. They break your wings.

Then they have you. They don’t kill you then either because they’re sadistic. They want to keep you around alive so they can torment you throughout the course of your natural life. They’ll saddle up next to you, put their paws with their killing claws around your shoulder, look up at the other birds and say, “Why don’t you go join them? Is there something wrong with you?”

Then they laugh.

That’s what life is like if you grow up in a culture that celebrates ignorance. That’s peak humor. That’s peak entertainment. The predator who tells that joke is revered. He is on television every night smiling and bragging about how birds with broken wings can’t fly. He talks about how they need to be punished. Then he starts blaming them for everything that’s wrong.

Never once does he mention he’s the one who broke the wings.

Never once does anyone ask him.

They celebrate ignorance. They accept what they’re told. They know who to hate. They laugh at the misery of others. There’s no way out.

But you’ll find good people too. The good people go underground. They dress in camouflage. They pull their robes tight around their faces and fade into the background when the enemies approach.

The enemies are always loud. They even breathe loud. They don’t even try to hide their passage.

So, the allies see you and they step forth from the shadows and they lend you a helping hand. Then they disappear again and you long to go with them, but you understand you can’t. Not yet. You have to be stronger. They have others to help. They’ve done what they can.

Thank you, thank you!

A kind word, a simple deed. Something small and generous that happens so fast nobody else can see. They slip you a piece of bread and you eat it before the monsters know.

In secret, you study. You memorize words. You look into the negative space that’s all that’s left after all the good things were taken away.

The monsters think you’ll never be able to see what you could have had. They think they’ve erased it. But they can’t erase the absence that’s left behind.

They can’t erase nothing.

Ultimately, that’s the thing a culture that celebrates ignorance can never understand. They can’t perceive how many clues are left behind because they are not curious. They are not inquisitive. They can’t put anything together.

But clever minds can see.

You can give them a field of mud and agony and the clever minds will yet perceive. When those that celebrate ignorance start coming after the clever minds, the clever minds will hide. We’ll pull our cloaks tight around our faces and hunker down in the mud and wait.

We’ll wait for the culture that celebrates ignorance to die.

It always dies. I’ve seen it happen many times.

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