The Nostalgia You Feel For a Time of Abuses Past Is Not Love

We've got to collectively sit down and work out how we think about our lives

Rage makes us blind. Pain makes us desperate. Love brings us comfort.

When I look around our nation, I don't see many comforted people. Instead, I see desperate and angry masses looking for something to blame. These are individuals who insist on hugging a spinning blade for affection. When you try to tell them the blade is the source of their pain, they spit at you. They turn away.

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It's amazing to me that so many people are reluctant to accept that this life is not so simple.

What is it about your lived reality that leads you to believe that it is not complex?

“It's as easy as riding a bike,” people say. Are you kidding me? What's easy about riding a bike? Ask somebody who has never done it before how easy it is.

In fact, riding a bike is so complex that it's stunning to think that bicycles are commonplace. A product that contains such an obstacle of ability in order to use, by all rights, shouldn't be able to carve out a niche in the marketplace.

Yesterday, I brought this up at breakfast to my daughter. “How did the first person figure out how to do that not knowing it was possible?”

Her response stunned me.

“Maybe it was a person with a natural aptitude for riding a bicycle,” she said.

That's it isn't it? Some people just know. Some people understand things they have no right to understand. This insight is a gift.

So, let me share another insight about your life that you might not have considered.

You were abused.

It's okay to acknowledge it. It doesn't mean you're “ungrateful.” It doesn't mean you “hate” anything. It doesn’t mean you’re “damaged.” It's just a statement of fact.

You were abused. At some point in your life, somebody said or did something that constitutes abuse. You are an abuse survivor.

We all are.

There's no need to stigmatize it because it happens to everybody. There's no need to start a competition about who suffered the “worst” abuse. For now, let's just recognize that this is a universal source of human pain.

You don't have to deny it any longer. Accept that you were abused. Don't blame yourself. Learn from it. Set the rage aside. Heal. Try to help others.

I look around my nation and I see a lot of people in pain. Perhaps the worst part is that they deny they're in pain. But you can see their pain in the hostile and abusive way they treat others.

Hurt people hurt others.

We've all been hurt.

We all hurt others.

This is the complex reality of our existence. Acknowledging that doesn't mean we're “bad,” or “sinners,” or “monstrous.” But denying it does lead to further transgressions against your fellow human beings.

There are many different forms of abuse at work in our society. I can only talk about the abuses I've experienced which I've come to recognize. I'm 50. It took me 50 years to speak openly about some of the things I endured when I was 10.

There are still many things I'm not yet ready to discuss. Perhaps when I'm 100, I will have been honest about everything.

I grew up on a farm. Many farms in the United States of America take advantage of child labor. Kids are forced to run machinery that would be illegal for a child to operate under normal circumstances.

But the tradition in the United States is for farmers to set their own children to work. Ask anyone who owns a business, and they'll tell you that payroll is the biggest expense.

There's no requirement for parents to pay their children. It's called “chores.” It's called “earning your keep.”

It's called abuse.

This is an atrocity that's been going on in the United States since the founding of the country. We don't talk about it. Instead, we fill the airwaves with propaganda about how grateful we should be.

“You were born in the greatest country in the world.”

Meanwhile, children are forced to perform dangerous, uncompensated labor so we don't have to spend too much on wheat, or milk, or eggs.

Naturally, there are other abuses that are quite commonplace in this country. It's complex. As I said before, I can only talk about the abuses I endured directly.

Again, it's not a competition. We don't have to put things into categories of greater and lesser abuse.

We just have to recognize that we endured awful things in our youth, and if we don't address it, we're left with a compulsion to punish the innocent.

I talk to a lot of people who grew up on farms. They'll acknowledge that they were forced to work from dawn until dusk. They recognize that they had to operate dangerous machinery. But they hesitate when it comes to labeling their experience as abuse.

“I loved those times. I loved my parents. I loved playing baseball on the weekends with my friends. It couldn't have been a time of abuse.”

Again, it's complex.

Recognizing abuse doesn't mean you hate everything that surrounded the abuse. We've all had relationships with people that ultimately didn't last. If a relationship doesn't work out in the long run, it doesn't mean there weren't times that were wonderful.

You didn't start dating somebody because they punched you in the face. They showed you kindness and affection. Abuse is always sprinkled in.

You can love your father even if he hit you. You can love him even if he ordered you to operate a piece of machinery that left you maimed. Love is complex. Life is complex. Abuse is complex.

People don't want to see the complexity because they don't want to dwell on uncomfortable memories.

But if we cut out huge swaths of our experience, we can't hope to make any sense of our reality.

Explore the abuse. Learn to separate the abuse from the good times. You have to come to recognize that the good times aren't dependent on the abuse.

The abuse isn't “necessary.”

The abuse can be cut out.

Abuse is perpetuated because we refuse to recognize it. We're conditioned to believe that criticism is inappropriate. “You should be grateful. He's doing his best. I'm sure he didn't mean to hurt you. It could be a lot worse. You're too sensitive.”

But all of these comments represent shying away from a line of thought before it's explored. How do you know what's in a room until you open the door?

I look around my nation and I see a lot of hurt and angry people crowded together in a cramped room because they're defiantly unwilling to open the doors.

They want to believe that everything was perfect in the past, but that's just because they've conditioned themselves to ignore the pain they were forced to endure.

The truth is the past is now and has forever been broken.

The future is the only thing with any potential for happiness.

You can't go back. You can't go home again. Let's leave the abuses in the past. Let's separate the abuse from our nostalgia for moments that were fondly remembered. We can keep our comforting memories without carrying forward the taint of agony. We can free ourselves of the false obligation to maintain a code of silence.

You don't destroy the good times by recognizing the bad. Instead, you free yourself from having to repeat them.

Thank you for listening! This publication is reader sponsored. Your support means the world to me. Thank you for being here, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow!

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