From Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/04-4
by Phil Rockstroh
Published on Friday, January 4, 2013 by Common Dreams
“Memory believes before knowing remembers.” — William Faulkner
In an era of corporate-state colonization of both landscape and mental real estate, when the face of one’s true oppressors is, more often than not, hidden from view, thus inflicting feelings of anxiety borne of powerlessness over the criteria of one’s life and the course of one’s fate, often, to retain a sense of control, people will tend to displace their anger and shame. Firearms provide the illusion of being able to locate and bead down on a given target. (How often does a person without wealth, power, and influence have any contact with — or even a glimpse of — the financial and political elite whose decisions dictate the, day by day, criteria of one’s existence?)
Beginning in childhood, carrying the noxious notions of the adult world, the viral seeds of mental enslavement to shame and the concomitant attempt to protect ego-integrity through psychological displacement are spread child to child.
All too often, internalized shame robs a child of his innate identity before it has a chance to gel. This is one, among multiple social factors, by which the collective mindset of capitalist/consumer state forcefully usurps an individual’s mind and holds it in torment.
Therefore, it is imperative for an individual, marooned in the shame-haunted miasma of the capitalist/consumer paradigm, to reclaim his/her own name. Even if the process entails (as it has played out in my own story) a descent into the underworld of memory and a confrontation with the ghosts therein.
A personal encounter with the raging ghosts of memory: Late autumn. 1965. Atlanta, Georgia.
At my back, as I stepped from the yellow school bus, and hurried in the direction of the small, two story apartment building, a seething cacophony of taunts and insults seemed to buffet me forward. Marc Leftcoff had sneered that the apartment complex where my family dwelled was, “The Projects” that he proclaimed to be “a roach nest for losers, unemployed rednecks and divorced hussies—only a place white niggers would live.”
Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/04-4
