Personal Abuse and Recognizing it in Society

Recently, I dealt with a person in my community organization who, willfully or not, engaged in very abusive behaviors which included taking complete control of a project and not asking for help when needed. This might not sound like an abusive tactic until I realized that this person was doing this in order to then have justification for treating other people poorly including yelling at them, making them feel unwanted/undeserving, and squarely placing the blame on other people. It took me a long while to be able to come to terms with the idea that this person was using abusive tactics on the people around them. It also got me thinking: Why don't we teach about these kinds of things to people more broadly? One conclusion I came to got me thinking about society as a whole.

Along with blaming others, the person in question often said that anything the organization was doing would absolutely fall apart without that person helping to lead it. I realized, after some reflection, this is the same argument that people will fall back on when we think about asking the wealthy to pay for things like taxes. The argument goes: If we do that, then the wealthy will just leave. This person said much the similar thing: If I don't get things done the way I want them, I will leave and this will all fall apart. The trouble is, for the longest time, I believed them. And in so doing, I stopped justice short; I helped to put other people in the path of emotional and mental abuses. The point I'm making here is that people will use fear and superiority in order to justify the abuses they are committing and, rather than being held accountable for their actions, they will insist that the entire thing will fall apart without their being present. This has been proven completely false on the micro level of my organization. I started wondering, next, why did it take me so long to see these actions as that of abuse and to stand up to them?

I think the answer to that is partly to do with the narrative we have received here in America as citizens. While there is certainly a trend of anti-intellectualism in America, there is also an idea that we must be more than we are in order to truly deal with a problem. The underlying idea behind many of our problems and why they still persist is that of: I don't know enough to deal with this properly. I don't have the experience. I don't have the time. I don't have the skills. I'm convinced that fire was either an accident or needed so desperately that we found a way to do it. I bring this up to highlight the idea that humans are incredibly resourceful. We always have been. The difference between making a change and staying the way we are often times falls to the choice of either doing something or doing nothing. It may not be the smoothest transition in the world, but if I were to liken societal change to art, then I would say that it is a matter of experimentation and observation in terms of trying to get something just how we want it. Recently, even, I learned that the myth of Icarus was changed to exclude the following line: Don't fly too low, for then you will surely perish. Instead, Icarus becomes a reminder not to challenge the sun; not to fly too high; but the real peril lies in assuming we must fly low in order to survive. There is too much sky to be swallowed by the waves. Beyond our narratives (super hero movies, I think, have a small part to play here too as "normal" people are often relegated to watching in awe as the hero saves the day), we also have a lack of education with regard to abusive behaviors.

Our society is built on them. The only way to survive is to stay quiet, to not speak up when we know something is wrong because that change will wake the sleeping dragon; it will cause all of our demise (or the wealthy will leave). We cannot educate people on abusive techniques used like the slippery slope (if you ask people to do X, they will eventually leave which will crash the whole system and then everyone will die), gaslighting (the deaths in Puerto Rico didn't happen; that's all fake news), and several other ones because, to do that, is to make people aware of how the system maintains control or would at least expose one of the levers of control that is used so often by abusers and authoritarians alike. If we don't have words for something, can we really see it? If we aren't educated about something, how do we learn about it? In order for this to be amended, I think we need a lot of change to happen.

Similar to what was done about the person being abusive in my organization, action needs to be taken. We need to demand justice and equality. If you're thinking, with that last line, it sounds as if this is an arm of the civil rights movement, I would absolutely agree with you. I would also say that America's racist past along with its insistence towards individualism makes it difficult to see the fight toward racial equality as one which also is about economic equality.

Many of the fights we are scared or at least apprehensive to engage in are absolutely necessary for a thriving middle class and for economic justice to be procured, but they are also mired in abusive tactics along with our general inability to call or see something for what it is. The good news is that we've had many, many people rise to organize people to vote and to take on the system for what it is: one that peddles false narratives and blames everyone else for the problems that it has caused. If we get enough people to vote, we can hold our powerful accountable and force changes to happen without having to rely on weapons or war. With elections coming soon, this is my greatest hope and, on the other side, one of my biggest fears.