How Abusive Relationships, Growing Up, Easter, And Red Dragons Are All Connected.

We in the modern world tend to have a hard time establishing boundaries. This manifests itself in several gradients of deviant behavior, ranging from not being able to take the keys away from your friend who is about to get a DUI, to staying in an abusive relationship way past the time when the significant other stopped caring whether it was your fault, or not, and just started taking advantage to no end.

Learning to make the distinction of where you end and another person begins is the foundation of all life giving human relationships. It's what happens when we can go our own ways from our parents. It's what happens when we don't give in to peer pressure and instead pursue what we want in life. It's what happens when we experience the best in committed relationships, both romantic and otherwise when we love people for who they are rather than what they do for us, and it's what happens when we are able to watch our descendants grow into their own independent selves.

The reason this is such a hard thing to determine and that it is such a source of friction in our lives is because it brings into question issues of core identity and insecurity that the modern social order does not at all help. Because we have been raised with a wholly western idea of moral relativism, we do not know what is up or down, what is right or left, or what is good or bad. We do not question that which we deeply want to, and only challenge those who do not conform to this ideal. Tolerance is only good to the degree that it makes people safe. Beyond this, it has resulted in a deep fear of questioning and conflicting over anything more substantial than those who are seen to be intolerant. Thus, in the absence of challenge, which, in this case, is the same thing as boundaries, we are left defenseless against the more malignants elements of, not only society, but our own personalities. 

One of these malignant elements is the need to belong. Like all perversions, it is nothing more than something that was, it its proper state, good. Finding your place in the world, and finding your place with other humans is good. However, doing so at the expense of your own humanity, and making sacrifices of your own identity to conform is not, and as has been mentioned before is the source of a vast spectrum of deviant behaviors. 

However, as with many things, there are second and third order effects to this deviant behavior. Deep within ourselves, we try to compensate for the violation of our spiritual immune systems because of our lack of boundaries by setting them up in other places. In essence, we triangulate our brokenness away because we cannot confront the root cause. 

The most profound and yet least obvious place we place boundaries is with any notion of something greater than ourselves, anything.......Divine. Believe or don't believe. The existence of God is something that cannot be proven, no matter how much the right wing types try, and cannot be disprove, no matter how ignorant the the Richard Dawkens followers' arguments get. It is not something that is debated intellect to intellect. It is something that bypasses the red dragons guarding our minds and snatches the perches right out from under their claws as it goes strait to the heart. Of course their is a God, and of course we all know this at some level of our psyches. And yet it is with the Divine that we establish the strongest boundaries, whether we believe or do not believe. We assume there is no God, or that we have killed God, or that we have to be good enough to be accepted by God, or that some are destined to Paradise and others to eternal damnation, whatever that is. 

If indeed there is a God, would the Divine not be anything other than the height of perfection beyond all that we heretofore see and the ultimate embodiment of all our deepest suspicions of what true love and beauty and good in fact are? Would God not in fact be the height of our greatest human ideals of good and compassion and acceptance and love and the ultimate expression of what we only grasp at when we admire great acts of selflessness? Would God not also be the ultimate expression of even the most natural love of a mother for her child or a father slaving to support his family? Could the truth in fact be better than we have ever imagined, even though our deepest psyches have supposed it for so long and driven us in search of it for as long as we have been who we are? At the same time, does not the suspicion of this at the same time cause apprehension, almost as if you don't want to look because you don't want to be disappointed? 

Today, many throughout the world remembered the destruction of the boundary between the Divine and the rest of reality, not that any such barrier ever existed, but the point had to be made clear. This is the essence of the Resurrection. The deepest longing of us all are there for a reason. They are there to be satisfied. Come into the great house where street dwellers, prostitutes, politicians, even pop stars, end even you and me become equals. This is the essence of salvation. 

Come home. The door is always open. 

Affluenza

Affluenza is a term that was recently made famous when 16 year old Ethan Couch was let off easy for causing the deaths of 4 people and critically wounding 2 others. He was reported to have been under the influence of several substances at the time in quantities that would make fraternity initiation nights look weak by comparison. The defense made the case he did not understand the consequences of his actions because his perspective was distorted by the amount of affluence he grew up in.

Now, a major sub-theme to the outrage against this ties into the ongoing observation prevalent in modern society that there is growing inequality and that more and more wealth is being pooled by the people at the top of the hierarchy. This truthful observations has often lead to the idea that the people taking over this wealth are bad and that being wealthy is somehow a crime in and of itself. Whether this is openly expressed or not, it is hard to ignore it's reality when people say things like the so called 1% should pay 90% tax on what they take in because no one needs (the implication is that they should not have) that much money.

The absurdity of this statement aside, it is indicative of deeper socio-emotional issues that do in fact require addressing. Protecting and expanding the middle class is important for economic and security reasons in and of it self. However, redistribution of wealth has been shown in so many ways and so many places before this to not be an effective measure for achieving this that there is no need to address it at length here. One does not need to go to some extreme right wing outlet for this information, only look at the countries in the world with large populations that have attempted the same and see that, not only was it not effective for protecting the middle class, it lead to the creation of a new hierarchies completely out of touch with reality.

However, the opinion still creeps that those on top should not be there and that penalties must be inflicted. So seldom though do we turn the leans of examination onto ourselves and look for what lurks beneath the surface.

It is not the case that inequality in the developed world is not a problem. Indeed it is and the resulting poverty is an insult to free and prosperous societies. However,  most of those often commenting on it from the angle that the rich must be punished to pave the way for justice have no perspective on poverty and justice and are themselves afflicted with affluenza.

There comes a time when it is important for those who wish to have a truly global perspective to recognize that "first world problems" are not the same as those faced by the multiple billions of people in the world below even the third world's poverty line, either in severity, scale, or otherwise. Poverty is a problem anywhere. Having to make fuel cost conscious choices about what type of car you drive, having to take a job you are over qualified for, even not having a job for an extended period of time is simply not the same thing as being faced with the choice of which child you will sell in order to pay for food for the other ones.

The wealthy are not the problem and being rich is not a crime. The discourse must focus, not on the redistribution of wealth to create pseudo-equality, but rather on limiting the ability of non-benign actors and organizations at the top of the hierarchy to make choices, which create the systemic conditions by which inequality grows, both here and abroad. Then again, doing this effectively will entail sacrifices. You will have to not buy what you cannot afford. You will have to pay attention to what you spend on, and you will often have to give up those low prices.

At the expense of those now unemployed because the production of those low cost goods went to an oppressive totalitarian regime in which workers lives are as expendable as the products they make.