Nothing Is Sacred and Maybe That’s Good
How the trauma of change subtly influences us all.
If you didn’t know this about me, I was a fan of Star Trek and Star Wars. More than that, Star Trek embodies my fundamental, core spiritual and philosophical beliefs. I have been critical of the new stuff. Sometimes more than critical. Attacks on those values feel personal, as if it were an attack on me. Logically, I know it’s not, but real or perceived, I have taken it personally. The ideals I latched onto from the original Trek and Wars seemed reasonable and attainable, even redeemable in that I felt sure anyone could adopt them. They were a compass guiding me. When they were smacked down, I felt lost. For a moment. I have had to re-orientate. Here’s what I think I have found.
Mandala Sand Painting by the Mystical Arts of Tibet
We are all sacred, spiritual beings creating art. Society is an art made with sand. It’s alive and dynamic, and the colored sands are swept by winds and currents created by other people and the structures and patterns come and go.
Sometimes we actively engage in destroying the painting.
When Trek and Wars changed, I tapped out because I figured if they had to alienate the old guard to bring in the new guard, they’re deliberately blowing up the good. It doesn’t matter how sound my arguments might be, like Strange New Worlds messing up Spock in the first episode, as evidenced by writers making his sex life too human. Vulcans only mate every seven years. That wasn’t a cultural thing based on philosophy, but a biological factor of Vulcans, which is why he explained in the original episode, ‘why do salmon go to the same spring where they originate, why do locusts emerge from the earth every seven years…’ It’s hard wired.
It was a time of irrational aggression. Vulcan didn’t kiss. They would not be inappropriate in a public setting.
Sometimes cannon is necessary. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat history.
Some people might think the elders should be respected, that they have always been respected till this age, but then there would not be an edict to respect elders if our elders didn’t also experience disrespect.
I am no more lessened by the fact that Egypt or Rome came and went, than I will be forever empty should America come and go. I will pick up the pieces of those things that were good, and forge on. It is something I know well. It’s something we all do. We forge on. Maybe America was not all good, but it definitely was never all bad. It was what it was, it is what is, and it will be what it will be.
It will likely go. It hasn’t established itself to the degree Europe has. No nation on Earth has established the staying power of China. But all nations, like all people, come and go. They age out. All nations and people out live their utility.
If all you measure is a person’s utility, you’re likely a user.
We’re always dependent on others to define who we are and what we are not. This is similar to the idea of mental health, which is defined by specialists creating disorders, as opposed to just treating what is. More on that coming up, hang on to it.
If the left pushed a button and all right people were gone, all you would have left is leftist. And the same if it was reversed. The question might be, who would you like to be left with?
I will age out and go away. We all will. I will either be crazy or sane, dependent on the people who make those judgements. May all our future caretakers be kindly in disposition to us.
I don’t know enough to really be philosophizing, but we all do that with the little bit we got.
Maybe women truly felt left out of Star Trek and Star Wars to the degree the old school had to be destroyed to bring in the new one. Never mind the fact that if you have to undermine another human to improve you, you’ve lost you. If we assume women destroy men, then the only logical conclusion is men should be women, because they’re superior, and maybe no one should be surprised that feminized men win all women's sports competitions.
I am speaking in generalization, of course, so don’t get too riled up, but if you’re feeling something, I am touching a core belief. Pay attention. Equality is right in theory and in some practical application, but you wouldn’t want it in all domains. For example, men and women differ in the domain of suicide. Women attempt more often. Men attempt less, but are more successful in their endeavors. We don’t want more men killing themselves, and we don’t want women being more lethal.
I would be okay if equality means no suicides.
The true goal is to help alleviate the social conditions that result in suicide. It is not, contrary to popular belief, an individual, random act, but a result of society not being right. This was the foundational discovery of the sociologist Durkheim! If your society has high rates of suicide, then your society is unhealthy. People who die by suicide are the canaries in the mine.
Suicide rates vary per culture, which means it’s not a biological or psychological thing.
My interpretation of the original Star Trek was that it had the most inclusivity of the time. It was the only science fiction that was prescribing the future was utopia. There were people, like my dad, that hated Trek and wanted nothing to do with it. He couldn’t touch that. He preferred Bonanza. His ideal was a farm. He also didn’t like Quantum Leap. Specifically, the first time the character Sam bounced into a female body, my dad tapped out. He was threatened by the dress. I am not, because abstractly, Sam wasn’t wearing the dress, the body was female, his soul was more than male and female.
Still, most sci-fi ends badly for humans. Mad Max, that’s a dead end run of people chasing drops of oil.
Human life on earth seems to be about competition first, leveling the playing field second. Once the playing field is reset, the domination and competition begins again. We are stuck in this pattern. Whether it’s too far left or right, there will be penalties and flags dropped. The playing field will be cleared, and we will start again.
I watched new Trek and Wars with hope, but I yelled, angrily, and threw my flags down. To no avail. The people in charge have decided cannon is bad, they hire people who don’t know Trek or
Wars, and they’re deviating so far from the things I knew, it’s unwatchable. Just because you have the props, doesn’t mean you have the culture.
They believe America is bad, it should be destroyed. You’re watching that happen in real time.
I may be able to go back in time to New York and drive the first cars, but you can’t take that first car driver and turn him loose driving in New York in a modern car.
Things change. Sometimes change is slow. Sometimes change feels deliberate, like someone is intentionally trying to destroy a thing. People come and go. Nations come and go. Sometimes people and nations die in your lifetime. Some ideas are supposed to last generations, and so am I disappointed that Star Trek, Star Wars, even America seems to be dying in my lifetime!
Devastated. I have gone through the five stages of grief, and you can find evidence of all the stages in my writing. Hopefully, the future people who find the angry stuff also are wise enough to find the depressed stuff, the negotiating stuff, the denial stuff, the acceptance stuff…
It’s a trauma for sure, to see the people you love die. It’s a trauma to see the things you love trashed. It is right for people to protest peacefully. I am not so keen on destroying property. I am completely against wars and killing.
If America has to go to stop all wars, I am in. Let’s level the playing field.
When I watch the Buddhist monks creating these beautiful, meaningful sand paintings, and then I watch them sweep it up and give it to the wind, I remember this is life. This is what people do.
This is what nations do.
The trickster and the fool always follow the angels and the merchants. In the reaping of one harvest is the birth of the new harvest. May all the future births be people and nations wiser and kinder than I.
Change is trauma.
All change is trauma. Going from childhood to adulthood is trauma. No matter how great your parents were, they could not prepare you for it all. Poverty leads to extreme wealth. Extreme wealth leads to poverty. Children of extreme poverty and extreme wealth often exhibit the same kinds of trauma based behaviors.
Don’t believe this? Observe how some of the wealthiest people’s kids in our society are acting right. You don’t have to look at just that. Take the Buddha story. Child born into a family of extreme wealth and power had the authority and luxury of making the kid’s life a virtual paradise. It was only when the kid discovered the lie, poverty, the aging and the dying and the dead that the Buddha was born.
Hollywood isn’t ‘woke,’ they’re in the active, dreaming lie of Maya. When they discover the poor, the aging, the dying, there is the hope some might become Buddhas!
You have not met the Buddha on the road yet. Probably because we keep killing those kinds of folks.
So mind you, I am not suggesting that all trauma be done away with and or that good can’t come from trauma. Victims and survivors are born in the same event. I don’t recommend going around causing trauma to tease out who will survive and who will become victims. You will find that by just observing how well people deal with change. How fast do they recover?
In my family, the more tattoos and body piercings you have the more trauma you had in the past.
Now, that’s not a clinical measure, but it’s a good rule of thumb that you can unpack: as body mutilation goes up the more trauma there was.
Some people just like tattoos. Fair enough. There is so much trauma out there, it isn’t hard to find evidence for it, even if it’s not body mutilations or tattoos.
It could be a good rule of thumb if it results in compassion for others. Because sometimes trauma/abuse doesn’t result in self-harm, but in other harm. Sometimes people who were traumatized pass the trauma on. Hurting people hurt others, that, too, is not clinical absolute but a good rule of thumb.
Some people who were brutalized as kids brutalize their own kids. This is not rocket science. I highly encourage the reader to pick up a book called Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Waters. It illustrates very well that not all cultures share the same forms of mental illness. There were cultures that never had PTSD or Anorexia, until the US
taught them how to have it.
If there is some ‘crazy’ syndrome today, never seen in the past, it’s because it’s being taught.
Maybe that’s because of trauma, and new forms of displaying it. Trauma will always manifest itself, one way or the other, if not this generation, in the next generation. It’s not called generational trauma for nothing.
Maybe it’s only seen at the extremes. Maybe it’s because a society that becomes too rational has to swing back to the polar opposite of irrational before it swings around again. Which means, we are locked in a trauma cycle, because too many people want to be on the far side of trauma.
You can’t get on the far side of trauma and traumatizing behavior if it’s everywhere. You definitely can’t leave trauma behind if you have to create to expose it. Except when it’s necessary. Rip the band aid off and let’s get this done. One last war will not end trauma. It will just guarantee the wheel will come round again.
This Indian parable is likely a nice way to sort through change and trauma. It offers an idea for cultivating a perspective that I aim for. Sometimes I hit it. Sometimes I fail. That’s human, too.
The story starts with a farmer and a son. We don’t know about the mom, but assume a tragedy.
They had one horse. One day the son left the gate open and the only horse they had fled. Society cried, oh, poor farmer.
“We’ll see,” said the farmer.
The next day the horse returned with a wild, friend horse. The son closed the gate and now they had two horses. Villagers said, “Oh lucky farmer.”
“We’ll see,” said the farmer.
The next day the son broke his leg trying to tame the horse.
Poor farmer. We’ll see.
The next day the army came through the village and sub-scripted all the capable young men, except for the farmer’s son because of his bum leg.
Lucky farmer. We’ll see.
The house burns down. Poor Farmer. In the ashes he finds a strings of pearls and becomes rich…
If you haven’t figured it out by now, there is no end to this story. There is no right response. It’s subjective, to the degree that if you are influenced by external things and not core beliefs that are unshakeable, then you will go where the wind goes.
There are some things we know are true and these usually make life fairly easy to predict. ‘This, too, will change’ is an essential life philosophy.
What can we predict? I don’t know. A little good, a little bad, and a whole bunch of the same!
Because though things do change, people come and go, some things never change, which is why the philosophy of ‘this, too, will change’ is eternal.
We are all just sand paintings, or in the words of Kansas, ‘dust in the wind.’
