I’ve been intrigued for quite a while by a certain characteristic of a certain primitive, and when she lit a campfire on Skins’s island recently questioning the validity of certain crime statistics, I decided to puzzle it out, why she feels, and acts, the way she does.
Never mind the identity of the primitive; I’m a nice guy and don’t want to stir up suppressed memories. I’ll keep the details, while accurate, vague enough so that nobody knows who she is, so that she doesn’t feel exposed.
There are many apologists among the primitives, for the misdeeds of a certain minority group, as if their being a minority excuses their rude behavior. But this particular primitive has stood out for years and years now, as the
champion apologist and excuse-maker.
In fact, she was the one who, with the sparkling old dude, flamed the fires of racism on Skins’s island, about two years ago, when she took up the cause of a dead teenaged thug, vigorously fanning race-hate against those who simply wanted to see justice done (which it eventually was).
She’s always been an enigma to me because on one hand she preaches that a certain minority group can do no wrong.
But then on the other hand, she doesn’t seem to like people in that minority group.
She lives in the whitest state in the union.
Some years ago, when we were still at our old home, some other primitive lit a campfire on Skins’s island that was brought over there; it had to do with the possibility of inner-city Los Angeles being devastated by an earthquake, and the primitive who lit the campfire suggested that these people be moved to safer places.
Somewhere along the line, this particular primitive butted in, saying, “Well, don’t send them up here to Vermont; we don’t want them.â€
Apparently while this primitive likes members of this particular minority group in the abstract, as part of some amorphous blob, she doesn’t like individual members of this same group; can’t stand them.
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At some point during my contemplation of this contradiction, like Saul on the road to Damascus, I was abruptly illuminated by a great light--whoa--the “Stockholm Syndrome.â€
The “Stockholm Syndrome†is a phenomenon that occurs when someone who has been abused or victimized by a certain group of people, instead of resenting it, that person perversely comes to sympathize with the abusers and victimizers.
Stockholm syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them. These feelings are generally considered irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, who essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness…..
Stockholm syndrome can be seen as a form of traumatic bonding, which does not necessarily require a hostage scenario, but which describes “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.â€â€¦..
This particular primitive, now bordering on the age of 65 years, was raised in rather affluent circumstances in Connecticut, and was sent to a girls’ polishing-off school in California. Given the culture of the times, she became hippie-ized, a radical chic chick, for whom one of her hobbies was hanging around with the sort of persons she’d heretofore been utterly ignorant, a certain minority group.
Such interest wasn’t because she was truly interested in the plight of the oppressed, but simply because she wished to shock, to offend, what she thought of as the dominant-culture oppressors.
A lot of hippies were like that; it was a way of getting back at their parents.
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There exists a very good book,
Common Ground, published circa 1980, dealing with the Boston school crisis of the mid-1970s, when affluent white liberals sought to preserve their own by coercing poor working-class whites to integrate with poor working-class blacks.
It’s a very long book, but it’s also a very good book. (For the edification of lurking primitives who judge books by their cover, it was written by a far-left liberal.)
Buried in it is a short description of a graduate student in women’s studies at the time (the mid-1970s, remember), who’d become radicalized by the convulsions of the hippie era, who developed an affinity for male members of a certain minority group.
She had no idea of their nature, but it was hip, cool, trendy, with it, to hang around with such guys.
One night, when she was where she shouldn’t be, she was grabbed by one, beaten and raped, the guy defecating into her mouth, in what had to be, to put it mildly, a traumatic experience.
Oddly though, despite such a horrific experience, she developed an affinity for this guy, for this class of people.
Now, this was more than forty years ago, and this is
not this particular primitive; one wonders what ever became of that woman, and hopes that she lived out her days in the safety of a nuthouse.
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Now, I doubt this particular primitive had an experience matching all the details of this, but I’m left wondering, given her vigorous espousal of a certain oppressed minority group despite her dislike of them as individuals, in addition to her low self-esteem, if she might’ve suffered some sort of abuse (I hope not this, though), and found it necessary to go Stockholm to preserve herself.
It’s just a guess, but I’ll bet I’m not far off, if off at all.
