Hitler and a Jewish Girl.

I’m going on a rant so hang in there or click out. I’m having this existential crisis as in, ‘why do I love bad people?’ Why do I see the light and soul in them even when they have told me to my face that they are not good for me. Why do I ignore red flags. Why do I keep best friends who belittle and abuse me. Why do I stay when I hurt and my life is so painful I want off world. Am I wrong to love “bad” people or am I loving the human beyond their obvious and sometimes painful trauma responses to life.

I don’t believe in the Devil but I do believe in mental illness. If there is evil on this planet it stems from the human consciousness or lack of consciousness we see daily in the news and in our society. The Devil didn’t make the Nazi, poverty, anger, despair, racism, and a need for revenge over the loss of world war one created the Nazi. The Devil didn’t create Jeffery Dahmer. Untreated childhood trauma created Jeffery Dahmer. Think of all the evil you have ever experienced, trace it back to its source and you will usually find a deeply painful traumatic origin story that leads to mass or individual mental illness. 

So, all those people in prison can’t be mentally ill right? Some of them are just evil right? Nope. They’re damaged, broken, traumatized and crammed into a system that will only injure them further. The rate of recidivism among inmates is so high because they generally come out of prison more damaged and mentally unstable than they were when they went in. The only evil under the sun is the human need to have power over another person, to create cast systems that makes one person lower then them, to hurt innocence, and destroy freedom because of an ingrained belief that if you are lower then me then I’m not at the bottom, you are. The only evil is us.

I grew up poor. My dad would walk through the house and laugh as he said, “We is Po Fuckers!” Yep! he was a racist immigrant who knew he didn’t have a pot to piss in and never would. He hated everyone who wasn’t white because that meant that his light skin made him better then the people he made fun of, the people I called friends and he called N*****s. When I told him my DNA proved we were gypsy and mostly North African and Middle Eastern he went silent. Who was beneath him now? His white brotherhood wasn’t his brotherhood anymore. He’s a Gypsy like me and the fear of being other must have hit him hard. 

Fear makes monsters of us. Fear yells in our head that if we don’t ace the next test or get into the good school we’ll be like them, the poor trash, the prison bound, the under dogs that don’t fight their way to the top but just get run over. I was born poor trash living in domestic violence and even when I thought I had fought my way out I realized I hadn’t. My thoughts about myself screamed in my father’s voice,” You is a Po Fucker and you won’t be nothing.” I was baptized in poverty consciousness, a mental illness that constantly reminds you that your next meal is not guaranteed, and your roof is only your roof as long as you can afford to pay the MAN to keep it. 

So how do we heal America? How do we end the mad dog savagery that is us. And please don’t think that just because you drive a Benz, live in the perfect community, and attend church regularly you aren’t just as big a lunatic as the rest of us. So again, how do we conquer fear and really turn this sinking ship toward shore? Well I’m just crazy enough to tell you. 

1. There is no evil, there’s just you. 
2. Fear is driving the crazy bus so if you want to get off you have to find faith in your own instinctual goodness. A person who does not fear can not be controlled. 
3. You have to start loving yourself. A person who loves themselves can not stand on anyone else’s neck to get a better view because a person with a direct connection to self love honers and loves the Devine in everyone they meet.

Love yourself. You were divinely made. Turn off the news. Step out of the matrix. Fear nothing but your own need to control. Mental illness doesn’t have to be our final destination. We weren’t born to struggle.