Episode 2
Bullies are alive and well, controlling our world and our minds.
One day, when I was a little boy, my friends and other neighborhood kids gathered together on a curb. We watched a road crew tear up a section of street, level it out with crunched-up new street, and then spray it down with a layer of steaming hot tar oil before a huge leveler machine would come and squish it all flat again.
After they started a new section and had spread new tar and released the hot oil, a neighborhood bully shoved a little girl into the street and into the hot, sticky mess. At first, she didn’t move as she lay sprawled face down into the hellish mixture, and then she suddenly started shrieking muffled screams. The workers dropped their shovels and ran over to try and pull her from the tar. They soon realized they couldn’t without leaving parts of the girl stuck into the street.
A couple of men ran back over to pick up their shovels, began digging underneath the girl, dug up the street, and managed to remove her with the ground-up road and hot oil seemingly stuck to her for eternity. They frantically tried to remove the still-steaming mixture from around her mouth and nose, which produced even more bloodcurdling screams from the girl as chunks of bloody skin stuck to the removed tar.
To make this entry shorter without providing more unnecessary gory details, the rescue squad soon arrived, and the EMTs rushed her to the hospital. The girl unfortunately survived with lifelong scarring. No one knows what happened to the bully who shoved the girl, as he ran away, never to be seen again. For a while, it was my mission, if we ever crossed tracks again, to beat the living tar out of the coward (sorry).
It would seem that most of our ruling leaders in the world never learned how to play fair with others in the playground. They think they can bully other countries by attacking and stealing their assets or natural resources.
The World Bank and multinational corporations, which are ruled by powerful bullies, pretend to empathize with poorer countries by lending them money to fix their infrastructure, only to charge them exorbitant interest rates. The beaten country can never repay and ends up giving away their most valuable resources instead for compensation.
There’s a popular diagnosis going around now called PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. To simplify this, it seems it is a result of our mind’s incapability to overcome, process, or make sense of some traumatic event(s) that occurred in our history. There was something in the trauma that did not compute with our reality.
Unless we’ve sorted out these events in our minds, everyone carries some PTSD from an event, including all the witnesses to the girl stuck in the tar and the people who succumbed to overpowering rulers. PTSD is the result of someone or something producing control over our lives and minds.
There is another form of PTSD. Back in the moldy oldie (ancient) days, usually when a child turned twelve or thirteen, there was a festival of some sort. It was a demarcation point when a child knew they passed from childhood into manhood or womanhood. This still occurs primarily in Jewish circles but not so much for Gentiles or non-Jews. It leaves the Gentile man or woman stuck needlessly protecting their childhood because there is no official confirmation we are now men or women.
Men will often put on a coat of machismo or toughness, and the woman will display a snarling attitude (to put it nicely) to protect them if it seems someone causes the smallest crack into revealing childlike weaknesses.
Even more often, we spend our lives with endless, subconscious attempts at trying to please our parents, hoping at some point they will affirm our transformation into adulthood, even if they are no longer alive. We cannot even waste a day without the fear of their disapproval. I only say these things because we will have trouble seeing the bigger picture if we haven’t dealt with our internal sufferings.
With our PTSD, many people medicate themselves with alcohol or drugs or escapism to gain a moment’s peace. Of course, this isn’t the cure, and one thing that is is revisiting the traumatic event(s) from memory enough times until we extract the truth from the deception from the event. For what we don’t realize is the result of the calculated event is now based in deceptive lies for our subconscious to try to put back in order.
A soldier may come home with horrible PTSD. After all, he or she has been indoctrinated to become a killing machine. His fellow soldiers’ lives are more important than his own. Perhaps they witnessed a bombed-out village with dead children, caused by a bomb dropped from their group.
Then they come back to a society that has no need of a killing machine. There aren’t fellow soldiers to care for. They look at their own kids and remember the dead ones from a war. How can they possibly overcome these things?
Becoming a soldier as a killing machine is a temporary assignment. When you come home, your assignment is over, soldier, and there are new assignments to take on. There are new soldiers to care for, family, friends, animals, etc. We need to make the transformation back to who we were before entering the service.
I realize this isn’t as easy as flipping a switch, and it takes concentrated effort to take on new assignments. If you have trouble shaking the vision of dead kids, maybe get a job in pediatrics or work with kids or be an elementary teacher or build homes for kids and families. You may have the opportunity now to save thousands of kids.
Most often the best alcohol and drug addict counselors are the ex-alcohol and drug addicts. Sometimes the best therapy is to have whatever affects you be in your face every day with others with similar issues.
There is a war going on in our minds stemming from deception that just doesn’t compute with what we know is our perceived reality.
This doesn’t mean the experience isn’t real; it is and can be terrifying to remember it for even a moment. What is meant is there are extenuating circumstances that keep us tricked and locked into the trauma.
For example, there may have been sounds, odors, sights, or other senses or other people that went along with the event. The input or remembrances of these exterior forces trigger the memory and are what keep us from releasing the emotional attachment of lies to the event(s).
After experiencing the little girl screaming in the hot tar, for many years I carried a burden of overwhelming guilt. Seeing a work crew or smelling tar would trigger the awful memory for me to try and deal with again and again. Not that I was in any way responsible, because I couldn’t escape for a moment to a local phone booth, change my outfit into Superman, and rescue the damsel in distress only a few feet away from me.
The guilt soon accompanied a feeling of worthlessness, and kids, as supposed friends, or parents are often too happy to endorse our feelings. “Can’t you do anything right? Shame on you!”
This and many other instances of traumatic events occurred later and took many years of sorting out the facts from lies gnawing away in my mind. A one-second event from a bully had controlled my subconscious mind for years.
However, the truth was I was a little kid, not Superman. There was nothing I could do to save the girl or stop the bully. I was not responsible. I was not guilty or worthless. An evil someone else was responsible for the horrific event that not only affected me but all the other witnesses as well.
In addition, sometimes we are the ones that cause a traumatic event upon others. Our moral compass will often point to a lifetime of shame on us for doing so.
On Sundays, a religious leader might tell us about the saving grace of Jesus to ease our troubled minds yet not follow through on how to achieve it through repentance and becoming born-again with God’s fire baptism of His Holy Spirit.
Instead, the religion teaches us how to jump on their hamster wheel of rules and regulations and works to be a member, never able to complete the cycle or grab the carrot at the end of a stick.
At some point, after many battles with trying to sort everything out, and the guilt and worthlessness were rearing their monstrous heads once again to lock me in depression, I closed my eyes and sat quietly surrendered in terror and said, “Bring it.”
I knew and felt I was going to die; however, I let the guilt, worthlessness, and shame overtake me, and when the truth within me came out, the lies couldn’t conquer or kill me. Its vapor of guilt-ridden lies engulfed me and then forever disappeared like dust in the wind.
This could be self-help for some people; for many others, we might need a trusted friend or counselor to assist us—someone who isn’t going to laugh or call us names or blab our event to all the neighbors. But when we get angry, throw a tantrum, start crying, become depressed, or get overly frustrated, stop. What is happening around us at that moment?
Try to catch it. What do we sense—odor, noise, someone saying something, or a song playing—but most important, what is the little inner voice saying? If you can, at that moment, shut your eyes. Why is this thing bothering me? But most important, what is the inner voice saying to accuse me?
Scan your memory of personal history. When an inner vision of trauma pops up, remember the event in all its ugliness. Look around: who was there, noises in the background, smells, etc.? What are the thoughts (for men) or feelings (for women) going on during the event? Is there fear, worry, hatred, disgust, or shame? Did someone abandon or abuse us? What is our perception of it? The trauma experienced is true. Think on it, what is the truth of the event? A little girl got shoved into tar by a bully. Everything else is deception.
Whatever the deceptions are, tell it to “Bring it.” Let it overtake us, and after we walk through our moment of death, it too will vanish like dust in the wind.
Bullies actually are cowards. All they can do is hide in the shadows and then strike out to instill fear and worry in us to gain whatever it is they want to accomplish. Sometimes a punch in the nose will stop the bully. Maybe this should become the solution to world leaders who think they can take advantage of people or control other countries.
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