I don’t have time to write the post now but I was thinking earlier about Reeducation. I understood from my mother I should marry for food, and accept abuse in exchange for food. I did not do that but I realized today I can be made to accept that kind of relationship with work, and I should not. In the psychotherapeutic aspect of Reeducation, I continue to object to the idea that you must subject yourself to re-experiencing the feelings you protected yourself from as a child. I know I dulled myself from emotional abuse; I knew it at the time I did it. That doesn’t mean I have to re-experience it now (although at the urging of a therapist I accepted to do that, and it meant I was near flat on my back for 30+ years afterwards, which was why I had not done it and did not think it a good idea, or necessary). But anyway, the idea that I accepted that kind of relationship to work is fresher, and important.
Earlier today I had noted that people express shock at the Trump administration’s plundering of US wealth and nepotistic appropriation of institutions. I am sanguine because I have experienced this shock before. When I moved to my current university, I discerned in disbelief that those in power did not see it as a workplace or an institution to contribute to, but as an asset to plunder for themselves and their circles, and a platform from which to project themselves. I couldn’t believe it, especially since it’s a public institution, it’s downright unpatriotic to misuse it in that way, but slowly I came to see that it was happening and that I would not struggle as much to understand if I allowed myself to believe my eyes. I wanted to know: how common is this experience? I had not experienced it to anything like this at prior institutions, including one in the same state, although none of them had been free of corruption, iniquity, and so on. I wondered whether others also work at an institution that people, from instructors to department chairs and on up, blatantly treat as nothing more than an asset for them to plunder? I wanted to know how unusual this degree of utter disrespect of education, institutions, and other people, was.
Interestingly, a colleague came by and raised this very issue. He said they are only interested in collecting their pay and they don’t even remain current; they care about nothing. If they cared about, let us say, the students, an entirely different set of things would be happening. How do you already understand all of this? I asked. Because there is a lot of corruption in my country, he said; I recognize the signs and I know what they mean.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 