Follow up article suggesting the rejection of the normalization of insanity.

::::::::

It's everywhere, straining our society, distorting our culture.

The other day, I was listening to a former host, Joy Reid, from a cable network I wish not to name, explain why Europe isn't really a continent. It caught my attention because as much as I'm prone to question everything, this passed me.

I knew that the production of world maps tend to depict a US-Europe centered globe, honoring white supremacy narratives. These are the maps and globes we were introduced to in school, and we were to think of a one-world scenario, even if when the continent from which all of humanity originated from was relegated to a spot-- off-stage. Mapmakers today, have learned not to be so ignorant or teach other generations of children a lie.

An African-centered map must irritate the authoritarians of our current world.

In the day, when European conquerors and mapmakers were planting their flags and naming land, in which people already existed, they proclaimed themselves the center of most everything east of the Atlantic. As children, we didn't note the cruelty of not only brutal conquest of land and people but also the naming and centering conquerors. We identified with the "we" the teachers referred to only to realize, if we became woke, that we weren't the conqueror, nor did we want to be.

We didn't want to be the conquered either. Who does? Except that we are like to wake up from the nightmare of lying narratives and brutal dominance. And Reid, someone proud to be woke, pointed out in her podcast that Europe is attached to Asia! Europe is the smaller land mass! Look at a map!

Euro-Asia makes more sense. It's has nothing to do with how far Europe is from Asia, as European narratives of white supremacy would have the world think because there isn't any such thing in actuality as "the Middle East." Or, "The Far East." It's Euro-Asia, with Russia above and across Europe and Asia.

Doublethink isn't something described in a novel from the 1940s.

It's not just about turning a fact into a lie, a reality into a fantasy to placate the powerful and wealthy who become so because of the lie or fantasy. It's not just that. It's a crime to abuse children, and what is the greatest abuse of children is the telling of lies, even when we tell children, not to lie. Remember Pinocchio! God doesn't like liars, we tell children. And yet, we teach our children that in order to fit in, absorbing lies and believing them is patriotic or god-fearing.

Imagine the cruelty manifested in the deliberate misrepresentation of a people, and designating them as inferior?

The other day, I was trying to talk with a fellow citizen, white, slightly older, but to her, it's the difference that matters, college educated. In fact, she received her BA from a Wisconsin campus where I first taught 26 years ago. I mentioned I had a horrible, racist experience at that campus. As a black woman, new faculty, with a PhD.

After a childish trick played on me by the English department staff, I went to the dean only to be told I had to move to the Education department. Later I found out that the black chair of that department provided me with an office. I have a doctorate in English, 1900-45 American literature! I had to swallow the humiliation of students thinking what-- about a black woman with an office in the Education department and not in English. This happened two weeks before classes started that year.

But before that, I had to sit some two hours in the affirmative action director's office where he was assigned the task of getting rid of me before she signs the Visiting Professorship contact. I wasn't to leave his office. He left. I was determined to not give in despite being told what happened to two other black women who attempted to teach in the English department.

The woman, however, didn't hear this story, and I couldn't express to her how cruel her dismissal of my attempt to reach her as a fell human being. I never got that far before she interrupted because it would have been too, what-- "uncomfortable" to hear what I meant by racist? I was less than because that is what she had been taught, despite, as she informed me, her deceased husband was black. Instead, she told me that if I didn't have a good experience there, it was anything personal. The now-late chair of the English department spoke rudely to her when she was an undergrad student in his class. So, don't think about it. What I experienced wasn't unique. It was just a rude professor.

Ignorance is strength. Doublethink survives and permeates the way in which we think, the way in which we educate our children.

The same woman I tried to talk with believes in God. Apparently, she's not heard of Dr. Martin L. King since she also believes she can't do anything about what's happening in the world. Aside from pray!

I imagine living in Lebanon or Iran, on any street, in any home, with young with children, or elderly, or disabled, or schoolteacher surrounded by school girls, or college professors in front of their classes of hopeful students, or just walking home with friends from the theater, and one moment I am and the next, I am not. Or my children are lying dead. My mother, My whole neighborhood unrecognizable.

If I can't even imagine this, I can't begin to empathize, and recognize that my taxpayers dollars, in part, made this death and destruction possible.

We know, some of us Americans, what it's like to live in a neighborhood, community, city, state, or country where our very presence is perceived as an invasion of the "enemy." An invasion of domestic terrorists!

And then the president of the US threatens genocide! An unhinged man threatens to wipe off the planet 90 million people! Because he believes he can do so. Where are we America? Where is the world? Where is the one person, anyone who could have stopped this man by invoking the 25^th?

When the president of the US is threatening to annihilate the Vatican because Pope Leo told the warmonger Trump and that secretary of "war" that Jesus isn't listening to them, where are we? To tired to deal? Tuning out? Accepting the insane as normal?

A War for Jesus! Who questioned this insanity?

Ignorance, some believe, is strength.

Let the people know next to nothing! And so people are dying in Iran and Lebanon, and elsewhere, depending on their relationship with the two warmongers, the US and Israel.

But this can't stand! It's not in the history of Africans shipped and enslaved in the US and their descendants, to allow slavery to stand. We didn't allow lynching and legalized segregation to stand. These are strange times, end times for democracy in the US, when it should be end times for humanity's cruelty toward its species and the planet's life.

Why are we, after almost a year and a half of witnessing the inflicting of cruelty on American, Venezuelan, Palestinian, Iranian citizens, following a man who is mentally ill and who isn't afraid of perpetuating death and destruction in this country and around the world?

In the first sentence, the protagonist of George Orwell's 1984 acknowledges the striking of a clock at "thirteen." If you read this sentence, you would think that you've entered the Twilight Zone. The message, you would think, is that something is off in the world Orwell presents in this novel. But we are told that Orwell, in 1946, "made extensive and almost melodramatic use of his own buried knowledge of cruelty." At the boys' boarding school, Christopher Hitchens writes in the "Introduction" to 1984, Orwell suffered from the sadistic and authoritarian behavior among those small boys. He witnessed this cruelty while serving as a police in colonial Burma ("Introduction"). "He has also gained first-hand experience of political terror as a fighter against fascism and Stalinism in Spain."

There can be no hope in this world and the people, like our protagonist Winston, feel powerless, as Hitchens notes.

Are we living where our clocks strike "thirteen"? Why, I wonder, have we continued to normalize authoritarians? If not that so many have accepted doublethink as the norm!

We are free, and yet, we are slaves to protectors, saviors. The powerful have vowed to protect us from the them! Inside and outside! Everywhere! Or they will replace us! So wars! Everywhere! Arrests and detention warehouses.

That our liberties are disappearing is okay. Protection is costly. So we'll toughen up!

Waging wars elsewhere means "peace" at home.

Trump stands before the world, before the American people, experiencing high fuel, high prices at the grocery stores, high rents and medical costs, that he wishes for Iran to one day enjoy the lifestyle of the American people.

I'm sure the world heard him rant about the impossibility of funding medicaid and all these social programs when the US has to wage war! There's the Department of War that needs funding in order to confiscate oil and other resources from other nations. Let's not forget land for the billionaires to develop playgrounds, with luxury hotels, golf courses and airstrips. The US government must fund ICE to tackle domestic terrorists.

So much work goes into protecting the American people! Or is it, so much lying? So much deceitfulness resulting in cruelty--all for so few people to benefit.

Almost two decades ago, I wrote a few articles referencing 1984. I thought then there was time enough for this country to get a hold of itself, prevent itself from rolling down the cliff. Yet, here we are in the year 2026 with the face of Big Brother draping the front of the Department of Justice. Trump mug shot everywhere reminds us of his protection. He is our savior. He only requires of us, as Winston describes his co-worker, "paralyzing stupidity."

My ancestors were to be "happy" as enslaved people. They were to accept another people as superior while they were labeled as inferior. Subhuman.

Only some of my ancestors refused to believe in their inferiority. They refused the definition of what it meant to be a human being and therefore to be free. These ancestors registered their desire to be free as normal, defying the psychological theory that it wasn't natural for those who are "happy" and enslaved in the US to want to escape the plantation. To be free, at least, of these peculiar institutions. Samuel A. Cartwright insisted on the mentally ill aspect of run-away enslaved blacks. Drapetomania, he called it in 1851. It's a wonder the order of things wasn't so tired up with, of all things, race. Or someone would have inquired as to whether or not this individuals would want to escape it he was purchased as property.

We've refused to serve self-imposing gods. Kings. We fought against a monarchy. We've refused to serve masters and the KKK. We fought against a fascist regime. We've refused to serve as fresh skulls for police batons nor did we serve for long as targets of snipers' bullets. We showed the world what is done to our children on bright Sunday mornings at Sunday school or in darkened barns in the dead of night.

In the episode, "Chain of Command," there's a scene in where Captain Jean-Luc Picard, captured by the Cardassians, is stripped of his clothing and forced to knee in front of Gul Madred. Near Madred are four bright lights. Picard is order to state that he sees five bright lights.

The Captain, treated as a terrorist rather than a prisoner of war; consequently, he's tortured.

When he refuses, he is tortured.

It's Twilight Zone! It's a clock striking "thirteen." Yet, Picard refuses to denounce the reality of four bright lights.

Why, Dr. Martin L. King asked himself, should he accept that poverty was okay in the world's riches nation while the military war industry enriched the corporate coffers and the private pockets of CEOs waging war in Vietnam?

In 1968, at Ohio Northern University, King delivers a speech and argues that there might be some legitimacy in labeling someone "maladjusted." He could understand how psychologists are concerned with the "neurotic and schizophrenic" personalities. When, however, injustice becomes the norm, when cruelty becomes the norm, when warmongers refuse to stop and think, then it comes a time to refuse to accept the "norm." To be "maladjusted" might be the only way to survive becoming neurotic or schizophrenic or a downright liar, complicit with an authoritarian regime.

"'I'm proud to be maladjusted,'" King tells his audience. He called upon those of "'good will to remain maladjusted until the good society is realized.'" A regime that expects its citizens to accept "'segregation and discrimination,'" or "'religious bigotry'" or "'economic conditions which take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few,'" is one adhering to "'the madness of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.'" This is a regime and society, King adds, both, far from a sane regime and society.

The war in Vietnam was "'a gravely unjust evil, abominable war.'" I'm sure King would say the same about the war in Iran and the attempt to destroy Lebanon by Israel. People have died and will die because of a man deeply immoral, and deeply disturbed.

Those determined to be "maladjusted" are those who recognize they no longer want to be "slaves." As King states, we can't "survive half slave and half free."

"'Through such maladjustment I believe that we can emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.'"

King continues, declaring that he still had faith in humanity. Maybe, he adds, our world was in need of a new organization. Maybe there needs to be an "International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment."

But adjust isn't the response to maintain a democracy. Normalizing the insane says something about us!

We have to free ourselves, once again! Freedom isn't slavery!

Authors Bio:

Activist, writer, American Modern Literature, Cultural Theory, PhD.