Читать книгу Pioneer Islands - Dr. Steve Rolland DC - Страница 4

Now, I am not trying to say that the advent of agriculture was a bad thing, but that it was a big thing. It started gradually and endowed its creators with the ability to feed their numbers and set the framework for the evolution of civilization and the specialization of labor. It paved the way for advances in many areas: writing, animal husbandry and eventually great advances in science and technology. With these increases in sophistication came the opportunity for a social stratification that eventually put power in the hands of the elite. This has repeatedly led to corruption and tyranny by those who hold the very lives of the populace in their hands. Gradually, with this acquisition of power over an ever-growing population, there became more intricate means of exchange of goods and services.

As an example let’s say that “Og” make fired earthenware pottery that he trades for goods and services with others in the village, and “Dalu” is in need of pottery to carry drinking water to his hut from a distant spring as well as for cooking and storing food, he might be able to trade goods with Og. Dalu raises fowl that he trades for goods and services within the village, and he wants to trade some of his birds for Og’s pottery. But Og’s father-in-law who lives in the hut adjoining his, and also raises fowl, which he freely gives to Og if he requests some birds. Dalu would then have difficulty striking a deal with Og to trade his fowl for pottery. Eventually, in many cultures, a standard media of value would be achieved where beads, gems, ornate feathers or something of rare value could serve as a currency that would be easily traded between individuals and would be considered equally valuable to all, and could be used as an exchange to acquire any good or service. This eventually led to the creation of a monetary system, often in the form of rare metals that could be traded and eventually came to be cast in specified quantities as coinage in many European and Asian cultures.

Eventually monetary systems were created using coins of copper, silver and gold by many governments. As some individuals amassed great amounts of coinage, it also became a commodity that individuals or groups would go to great lengths to acquire by theft or warfare. As the monetary system evolved, and some people amassed more money than others, guarding their loot became a problem for many individuals. Some created fortified buildings with security to guard them. Those who felt their money was less secure began to store their money with those they trusted to guard them together with their precious assets. This was the birth of banking. Of course those persons who invested in these secure buildings with guards wanted to receive some fee for protecting assets of others. Sometimes these new “bankers” would loan money to individuals they felt confident would repay the loaned money at a later date. A fee would usually be charged for this service which we now refer to as “interest.” When people deposited this money with a banker they were given a receipt for their deposit, a “banknote.” Because large sums of money were heavy and cumbersome, bank notes were sometimes used to purchase goods and were the early forms of “paper money.” Eventually those with the most money and power came to be known as “the government” and took exclusive control of the printing and value of currency inside their domains.

Historically, those who were born into wealthy families were offered tremendous advantage over those who were not. The initial possession of capitol allows that person to accomplish things a person born into poverty could only dream of. With large sums of money at their disposal wealthy families could invest in all sorts of business dealings and amass greater lands and possessions that would stay within the family. Although, of course, it is very possible to lose money through bad investments in business or losing wars, it is quite true that “it takes money to make money” leaving those who have it in a much better position than those born into a lower socioeconomic class. With wealth comes more lands, more wealth and more power until those wealthiest citizens become the “owners” of society. Just as the case of wars over food in the past, wars over assets and wealth are now the norm.

As I have presented it, much of recent human cultural history over the last few thousand years is in fact a history of conflict over resources. Perhaps the greatest resource we have is people. When wars have been fought it is usually an all or nothing conflict. The winners in battle hold all the cards. Food, land, gold, men, money, children, and animals live or die at the victor’s whim. With the conquest over another group, often came the enslavement of the survivors.

Slavery may seem abhorrent to us today but it has existed throughout written history and, in fact, exists under most people’s naïve noses today. To those who have won absolute power over other human beings through systematic murder, to enslave the conquered is certainly no great moral offense. Some might even consider it to be a twisted form of benevolence. It endowed the conquerors with food, land, whores and generations of enslaved workers who themselves were a commodity. Typically slaves were considered inferior by the fact of their status. They had lost in war and deserved no mercy. They were considered culturally, genetically or religiously inferior and so were regarded as no more than livestock.

It is doubtful that slavery existed before the rise of agriculture. How could a hunger/gatherer enslave another hunter/gatherer? Firstly, the necessary workday was only a few hours, negating the need for a slave. Secondly, it would be extremely difficult to oversee a person who must follow wherever nature leads them in their quest for food. Modern slavery presents few modifications from its ancient ancestral state. Although it is usually referred to by a different name, it is slavery none the less. It is now referred to as debt.

When the slaves in the United States were emancipated in the 1860s, former slave owners found a simple way to continue their dominion over them and have their crops harvested and labor performed by simply enslaving them with debt. Because these people had had even the most basic of education denied to them, they were illiterate. They possessed no resource of cash to buy their own land, no housing, no food. The only way they could survive in the North or South of the United States was to seek menial labor. In the southern states, in particular, they were compelled to pay rent for the shanties they had previously lived in, pay for the food their former masters had given them, denied an education to improve their lot, and were unable to cast a vote to change an unfairly oppressive system. Often, they were actually worse off than they had been before. Of those who travelled north, many fared little better. Racially and culturally discriminated against, only the most difficult, most menial, most dangerous, and lowest paying occupations were available to them. They had gained freedom, but by no measure had they gained equality. Cruelly, by impoverishing humans, one gradually increases the likelihood that they will obtain what the need for life or comfort by the use of theft, deception, or violence. As I stated before, that is a common natural behavior among all mammals, and human beings are not an exception. The unfortunate consequence, however, is that other races or cultures of the rest of society see this as a confirmation of negative prejudices against minorities in American culture or other outsiders in other cultures. Because freed slaves in America universally began their post civil war culture impoverished, this debilitating economic position functioned to maintain them in poverty almost perpetually, after all, it takes money to make money, and if you don’t have it, you are fucked!

I lived in Jamaica for four months in 1995. As with all my adventures since adulthood, I have never travelled or lived in any country as a tourist. I arrived with almost no money and left forty pounds lighter and penniless, however, I was blessed with a pristine experience immersed as a clandestine cultural anthropologist. Before my experience I had envisioned Jamaica as a tropical paradise where one could enjoy abundant natural vegetation and fishing that would easily provide you with a ready supply of natural food. This was not the case, however. I lived in Redground, a suburb of Westend Jamaica, within sight of Montego Bay. I went there to be a “mule” on a drug deal and earn myself and fiancée $5,000 which we planned to use to obtain a business license in my adopted home in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. The deal did not work out, due to my employer’s heroin habit. He ended up leaving me there with no plane ticket home. I was trapped on the island with no money, food, or even shoes! I contemplated stealing one of the many sailboats moored offshore and sailing due West back to Mexico.

But I survived there by helping a local ganja farmer tend to his crops in the jungle. I also contributed to my host families’ welfare by shoplifting food from the grocery stores as they graciously shared every one of their meals with me. Eventually I was picked up by a camouflaged narcotics squad in the bush one morning en route to our clandestine marijuana plot. I never gave away its location. After eleven days in the Negril jail (which was another cultural experience), I was able to weave a plausible enough tale to win myself a free ticket back to Milan, Italy, and my waiting fiancee and baby child, compliments of British Airways.

While living in Jamaica, embedded in the local culture, I followed the “prime directive” as outlined in the original “Star Trek” series by Gene Rodenberry. It reads: “There can be no interference with the internal development of pre-warp civilizations.” I was only an observer; I did not judge or intervene. Rather than a cheerful and robust people, I found the populace to be quite poor economically and largely illiterate. Food was expensive and in short supply, gainful employment difficult to find, and the culture prone to drug activity as well as domestic violence. Indeed, for most people, participation in the local marijuana or cocaine trade was, for the most part, the most viable path out of poverty. Employment in tourism was available to those with an education, and the money to buy a permit as a tourist guide, without this permit, a Jamaican citizen faced arrest for even speaking to a tourist. For women “renting” was almost the only opportunity to earn money, and they were typically pimped by husbands or boyfriends. Fathers were usually estranged from their baby mothers and children. Health care was non-existent for most. Island economies are very sluggish as goods must be imported and exported making everything expensive. Here, it was another example of “takes money to make money” and no one seemed to have the money. I was appalled at the prevalence of domestic violence; it was the norm. The men beat the women and children, the women beat children, and children fought with other children. Now, this was not the case with every family, but it seemed to be so in the majority of families, especially those who did not have assets. Those who did have money used it to build walls around their fortified houses.

When I would walk to the store and get a newspaper, I would often have people ask me to read it to them. Indeed I only ever saw one book for sale in Jamaica, Bob Marley’s Biography, Catch a Fire. In over 120 days on the island I saw only two children with toys, a boy with a hand-crafted wooden car with wheels made from the lids of tuna fish cans and powered with a string to pull it. Another little girl I knew always tightly clutched a little white skinned blue-eyed blond haired dolly. The possibility of experiencing anything except abject lifelong poverty was almost nil. Certainly, poverty breeds violence and desperation, but it was the violence within families that pained me the most. Keep in mind, all things are relative, and I know this because I have experienced it, there exist far more terrifyingly brutal cultures than what I observed in Jamaica.

By far my most profound revelation in Jamaica involved my discovering the malignant roots from which sprang the most negative aspects of their culture, that ogre I despise the most in all human societies, domestic violence. I saw the frequent aftermath of women or children bearing facial cuts and bruises from beatings. Once “Plumber,” the father figure in the family which sheltered me, was angered at the oldest boy, Musai, because he had failed to do his household chores. The man promised the 7 year old a beating, and the little man had run off and hid in the bush near a decaying abandoned house across the lane. He was clad only in a pair of white briefs. The poor kid hid out for three days like that, too fearful to return to accept his beating. He had no other clothes, food, water, or shelter from mosquitoes at night. Daily, I took what food I could, a banana, perhaps a slice or two of bread, and left it where I had last spied him. Because he always ran off when I approached, and stayed out of sight, I never knew for sure if he had gotten it. Finally on the fourth day he returned to accept his beating; I was grateful it occurred while I was gone.

A trait that I believe was borne out of a great human decency to their comrades in suffering was the Jamaican tradition of food sharing. If any family member or friend arrived as a group was eating, each of the diners would scrape an equal portion of the food off their plates in order to present the newcomer with a meal the same size as everyone else’s, regardless of how grand or meager the meal. One morning while sharing breakfast with by my host family, we sat or squatted around the cooking fire outside their one room hut, I was making funny faces at the youngest of the three children, a two-year-old spirited little tyke they called “toughest.” He would run up to me and look into my blue eyes smiling (they are quite rare in Jamaica and I would often catch people staring at them, after a few months of seeing only dark brown eyes, I too, would stare when I saw any other colored eyes on a person). I would then make some crazy expression and he would run away, laughing hysterically. After this had gone on for a few moments, I realized that he would also look, a bit hungrily I thought, at the toast on my plate each time he approached it. Teasingly, seeing his directed gaze, I would pull the plate away, taunting him non-verbally to take the morsel that I was intending to give him anyway, seeing that the giggling child was still hungry. Finally, on one approach, he reached out and snatched it. In a flash, Plumber grabbed the kid’s wrist, and scooped the child up with his other arm, he held his wrist in an iron grip, and spun around to place the little man’s outstretched hand directly into the flames of the fire! I shrieked in protest, “No, no, it’s my fault, I was teasing him.” But it was in vain, as he held the child’s hand there for a horrifying five seconds while he screamed. Finally he dropped the wailing child muttering “it don’t matter; he’ got to learn not to steal nobody’s food.” I was absolutely mortified at what had happened, I could not speak, and I knew in my heart that it was all my fault.

In the following 24 hours I did some very serious soul searching, using deductive logic as my guide in determining why this culture had acquired what I considered to be, negative traits. I used the premise that essentially this appeared to have the earmarks of dysfunctional family. You know, the type of home situation where an angry father comes home then beats his wife, the wife and mother then vents her frustration by beating the children, and the children express their pent up hostilities by dowsing the neighbor’s cat with gasoline and setting it on fire. The child becomes an angry menace to society, a truant from school and a bully, resorts to crime and delinquency at an early age, gets expelled from school for threatening a teacher, and becomes a habitual criminal as an adolescent, as a young adult, they are indoctrinated into a violent social structure that carriers the misnomer “corrections” or “rehabilitation” but is actually a training facility for those who will likely experience a lifetime of violent maladaptive behavior and exist in a revolving door system of freedom followed by incarceration that will progressively shut them away from “normal society” for longer and longer periods where they will pace their cells in anger for years, hard wired by this time to be robots programmed for crime and violence. If they have a family, their offspring will have an almost doubtless predilection for the same crime and violence patterns of behavior directly proportional to the amount of time they spend during childhood with their socially crippled parent. When they finally meet their fitting end, society will shake its collective head and say, how could a human being become such a monster? The answer is because “society” never gave a shit about them. The most terrifying aspect of this dysfunctional picture is that it is self-perpetuating, continuing generation after maladapted generation.

As a scholar, studying both hard sciences (e.g., Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Physics) and social sciences (e.g., Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology), I had completed major curriculums in Biological Sciences, and Psychology, as well as achieved my doctorate in Chiropractic. Following this decade long plod through five colleges, a stint in the Air Force and having earned a black belt in the martial art of Wu Yung Mun, I should have, would have, begun a career as a practicing Chiropractic Physician. That is had it not been for a trip through a legal, financial, and emotionally exhausting, gut wrenching tour of a labyrinth chamber of horrors of a bitter divorce and child visitation battle. Up until the last two years of Chiropractic College I had been married to my high school sweetheart. One weekend in the summer of 1984 a long brewing discontent I had harbored over the power of structure of our marriage erupted in a showdown. I was tired of having my spouse run every meticulous detail of my life and her intent to dominate my entire career as well. I left to spend the weekend with a buddy in his mountain home and expected to return the following Monday to a wife that was an equal partner rather than a dominating overlord; that had been my ultimatum. Had it worked out as I had expected, I am sure I would have never gained the experience and depth of insight that has prompted me to write this book. The situation rapidly decayed into an unimaginable choice that forever changed the lives of my immediate and extended family.

Until that turning point in my life, I had never realized or appreciated how idyllic my upbringing had been. I had had the good fortune to be born into a modestly wealthy family. I was raised in a loving extended family and had both sets of grandparents living next door to our home on a hill overlooking the city where I grew up. My grandfather owned 80 acres that included the entire hill with a creek and ponds that teamed with deer and other wildlife. I never had dealt with the insecurity of changing schools. My mother excelled in a long career in education and my father was a very successful businessman. Both grandfathers were also quite well known across the state in their respective careers and were pillars of the local community. Both grandmothers doted over me and were always available to listen to every whiney complaint or boyish joy I experienced. I was constantly showered with love, hugs, toys and candy. As far as I knew in my childish way, this was how everyone grew up.

As I dissected in my mind the cultural manifestations I observed in Jamaica, I came to realize that this was essentially the same mechanisms that one might observe in a dysfunctional family, but extrapolated outward from a familial dysfunction to a Cultural Dysfunction Syndrome (CDS). If correct in my assumption, then by regressing through time I should be able to determine the original cultural scenario that had initiated this generationally transmitted blight. I wondered, were the original social conditions in Africa so malignant that this had evolved into the Jamaican society that I saw today? That seemed a bit simplistic, after all they had originated as tribal hunter gatherers there, not that this granted them immunity in some way, as certainly their populations had reached the carrying capacity of their landscape over the millions of years that humans had essentially been “bottled up” on that continent due to climatic conditions that had prevented our common ancestors from following a northern exodus through the harsh northern deserts that expanded and contracted as the planet cycled through various climatic conditions.

After further reflection I believed I had hit upon my answer. Less than one hundred fifty years ago, all these people were slaves! In Jamaica, as elsewhere, masters held absolute power over their human property. They could literally work them to death, starve them, beat them, hang them, rape them, separate families or separate limbs from their bodies. Slave owners held absolute and total dominion over their charges and never, ever, were compelled to treat them with a shred of decency. Naturally, some slave masters would be more humane than others, but there was no societal more that compelled them to do so. If the master was drunk or perhaps didn’t get laid that day, he could vent his frustration by tying up a slave and flogging them until his arm got tired. Now, imagine a child being raised in such an environment, countless sociological studies have documented how being raised in an abusive and violent home dramatically increases the likelihood that those children, as adults, will be many fold more likely to be physical abusers than children who were not exposed to such a harsh environment in their youth. Likewise, children who have one or more family members commit suicide are far more likely to resort to the same method of ending their life than others.

Because dysfunctional families are much more likely to follow in the patterns of abuse that were modeled to them in the environment in which they grew up, than a child raised in a nonviolent home, the pattern is more likely than not to be repeated in their adulthood. The next generation is then indoctrinated in this dysfunctional type of behavior and they, in turn, will probably be abusers as well. And so the cycle continues from one generation to the next. It matters very little if the abuser is a biological parent, step parent, or even slave owner; the cycle continues. In my personal experience, I have met countless persons whom I knew well enough that they would recount their childhood traumas to me that had greatly negatively affected them at the time. These same individuals, I would often notice, later would inflict the same sort of emotional or physical tortures upon their own children when they became parents, often at exactly the same stage of child development as when their trauma occurred, as if they insist that their child endure the same experience. Rare is the individual, who through their own intellect and will power is able to break these damaging behavioral patterns. I believe that the opposite is also true, in that those children who are raised in positive, non-judgmental and non-violent households are extremely more likely to present the same sort of caring environment and behaviors toward their children when they have spouses and raise families. The 150 years since the end of slavery represents between five to ten human generations. It is likely that many of the current generation of Jamaicans retain some elements of this same cultural dysfunction. Because cultural inheritance, like genetic inheritance, can pass its characteristics on through either parent or presumably stepparents, grandparents or other affected family members, it increases the likelihood that someone who carries this negative trait would be present in a child’s life to successfully model this behavior.

But, who is to “blame” for all this, shall we say, cultural dysfunction? It is certainly not the group of Jamaicans I lived with, no, but the “white man.” It was Europeans who chose to engage in the slave trade. They captured or paid others to capture these slaves, ruin their lives and families, chained them up and transported them under horrific conditions from which countless died. They then sold them into servitude for generations and committed atrocities, all in the name of profit. They barred them from using their native languages and taught them an inferior English dialect, forbade them to practice their cultural inheritance, songs or religion. They are the ones who initiated the repeating cycles of abuse and suffering that have continued to this day.

So I do have some group to blame for this atrocity and it is me, my name, my people. Any just God would damn us all for not setting this straight! I see the enemy and he is me. Jamaica, however, is only one example of cultural dysfunction syndrome. There are so many more. Most of them have a single uniting root cause, money! Enslaving our fellow humans is big business and although we no longer call slaves, slaves, there are slaves none the less.