OK so here is a tragedy we seem to be hearing more of in recent years. Two Calgary children killed by their father. And what’s even more inexplicable, it’s FIRST DEGREE murder charges he faces. If I got that right that means it was premeditated, planned, and executed.
A father plans to kill his children?!?
And honestly, that kinda struck me as a little odd. I mean, how the hell does a father who is planning to kill his children, how does a family that is so dysfunctional that such a thing can even considered, much less planned, not give off any signs? I mean really. How can the people who live next door not know that something is up.
Well of course, the answer to that is easy to specify. We simply don’t know who the people are around us. They can be our closest friends, or longest term neighbors, our most valued co-workers, or whatever. We just don’t know the people around us.
And why don’t we know the people around us?
Well, that’s easy to. That’s because all of us, and by all of us I mean everyone of us over the age of say twelve, has learned that nobody around us wants to hear or see the truth. Nobody wants to know what’s really going on in someone’s life and so everyone around us puts in incredible energy and effort into presenting a lie. I know it’s common in the little middle class suburb where I’m in. People will go to intense effort to clean and shine their home just to put on a show. It doesn’t matter that they live in cluttered chaos, or regularly leave dishes on the counter, or otherwise don’t live the perfect “designer magazine” lifestyle, what counts is the show.
And it’s not just home presentation either.
Emotionally we generally tend to present a facade.
In our relationships we regularly act and do things we don’t want to do just because we think we should.
The truth is, our life could be total shit yet we will expend our precious energy on presenting a vacuous facade just to avoid, what? Sharing our lives with people? Letting others know that everything is just not right in the land of over-consumption? And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider the statistics on just one social problem, depression. Speaking about Americans, about 1 in 10 is depressed (1 in 3 women) in a given year. Pre-schoolers are the fastest growing market for antidepressents. 15% of depressed individuals will kill themselves, many people will not seek help (perhaps partly because they can’t find competent help), and who knows how many psychotic male depressives are behind the murder of their children.[link]
And that’s just depression.
I haven’t even mentioned skyrocketing eating disorders, the epidemic of obesity, and a host of other psychological and social dysfunctions that are rampant around us but to which we seem completely oblivious.
And why is that?
Why are we oblivious?
Well, if you want my opinion, it’s because we have been taught to lie. As children we were told, in no uncertain terms, that it didn’t matter how we felt, or how things really were, or what we really thought, or how stupid it was. We had to be polite, and presentable, and damn the truth of things. The young child of five laughs and points at the ashen, unhealthy looking obese person who eats no vegetables and is heading towards an early grave and is slapped across the face for speaking the truth.
The lesson?
It’s better to not express what you see. Just lie!
The young child of eight sees mom rushing around the house in an emotional frenzy, kicking the child out of the way and setting everything in the home in an uncharacteristic order just because some unknown stranger is coming.
The lesson?
Create a facade.
It just doesn’t matter what’s really going on, or how ugly reality really is. We’ve been trained not to know about it and what’s annoying to me about that is that then we, like the robotic reporter, reporting in that falsely expressive voice they use to make it seem they are expressing when in fact they are not, express surprise when “there were no signs.”
And it doesn’t matter where you live.
And social class certainly isn’t correlated.
We all put on the face.
We all lie to each other.
We all keep what we really think and feel a secret, sometimes even from our selves.
And you know it’s sad. I lived for about ten years in the affluent suburb of St. Albert, Alberta. And it wasn’t too long after I moved there that I learned, that in this beautifully treed suburb with the carefully manicured lawns and the beautiful dressed windows, the Government’s social services department apprehended more teenagers from their emotionally (and often physically absent) parents than in any other location in the province.
Driving through the pretty streets and seeing the pretty houses on the pretty lawns with the pretty people in their pretty cloths, you you just never know what lies beneath….
ms
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