novoid

When I read about your overseas deployment, something goes off in my chest - about which country you're going to be deployed to and what horrors await the people there. It is not about you, but about the historical imperialism America has been perpetrating over rest of the world, starting in 1899 with the Philippines.

And I've read enough history to wonder why and how the black population has suffered so much injustice for so long. You ask "why now" and you question their motives. But the only explanation I could come up with - for why they suffered in silence for the last few decades - was that the enemy was too formidable. Yet there is a breaking point, and George Floyd probably was it. I'm not hopeful that there will be any change though. On the contrary the American system will make black people pay, in a long, insidious, and institutional manner.

I went through a similar realization when I consumed mushrooms a few years ago. Truly beautiful understanding about how connected everything in the universe is, how we're all just a single thing. Even outside the trip, it is an objective notion, it is just that I had to go through the trip to really "know" it in my bones.

However, I now worry whether this has made me too malleable and less assertive. I often have to remind myself that there are people who would take advantage of you given a chance (the dark personality triad); the systems we live in can be very impersonal and hostile; and so we do have to lookout for ourselves and our family. Is there something you can share about this?

Sartre's Nausea and Hesse's Steppenwolf tackles this theme beautifully.