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jazzfishAbout twelve years ago I'd started wanting to understand what the hell was going on with the inside of my head, so I read Mary Edwards Wertsch's Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. It was written for brats about ten years older than me. My deployment experience was with Desert Shield/Storm, which was a far different animal from Vietnam. (Dad joined in '70 but missed going to Vietnam by virtue of getting assigned to a heavily depleted unit that had just come back; by the time it was up to strength they weren't sending anyone else over.) Still, there was a lot of "oh my god THAT's where that came from" in the book.
One of the things I brought out of it was a verbalisation and recognition of the idea that there aren't really degrees of success or failure. There's doing it right, and there's not doing it right, and if you didn't do it right you failed and had better either do it again (and right this time) or otherwise face the consequences. Wertsch ties this to, among other things, the military culture of fitness reports and "up or out," where anything other than a perfect satisfactory score across the board is grounds for denying a promotion.
Seems a bit pat to me, but I'd believe it.
Something related that I just now put together, though, is that there's also no concept of appropriate punishment or extenuating circumstances. I mean, that's putting it a bit too strongly, but ... you break the rules, you get punished. End of story.
I haven't spoken to my folks in about two and a half years now, but prior to that I had plenty of conversations with my mother about people who break the law in various ways deserving whatever they've got coming to them. The one that sticks in my mind these days was about undocumented immigrants. "Well, if they'd just followed the rules and come here legally, bad things wouldn't happen to them."
Here in 2019 this is obviously bullshit: between the fact that by international law you apply for refugee status in the country you're seeking asylum in, and the way that even naturalised citizens are being referred to as "aliens" in legal proceedings, it's clear that it's not about "following the rules." It's about keeping (poor, brown, different) people out. But there's still enough respect for The Rules that people like my mother can do good work in the church while still saying "well, they must have done something wrong." As though that justified legal arguments to deny them soap or blankets.
I have my own unfortunate tendencies towards followership and hierarchy and authoritarianism. Somehow I also developed a strong sense of, well, fairness, I guess. And empathy. And those are sometimes strong enough to override the authoritarian impulses. But I don't know how or why, or how to replicate that in anyone else. So I just keep being me, I guess, and asking "why" and "is this who i want to be."
One of the things I brought out of it was a verbalisation and recognition of the idea that there aren't really degrees of success or failure. There's doing it right, and there's not doing it right, and if you didn't do it right you failed and had better either do it again (and right this time) or otherwise face the consequences. Wertsch ties this to, among other things, the military culture of fitness reports and "up or out," where anything other than a perfect satisfactory score across the board is grounds for denying a promotion.
Seems a bit pat to me, but I'd believe it.
Something related that I just now put together, though, is that there's also no concept of appropriate punishment or extenuating circumstances. I mean, that's putting it a bit too strongly, but ... you break the rules, you get punished. End of story.
I haven't spoken to my folks in about two and a half years now, but prior to that I had plenty of conversations with my mother about people who break the law in various ways deserving whatever they've got coming to them. The one that sticks in my mind these days was about undocumented immigrants. "Well, if they'd just followed the rules and come here legally, bad things wouldn't happen to them."
Here in 2019 this is obviously bullshit: between the fact that by international law you apply for refugee status in the country you're seeking asylum in, and the way that even naturalised citizens are being referred to as "aliens" in legal proceedings, it's clear that it's not about "following the rules." It's about keeping (poor, brown, different) people out. But there's still enough respect for The Rules that people like my mother can do good work in the church while still saying "well, they must have done something wrong." As though that justified legal arguments to deny them soap or blankets.
I have my own unfortunate tendencies towards followership and hierarchy and authoritarianism. Somehow I also developed a strong sense of, well, fairness, I guess. And empathy. And those are sometimes strong enough to override the authoritarian impulses. But I don't know how or why, or how to replicate that in anyone else. So I just keep being me, I guess, and asking "why" and "is this who i want to be."
no subject
Date: 2019-06-22 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-24 05:29 am (UTC)