Colluding With Your Own Oppression
Week 35
The worst thing about capitalism is how it makes you collude with your own oppression. Starting at home by making you love your abuser. They abuse you because they were abused. It goes on and on. Never ends. They call oppression depression. That place where you stay confused. Where you stop being able to know if They are good or bad. If Life is good or bad. Which is the badness or the goodness? You want to stay home and hide and never leave your house, the place where you learned the perfect balance between love and terror, the place where you learned to navigate the specific geography of your abuser’s way to love and hurt you at once.
It’s a terrible thing. It makes you alpha or beta, depending on how you learned to sail their violence tsunamis. You stay forever waiting for them to be good again. Or you think the way they are, the way they hit or lie, that’s what goodness is. You want to love that bad. And be loved that bad.
They are hurricanes or tornadoes of oppression. Natural human disasters. Humans who become disasters. Humans who are parasites.
Adolfo is a human tornado and human parasite. Every word out of his mouth is a lie. He’s almost a good conman. Because we, I, want to believe, wanted to believe. Wanted them to be good. I was programmed by capitalism to collude with my oppressors, internal or external. How have I gotten stuck with this grifter Machi imagined was his friend, until my checks turned up in his pocket the day they were both picked up on Kill Island? Now Machi's gone god know where and I can't get Adolfo out of Machi's bedroom.
Don’t feel well. Don’t ever want to go into work after a holiday.
And then I got to work.
The most amazing day at work. The thing you want to happen happened. Xiomara was standing at the door in all her deputy commissioner corporate finery (red suit, navy blue blouse with red polka dots, very high heels to give her height. I got to work and there was no work. I’m sitting at lunch now in a table in a salad bar by my same park, writing. Xiomara redirected us to the 92nd floor of the rascacielo mayor. Amina complained to the union that asbestos was being improperly removed in our old place. (The funny smell in the lobby? All of us starting our terminal cancers). And the building was shut down.
The building shut down and all of us moved up to the 92nd floor. Our work spaces are plywood sheets propped on horses. Someone moved all our computers and stayed up all night assigning us our plywood sheets. The building sways. Elevators have to be taken in shifts. This morning there were window cleaners dangling outside our windows and as my jaw was dropping from the sudden appearance of two men on a board tied to what?,wiping down the outside of our floor to ceiling picture windows 92 flights up, their jaws were dropping at the sight of our refugee camp office, a sea of plywood, no walls, and all of us milling around. There are no walls, no partitions, except at one end of the long rectangle of open space. There they have a single office for the commissioner. Her deputies x and Xiomara and the others have plywood on sawhorses all around the one office with a door. The lifers and the grant fundeds are now not separated by anything but the different crumbs of privilege each of us has. We have slightly higher salaries and still like our jobs. They have job security and hate theirs.
The rumor is the only reason this high floor space with views all around of the City was available is that there was a stampede away from this building after the bombs went off in the garage two years ago.
Tonight: Hiding out in my room from Adolfo. My permanent invader. On the train home there was a sudden stench of gas and I thought, me llego la hora. To die from an act of terror in the train. I never knew that fear was in me and it erupted full blown and then the explosion didn’t come and I emerged onto the platform and I thought, Maybe the explosion came and I am dead and this is death, you land in the next life with your memories, reincarnation not to an infant birth but smack in the middle of this life, this moment. I just died but life goes on, heaven and earth forever, an uninterrupted mahabarata of experience, sorting out that question: are they good, am I good, are they evil am I evil, is life good? What is oppression? Why do we know what we know and still hurt each other?
Why do I want to kill Adolfo. Why doesn’t he have verguenza and leave?