A traitor to their own team, an expat will leave their own side to join a winning one when the going gets rough. Not really having had a team to be loyal to, or to be loyal to her, X could understand not going down with a ship that was never really hers anyways. She may well have left the country for greener political and cultural pastures if she could do so, assured that they exist beyond illusion. She scanned the diverse populous of people in Edmonton who had come there with that same purpose. Not knowing where they were from or what it was like there, she couldn’t say that they’d achieved the goal, not even if they felt they had. What she did see was that they were vulnerable and disempowered by a lack of accurate insight about the problems underlying their paradise. Just as Canada had always done, it used immigrants who were desperate for escape to enforce a colonial model, misinformed and misguided about what they were doing and believing as the settlers before them had always been. Importance pressed upon the whiteness of it all had erased how anyone under this regime can be, and if unseen and unprotected, will be used for colonial violence.
Abandoning one’s own country for a new life is an obvious form of expatriation, but if you look closer, you can see it ravaging our social structures. Social media campaigned antisocial advice to just leave anyone who challenges you, in a self-negating goal to “protect our peace”, mass abandonment has made us weakened to the unseen warfare waged on us. Isolated if not under threat of it if we don’t behave according to the imposed rules has dehumanized and disenfranchised us all – albeit some more than others. Now people, even if they’ve been friends for years, barely know each other beneath the behavioural compliance that we the people have taken to enforcing ourselves, like it was our own idea and not a meme-driven meme.
Now when people breach these unexpressed contracts, the proverbial baby is thrown out with the bath water – a whole person disposed over singular flaws, breeding a new and old kind of survival fitness: compliance. We no longer take responsibility for how we are socializing ourselves and each other in this process. Ample focus is placed on surrounding ourselves with the right people, but what about being the right people. Where the standard is currently set, none of us is safe knowing that if we break we will be discarded, based on how we have come to treat others, discarding them as “not our problem” if they should fail to serve us, normalizing a culture of human exploitation on the personal level. We treat our personal relationships the way the gig economy treats us – again, disposable, replaceable, resources.
X herself was often wondering if she was with the right people as she attempted to start her life over. Seeing very few people, who they were and how they treated her seemed to matter a lot. She was cautious, though, to consider her own responsibility in co-creating these dynamics. Her lack of boundaries regularly found her trampled and taken from. It wasn’t her fault they did this, but it was her responsibility not to let them, and she did let them, even invited them on occasion. Yet, even the paradigm on boundaries had been co-opted, encouraging rationalization of boundaries to reach across social responsibility to each other. Anyone who abandons their own people over popularity and privilege which dictate like-ability, comes to know intrinsically that they too can be abandoned if they ever lose their position. What is often unseen and unknown unless experienced for oneself is what this abandonment is actually like – a living death sentence that nobody deserves, and nobody is better for. A social kind of homelessness, the ostracized are used to advertise what will happen to you if you don’t deform to conform to the media-made social conventions. It can be seen in how we swap idols faster than the temple of doom as soon as one we had on a pedestal falls from grace onto the pikes set out for human nature. Easily betraying those we feel betrayed by, our own hypocrisy (and refusal to recognize or admit it) entraps us to colonized conduct.
X looked over her shoulder to glance at all the golden windows, illusions in the sun of better people with better lives but began to recognize the shape of a cage. Being tied to no one, and no one tied to her (except for Y(the dog)), X could easily justify leaving anyone at anytime, and being treated as an outsider is, cross referenced with her own critical nature, had ample reason to do so, seemed to be a cage of another kind. She longed for the illusory sense of community that she lost in coincidence with the pandemic, and struggled to know how to gain it outside the confines of her maladaptive conditioning to be exploited. She felt alien, a pariah almost everywhere she went in this city, almost anyone she was with saw the mask fused upon her face but not the person beneath the compulsively confusing performance. How could she ever be held and be herself at the same time? How could anyone?
She resolved to be loyal to whoever was around, albeit distinct from subservience. There was good in all of them crying out to be seen and encouraged, just as there was within her. How could she ask to be seen without reciprocating that sight into others?She thought that we must be responsible to how we socialize each other just as much as how we socialize ourselves, if we should hope not to be preferably socialized by the powers that be, who will us all to be isolated, at odds and easier to control. This is where advice to just, “throw out the whole man” or, “cancel them” comes from. It is not about personal or communal cleansing and empowerment as it claims to be. It is about divide and conquer. Despite the cliches and awareness of them, Fascism 101 was working all too well on the “free” and modern world, and our consent to it has been and is coerced. This is where personal and social responsibility beyond doing as culture dictates, begins to look like the best we can hope to do for now in order to counter the systems of control used against us in such a parasitic and viral manner – kill the cancel cult.
Cancel programs, not people.
Leave a Reply