Yes, those two seem like odd to mix together but I have had a lot of things running through my brain and I figured I would write them out here. Throw the pasta at the wall and see what sticks I guess.
Follow over the fancy doo dad
I work at a call center, inbound reservations, so I talk to 50-60 completely different people every day and I have noticed a lot of disturbing patterns. I am also attending massage school and learning more and more about how people relate or rather don't to each other, what does this have to with Elizabeth Warren...I'll get to that.
Being on the phone everyday and talking to people from every walk of life you get a really good idea of how people interact without the expectations of dealing with someone face to face. People act differently if they think there isn't another human on the line they are dealing with, they are more true to their actual nature I think. After all, if you can't see that you're upsetting someone or not actually forced to acknowledge their existence as a human being then you don't have to pretend to be civil.
So the first thing I notice, about 90% of the people I talk to don't say hi, how are you or even give a name. The first thing out of there mouths is a demand as to what they need and do you have it. There is no respect in their tones, there is no caring or compassion or awareness that there is another person on the phone, it is just "I need this and I need it now. What can you do for me? " These are all races, both genders and various social classes. This is not an "entitlement generation" issue. It's a United States of lack of respect issue.
The next thing I notice, I would say about 40-50% of the people I talk to have no concept of how to listen. It blows my mind how often I have to repeat basic information over and over again to people quite often at the same time they keep interrupting me to ask some other question while I am answering their first question.
Having to deal with this behavior day after day after day while reading about gang rapes, shoot outs etc in the news is making me really start to wonder about the real problems in our country. I am finishing up massage school and have started learning more about how people change and grow when shown a little bit of caring and given when treated with respect. Quite often on the phone I can turn the conversation around to a respectful one by not being a pushy sales person (which I never view myself as) and being patient with them and firming up my tone of voice so somewhere in their head they realize they are being disrespectful and they are usually very grateful to me at the end of the call. I find this rather fascinating. It truly is interesting what happens when you treat people kindly but firmly.
This brings me to how all this exposure to humanity at it's most open has led me to a theory as to why we seem more and more destructive as a society. Listening to these people day after day it has dawned on me that this callousness is something deeply ingrained in our culture as a defense mechanism. What are we defending ourselves against? That came to me today actually as I was pondering how I wanted to pursue my massage career and I realized something very profound. I don't want to be a commodity......
Think about that, we are commodities to everything in our society. Our companies view us as nothing but numbers on a spreadsheet that they somehow have to keep making smaller, the cut away at our benefits, they constantly challenge our abilities to make a decent living by cutting hours and benefits and at the same time trumpeting their success and making more money. Our "leaders" (hahahahahahha oh that's a hysterical thought) in DC view us as nothing but numbers in an election, sheep they have to persuade just enough every 2 or 4 years to get us to vote for them and then they happily leave us stranded, destroy our homes, our environment, strip away our basic rights and basically belittle us to our faces. Marketing companies crunch numbers and strategies on how to get our much more worthless dollar to go to such and such product. I could go on and on but you get the point.
All this disparaging of our basic humanity I think causes us to shrink further and further away from each other, to treat each other as commodities, as meaningless figures in the world with little or no meaning or relation to each other. We become things in each others eyes. When people view people as things that is when violence is so easy.
I think this is part of the capitalistic nature of our country, competition is good and I am all for that but the constant obsession with the bottom line, the race to the bottom to cut every bit of expendable overhead, that is destructive and I think in a way it is a rape of our souls.
When I am at my massage school, which is really more a school that teaches a whole holistic program, everything from yoga to spiritual studies to massage ( I LOVE MY SCHOOL) everyone is respectful and kind. We are not there to destroy each other, we are there to help everyone achieve their goals. It's not about that though on a deeper level, we see each other as people, not things. When people there look at you they are really looking AT you, not through you or dismissing you as some "team member" that they have to bullshit or sell the company line to that no one believes anyway.
I was reading the book "Waking the Tiger" by Peter Levine, it's a book about healiing trauma , and he discusses how there is societal trauma that as a nation we have not dealt with, all the violence from wars and 9/11 and shooting he refers to but I think it comes from less horrific and spectacular events. I think our societal trauma comes from how our employers, our leaders and many of our companies that are supposed to help us dismiss us and treat us like things, not people. Every time you get forced to go through some automated phone system, every time your job cuts your hours, or takes away another perk or focuses all on your numbers and not on you is a little cut. All that frustration and anger at being treated so coldly builds up and I think trains us to not care, to armor ourselves against these things by acting the same way towards each other.
I know when someone I interact with at a business or customer service level treats me like a real person I feel a huge sense of relief and some joy that I was treated respectfully. However those that never get that, the disenfranchised, the mentally ill or just those at the bottom rungs or even those at the top who have buried their humanity to please the corporate overlords, they become lost and that spreads from place to place and person to person.
So what does all this have to do with Elizabeth Warren and why we need her. Sen Warren sees every one of us as people, she fights for that, she has not been made hollow and cold like so many of the other DC people. She is calling into question the paradigm of banks etc treating the people as numbers in a ledger to be manipulated and twisted around to increase the profits. She is awake to the corruption and is willing to look it in the eye and fight it. Clinton is a DC insider, she has had her time, she is not capable of waking people up the way we need to be woken up. Everyone knows the banks are corrupt, everyone knows the game and how it's rigged but at the moment it's an acceptable paradigm because we have no one in real authority sending out a message that this is not ok.
It is not ok to be cheated by those you should trust, it is not ok for your political leaders to line their own pockets with corporate money while promising reform, we all "know " that in our heads but we accept it and accept the abuse behind it. Warren is a powerful image, her truthful and honest questioning of the "accepted" paradigm will wake up many Americans who have been going along with it because that is how it always has been. When there are repercussions for abusing the people, for being corrupt and when disrespectful behavior is seen as something not to be proud of but to be ashamed of, I think that is when we will see a difference in the level of violence and rape here.
I think Warren is the only one in DC that can start that process, she is the outsider that pulls the curtain back and exposes all for what it is. She is the Tyler Durden I think to the collective Edward Norton (Fight Club reference) our society has turned into. In that movie, Norton's character has pushed himself so far away from his ability to acknowledge the reality of what he does as a job daily that he is forced to create an entirely different world for himself to express that. I think we as a country are doing that with many of the movements that have started like Occupy or even Anonymous, however those are merely reflections for the steps we need to take to resolve our problems. We need someone to make us stand up and reclaim what is ours and the only person I see doing that right now is Warren.
My thoughts as they are.....Chaos