Sometimes, the best that someone can do is attack someone vulnerable. Sometimes, we were the vulnerable target. Sometimes, my mom when she felt low went after me.
It started the same way every time. She had a bad day. But I don’t mean normal disappointments. I mean BAD. Like, a fight with my dad or grandparents, someone insulted her bad, sometimes she herself flashed back to bad memories from occupation, war, and her own past suffering of domestic abuse. She endured a horrific amount of suffering in her life.
Bullies went after her when she was a kid. She was a quiet and kind child. When she felt like herself, she was a quiet and kind person. She was like this even as a young adult. But in her twenties the abuse she suffered got so bad that she hurt herself as a way to escape. She never told me that as a child. But I tried the same thing, to hurt myself to escape. She lived. And she saved me, so I lived. Eventually through her experiences she changed.
But before she changed, I became her safe space of abuse. I became the child where she could safely get angry, lash out, heap cruelties on me. Every hurt and cruelty she experienced on her bad days got transferred to me. Never physically. Always emotionally. She’d say I deserved it, for being stupid, for being as dumb as a mule, for being as stubborn as a donkey, for being ugly. She’d say the same kinds of things to me that really mean kids and adults said to me at that time in my life. I believed everyone. I accepted my role as the scapegoat.
Years later, she broke down sobbing because she felt so bad for those things, and so many others she regretted. And inside, the abuse and horrific things she suffered, it was like some part of her thought she deserved that abuse herself. I just held her and told her there was nothing to forgive. I said I forgave her anyway for her peace. She and I both shared being scapegoats. We both let that go.
People make mistakes. I have regrets about times I was abusive, and even violent. Times I insulted people. Was mean. I regret distancing myself from my mom for a while when I was early in my PTSD/CPTSD therapy. It turned out I made that choice as she was nearing the end of her life. I thought she’d live to be one hundred, but dementia had other ideas. She deserved her rest. But there’s a regret I live with, now.
Sometimes people vent. We use figures in media sometimes to vent at, to abuse, to see abused, for the same reasons my Mom abused me. There’s something about US culture, a caste system, with abuse entwined in it. Someone is lower than you so they’re a safe target for ridicule. Talk show hosts and comedians sometimes punch up in our caste system, when they make fun of Presidents with their jokes, and something about that punching up feel cathartic.
But sometimes those comedians do segments about the supporters of a President, focusing on their voters and how foolish and stupid they are, cameras in the street pointing at ordinary people and asking them questions about geography or something. These ordinary folks without much power, lower in the illusory caste system than comedian, becomes the target of ridicule. Safe targets for the higher status audience to laugh at. Scapegoats.
If you’re lower status than those folks, then the jokes are punching up. But if you’re higher status, they’re punching down. By the nature of the jokes, the host giving them is punching down. For the audience, a wide swath of people can just laugh at the target of their ridicule. Everyone is united by the scapegoat.
Because that’s U.S. culture. That’s abuse culture. Find the scapegoat. Abuse the scapegoat.
That’s racist and transphobic humor. Completely artless. A lot of wonderful comedians are so thoughtful about their jokes and aiming to punch down. But there’s also people showing up on shows who just do racist impressions. Who have acts that are just pointing at the Black person, Asian person, Indigenous person, the Woman, the Queer Kid, the Other. The pointing becomes the joke. You identify the scapegoat. You laugh at the scapegoat. You might be the scapegoat.
It’s artless, and it still sells tickets to shows. Even a genius comedian who’s descended into artless caricatures of Trans people and Asian people and worse can become so desperate for recognition they resort to scapegoating people. The worst is when the rich folks get upset when you notice what they’re doing and say, “No.” Bullying people that we refuse to acknowledge are lower status.
And some audiences eat it up because they want that safe person to bully, to get their own feelings out.
We make scapegoats out of anyone and everyone on a whim. Celebrities. Coworkers. Kids when someone’s had a bad day. I think my mom learned this when she came to the U.S. We’re not the only culture that does this. What’s unique is how much of our racial and sexual caste system is intertwined in this.
Imagine four animals in a room. One is a hungry lion. Another is a deer. Another is a stag trying to defend the deer. The last one is a bystander, a bear cub.
The lion bites the deer. The stag fails to stop it. The bear cub is frightened. The bear cub bites the stag.
The cub is too frightened to stand up to the lion. Or to help defend the deer. And they may not even consciously realize it. They attack the most powerful of the vulnerable. And now the lion is ready to bite any of them again. And the stag is weaker than they were before.
The fear of the bystander is of becoming the target of abuse. And that mindset is how someone like my mom, who was a beautiful and kind woman, was also someone who abused me when she was at her lowest sometimes, and in turn abused herself with guilt.
This is happening all around us in real time. It affects politics, our culture, and so much. For me, I hope I’m aware enough to have stopped the cycles. I try to pay CLOSE attention to the jokes I make and the things I say now, not out of a fear of being cancelled or something, but because I don’t want to perpetuate these cycles or contribute to the problem. Buddhism gave me the language for it. Samma vaca, correct speech, part of the noble eightfold path.
I don’t think anyone needs judgement or scolding when they do it. I think we all just need more awareness.
Before the lions eat us.