I’M WHAT? NOBODY TOLD ME THAT! OR IGNORANCE IS BLISS
The psychological imprints that are placed on society can have a lasting and dramatic effect on the human psyche. From the time we are children, we are told such and such a thing is “bad” while another thing is “good”. Such semantic hypnosis is cast upon our race on a grand scale every day and few if any people seem to notice, much less than recover. Sadly, this semantic labeling eventually gets directed at individual people. We are taught to quantify people into neat little categories. Everyone, it seems is busy labeling everyone else at all times of the day. We are labeled almost from birth by people we don’t even know, who use the narrow reality tunnels of society’s semantic hypnosis that have been imprinted on their nervous systems to describe and quantify anyone or anything, requiring no thought on the matter. Like it or not, we regard others and pass judgment upon them according to these imprinted programs in our minds. This is the beginning of (among other things) senseless discrimination. That person is overweight and gets labeled as fat. That person is a stranger and gets labeled as an outsider and must be avoided. That person is poor and is to be pitied or even despised.
All of this programmed senseless labeling always has a terrible effect on the individual on the receiving end of such mind-numbed stupidity. Or does it? What if the person being labeled has no idea of how he is perceived by society? What then?
Case in point…
All throughout elementary school and middle school I was in the Free Lunch program. There were three different lunch programs in our school system in those days. You were either in the Full, Reduced, or Free categories. As the names implied, Full meant you paid the full price for lunch, Reduced meant you got lunch at a discount, and those lucky few who were in the Free program ate for free. I say “lucky” because that is exactly how I perceived it. I felt lucky to eat for free. Honest to God, I thought it meant I was such a special little boy, that the school would let me eat for free. In all my years of eating for free, no one ever told me it was because my family was in a lower tax bracket. But being so young back then I don’t know that I would have understood that anyway. But if someone had told me I was from a poor family, I certainly would have understood the meaning of the word, but I would have totally disagreed with that assessment.
The whole time I was growing up, my parents, both very industrious and thrifty people, never told me we were poor, or that our family may have been just scraping by. Looking back on it, I honestly don’t know if that is entirely true. Again, that is part of my perception. Part of me remembers that we always, and I mean always had food on the table. That experience alone imprinted on my young mind that we had no money problems.
Conversely, I also remember wearing clothes that were hand-me-downs. I mean I am 100% certain that the overwhelming majority of the clothes I wore back then once belonged to my oldest brother (a full 12 years my senior). I still vividly remember how much I hated that time every few months when my mother would have me try on almost every single piece of clothes I had, as well as the other “new” ones, to see what fit me. It seems I never had new clothes except for shoes. I guess my brothers wore out their old pairs long before my little feet would ever fit them.
These experiences imprinted on my mind that maybe we really were scraping by. I have never talked to my parents about this, so I really don’t know for sure. But being as I was raised in a catholic family with at least four other siblings living in the house at any one time, it is a fair guess that money was tight. But to a mind still in the single digit years, what did I know? All I knew was I had new food every six hours and “new-old” clothes every six months. I may have well as been living in a royal palace because no one ever mentioned the word “poor” where I came from.
In Cajun country, people work hard and play hard, usually with more emphasis on the work aspect. If you are working, you are earning money. And if you earned little, then you were careful about what you spent, and were thrifty and frugal. Necessity demanded it. Pride and a strong work ethic permeate the land in which I was raised. Many years ago, the Cajun people had an opportunity decide by vote whether or not we wanted to be granted official minority status, meaning we would qualify for all sorts of government assistance as any other minority. We flatly voted “no”. This is the environment I grew up in, and the imprints still are with me to this day.
When I was in school, and was eating for free, I literally thought it was because I was just a special kid. Not special in the sense that I had special educational needs (I was a straight A student). I mean special in the truest sense of the word. I thought I was privileged and therefore allowed to eat for free while all my other paying classmates were suffering because they had to shell out a few coins a day to stuff their face. Instead of someone telling me I was poor and making me feel like crap, I looked at my paying classmates and felt sorry for them. As a result of no one labeling me as poor (at least to my face) I never developed any neurosis about my family’s financial status.
The ordinary human psyche being what it is, my experience may be one of the few times in history when someone who might be otherwise be labeled as “poor” was overjoyed to not be “rich”. Historically speaking, only saints, shamans, and yogis ever attain such a frame of mind, such a reality tunnel. And that only occurs after years of spiritual searching and meditation.
This is an example of what happens when a human being is raised with an absence of any labeling in regards to what makes them different from others. With such an absence of judgment, neurosis will naturally fail to manifest.
