Attitude is a Loss
The further one is away from privilege the less effect what’s in their head has on how successful they become. This is because attitude is like a product key and privilege is like having the entire piece of 50 Gigabyte software already downloaded (as to lack of privilege which is like having to download it using dial-up). With privilege you’re sitting on a gold mine, you just have to flip the switch to make it operational. Not to say that being successful is easy even for privileged people, just that their efforts (like at their full time decently paid employment, marriage-bound relationships, fancy degrees) are credited as effort by those around them. Someone with a disability that is volunteering some, fighting depression, and going to the gym twice a week to stem their dwindling leg muscle mass is probably putting forth just as much effort as the first person but society does not see it as effort because it doesn’t fit the narrative of the protestant work ethic where socially sanctioned evidence of gain must be seen. Just keeping one’s head above water is almost a mark of shame in this society.
When you are far from privilege the attitude of those in power over you is what is most important (attitude basically becomes a coefficient of how much power you have). If they treat you well and pay you justly, your life will go well. If they don’t, it won’t. In Old Testament times there were good kings and bad kings and the subjects kind of just fell in line behind them. It’s only been a recent phenomenon to even have a second thought about the attitudes and feelings of those without power. Nobody since the dawn of time has ever cared how those far from power felt or thought, it’s just that now we have the social sciences to thank for forcing us to pretend they matter. Nobody in any position of power gives a shit about how you feel. They never did and they never will. Don’t expect apologies from any of the forces that bilked you into believing that they did.
Dachau Notes
This is a compilation of my notes from visiting the Dachau concentration camp when I went to Germany last fall.
Dachau concentration camp lies just outside of Munich, Germany in the heart of Nazi territory and was the first concentration camp, serving as a model for all subsequent camps. It was housed at an abandoned munitions factory and opened in March of 1933 initially to house political prisoners. It was liberated in 1945 by the Americans who had a base there until the 70’s. They were going to bulldoze it but survivors stood up to keep it as a memorial. The camp and its satellite locations were set up for munitions slave labor as there was a shortage of Germans for these jobs.
Hitler really wanted to study art in Vienna (a watercolor of his was purchased for 390k by a Chinese collector). He didn’t get in to art school so moved to Munich. He tries to overthrow the local government and gets five years in prison where he writes Mein Kampf but ends up only serving five months out of the sentence. His platform revolves around scapegoating minorities (and he gave out free soup for a little while). Hitler becomes chancellor in 1933. Shortly after a fire breaks out in Berlin and it’s blamed on the communists. The Nazis fire decree takes away due process, if one is a danger to society they can be dealt with.
Upon entry to Dachau the prisoners were told (didn’t get it all), “you have no honor, you have no protection, you are shit, I am the devil”, and beaten by the guards. They were flogged and had to count out their floggings. If they missed a count they started back at 1. All their cloths were taken away and they were given uniforms with pockets in the shirts. If they dared put their hands in these pockets (even when it was freezing cold) they were subject to harsh discipline. All their hair was shaved off in a matter of three minutes (which basically meant they were cut up a lot because nobody can shave one’s hair off in three minutes time). This was to take away their identity as hair is a way people express who they are. They were never referred to by name, only by number. There was a specific pecking order for the different types of prisoners which the Jews were at the bottom of. Women were sent to the SS brothel to be raped.
The prisoners were subject to various miseries. They would have to stand at attention for hours in the freezing cold and one infraction by an individual prisoner would cause the whole group to have to stand longer. Prisoners were constantly starved, living on 1,000 (and later 600) calories a day (we watched a film that was so graphic it wasn’t permitted to be shown until 2004; it made horror movies look rather tame, these people looked like walking skeletons). Prisoners each had a bowl and a spoon and if theirs got lost or stolen they didn’t get to eat at all and starved to death. There was an SS bakery next to the camp and the scent of the bread would waft to the prisoners standing at attention, a pioneering use of psychological torture. Prisoners would get showers but the guards would turn them freezing cold and then scalding hot. As they were coming in to breakfast they’d see their fellow prisoners up high on a beam tree pole hanging, a painful torture where one’s full weight is borne by their shoulder sockets.
Dachau has that famous gate (recently stolen) with the words inscribed that translate “work is freedom”. Some prisoners tried to kill themselves by running over the barbed wire and electrocuting themselves on the electric fence. The prisoners did get two days off—Christmas and Hitler’s birthday. Every year they would release around 1,000 prisoners who could go back in to society and let others know what happened to you when you resisted the Nazis. The Nazis were mavericks of propaganda; long before Photoshop they knew how to manipulate images. To make a poster for casting prisoners in the harshest of light they didn’t just snap a photo, they waited to take it until a time of day when the sunlight was such that it cast more shadows on the faces to make them seem harsher.
Taking all this in I’m thinking, “I guess the Nazis were worse than I thought”. And they’re Nazis. They didn’t have much lower to go. Amidst all this horror an exhibit that stood out to me was a map of all the camps showing the German companies (including BMW) that used the prisoner’s slave labor. Like today’s companies they were all about profit and when Hitler came along and gave them a deal, letting them seize property of people the Nazis didn’t like and use prisoner slave labor, they weren’t going to complain. Prisoners of different specialties would be matched with camps dealing in that specialty. There was a lot of shuffling of prisoners between camps (where they were transported in horrendous conditions, basically train cattle cars where many of them died). IBM sold the punch card system that helped the Nazi organize everything. People’s skin was used for riding saddles.
There was a crematorium at Dachau that we got to see inside of. It takes ten to twenty minutes to burn a human body. By the time the camp was liberated there was a huge pile of dead bodies because the crematorium didn’t have any fuel to burn them. In 1942 Operation Reinhard stepped up the extermination of the Jews. Death camps were created in Poland specifically to exterminate Jews, 2 million of which were murdered. Dachau actually had a gas chamber we got to walk through that supposedly was never used (Dachau was a prototype camp so they modeled the others after it).
People with disabilities didn’t fare well either. The Nazis had a program called T4 where the disabled were sent to hospitals where health professionals killed them. They were called useless eaters, people that were a certain amount of drain on society each year. They would do medical experiments on the disabled and prisoners, for example making Soviet prisoners sit in ice water to study hypothermia or giving gypsies malaria.
There were 555 escape attempts at Dachau. Even after liberation some prisoners died because of a typhus outbreak and many were so starved they could no longer take in food.
Inside gas chamber that supposedly was never used (I am not so sure I take the Nazis’ word for it)
Afterword
Later that day after seeing Dachau we went to Oktoberfest. The CEO of BMW was actually hanging around right by our table. I was so close to him I could have touched him.
Music in My 30’s
I am 35 and passionate about music. I don’t know how to write about it which is why I don’t. The two acts I’ve gotten into coming into my 30’s are Low and King Creosote. Low is not a Christian band but two thirds of the members are Christian, they had an interesting interview here. King Creosote not so much but has a heart akin to mine.
YouTube embeds follow below:
I found Low through Rhapsody, specifically their album Trust and liked a few tracks of it right out of college but didn’t really start getting into them until around 30. King Creosote I found Kenny and Beth’s Musikal Boat Rides on hard drive of pirated music that my big brother was having me remove duplicate tracks from.
signs I was on the spectrum
My parents and others are still in denial about me being on the spectrum. Since I was born blind and had poor vision as a baby they pin all my abnormal behavior on the visual impairment.
I was always bad with eye contact from my birth to this day. I was better at it when I wore contacts and looked normal because looking normal made people treat me a lot better so there was a positive feedback loop that went on there. This could be blamed on my poor vision which a good portion of it probably was.
At the age of two I would bang my head on the tile floor of our house on Honduras (my dad was a pastor of an expat church in the capital there). I also held in my stool when I was potty training so when it finally had to come out it was painful. My first memories were of nightmares. I don’t know what they were about, I just know the feeling was so intense it stuck with me. When I napped I always needed a specific set of toys with me including a light box which allowed me to count in binary (my dad’s friend was an engineering genius I guess and helped make it for me). I was very good at the memory card game played before naps which surprises me because I’m terrible at it now. I attacked certain toys like biting the forehead of my big sister’s doll and a ripping into a stuffed monkey I hated with uncommon passion.
I started talking late and before being able to speak I had echolalia, where my mother would say, “say goodbye Matthew”, and I’d say “say goodbye Matthew”. By now we had moved back to the states, I had a speech pathologist and instructions like “take your jacket off” had to be turned into rules in order for me to follow them. Our family was strict by today’s standards, siblings tell me I got spanked the most but it wasn’t that often as the threat of it kept us in line. As a preschooler I liked to count steps up the porch to our house.
We were definitely free range kids. At five years old I was permitted to climb trees in the back forest of my grandma’s house, I’d get almost a hundred feet up. It’s one of my best memories.
At age seven I couldn’t think of a person (I ended up making up for this later in life when obsessive thoughts of people almost thought themselves). I know this because my mom would sing me this 70’s one hit wonder song, “Matthew Matthew Matthew are you thinking of me”. And I would always say no and it would puzzle her. At age 10 I always wanted to watch the Weather Channel much to the chagrin of my siblings. I still have journals from when I was that age and it’s amazing how social I was as a kid. I wrote about and interacted with people normally without a second thought. Of course this was before junior high when people’s standards for interacting with people become more stringent.
In junior high I got bullied by a teacher and some students. I was pushed in a urinal a couple times and got my lunch thrown away some but talking to others on the internet with my pathologies this was very mild compared to what they went through. At home I would complain incessantly about things like supper time.
Late junior high and high school I wasted a lot of time on the computer, so much so that one of the only girls I was ever friends with came up I was too busy making a level of a game to hang out with her (at the time I didn’t know how hard it would be for me to find female friends). I was raised Evangelical Christian but got a hold of my brother’s copy of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine and those songs resonated with me more deeply than anything coming from church. Freshman year I said my big brother was a virgin in a packed lunch room and everybody laughed. I wasn’t socially aware enough to know that there was anything wrong with that and my big brother didn’t like me tagging along with him after that.
High school was the time of my life where I was the most attractive (I had contacts by now so my eyes looked normal) so that helped make up for my social awkwardness. I looked up girls’ numbers in the phone book instead of asking them for them because I didn’t know that social convention. What made high school OK is most of the people were lower income and less obsessed with social conventions. When I went to Wheaton I noticed an uptick of maltreatment while at the same time finding some awesome people. Freshman year I would run to class and do other weird stuff.
My sophomore year of college was the time of my life I made the biggest commitment to be normal. I stopped my primary stimming (wagging my head back and fourth, something they say blind people do too) and started putting energy into being socially aware. There was payoff because that was the year in my life I had the most friends. Eventually everything went downhill as my eyes dried out so I couldn’t use my contacts anymore which resulted in social interactions being more full of negative feedback loops.
I didn’t find out I was somewhat on the spectrum until 2004 when I went to a psychiatrist to treat my depression. He said I exhibited some Asperger symptoms. To this day no one has given me a written test to ascertain whether I’m on the spectrum and I know if they do they’ll find out I am because I score deeply in autism territory on those tests.
Working Class Retreat from Church
Finding that less educated people’s church attendance has dropped off more than their more educated counterparts:
In the 1970s, a new study finds, half of white Americans with a high school education attended church at least monthly. Now only 37 percent do. In contrast, 46 percent of highly educated white Americans attend church, only a 5 percent drop from the 1970s.
…
Lack of a steady job might also cause people to shy away from a church community, Wilcox said.
No shit Sherlock. I have firsthand experience of being treated badly at a church for not having a job. People aren’t shying away from the church community, the church community is ostracizing them. We aren’t leaving the church so much as the church is leaving us.
Mental Health and Christianity
Great comment on a thread on the Ex-Christian subreddit asking why Christians are so uptight about Mental Health treatment:
Because a mental illness is essentially an illness of the consciousness, which is what people probably mean when they talk about a soul. So in that regard, mental health is basically spiritual health and that’s supposed to be God’s job. Seeking help elsewhere is basically saying that a good God is doing his job badly. A kind of action-implied blasphemy. I’ve literally heard my aunt say “there’s no way you can actually be depressed when you have Jesus in your life”. Not knowing, of course, that it’s something I was struggling with. :/
It’s gotta be a holdover from when illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia were understood as demon possession. (perhaps also, ironically, as gifts of prophecy?)
Religiosity and Wealth
For those on a desktop or laptop with Flash installed my other blog had a Religiosity and Wealth 2007 Pew Report chart with actual country names on the data points. That was before they had nice things like d3.js to do charts in.
poetry 12 24
pointing to Jesus
in defense of Christianity
is like pointing to the product packaging
in defense of a product’s quality
when you admit you’re suicidal to someone you want
that relationship generally kills itself
(don’t lean against your invisible cage in a way that creates a posture that couldn’t be maintained solely by your own balance)
you can’t out the beliefs that you’re not allowed to hold
because then the powerless would catch on that these beliefs were empowering
the gospel is fresh water
to those who are being redeemed
and salt water
to those who are perishing
suffering is measured with an odometer
the short distance is comedic
the longer distance is tragic
and the longest distance flips back to being comedic
you can tell you are in a hallucination
when you’re right too much of the time
when you’re mentally ill
God and the devil
are like wires of a bomb
and you never know where to cut
there’s a surefire way to test the character of someone you’re in a relationship with
leave
suffering and character
life rarely decrements gently
you usually lose a lot of things at once
I don’t see anything redemptive in any of my suffering, at least not in any way shape or form that offers any benefit to me. As one of my poems suggest, suffering may build character in one’s life but it definitely removes characters from one’s life! “God’s plan” is complete red herring because people will let you know your life isn’t going according to it by treating you like you’re invisible. Very little of what I write is redemptive because very little of what I experience is redemptive. And the rare times I do experience things that are redemptive I chalk them up to dumb luck because they happen so seldom.
Keep in mind all my poetry and all my writing (especially writing on religion) is a waste product of my mind. I don’t regard it as anything above that. The programming I do and the music I (rarely) write is the non waste product I produce (admittedly I produce less of this than the waste).
Hated at One’s Job
Another good thread on the Aspergers subreddit about someone who people treat poorly at their job. There are some really constructive responses.
I never had trouble being treated bad in a vocation situation until I volunteered at Calvin in the summer of 2011. The dynamic was not in my favor there being the old guy doing the same work the college kids were doing but as unpaid (this experience has scared me away from working in an office ever again). In other vocational situations I was always on the level of my compatriots whether being paid or volunteer.