by Martin Anton Smith martinantonsmith@gmail.com
You can shore yourself up slowly & surely for a decade or longer. You can definitely do that. Upon doing so you begin to climb out of that whatever that form of randomized cultural abyss you’ve been programmed by as a child and a teenager. Most of us came from various shades of cultural abysses. The child of the crack addicts & the child of wealthy on the hill are different, but I contend it is still a matter of degree, rather than form. The child’s crack addict parents were addicted to temporary chemical highs while the child of the rich-on-the-hill parent is addicted to the imperfect feeling – also a ‘chemical high’ – of security money & status gives. The crack addict vs the money & status addict adult share biologically all the same ‘brain machine’ of the same species. The difference, as I was saying is one of degree in terms of programming – morays – culture, which has rules for which ‘objects’ of the world (tangible & intangible) get focused on.
On that, if I was to speak as a English person from the 20th century I might say that just because the ‘working classes’ & the ‘middle classes’ hate each other, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t just on different sides of the same coin. I once said to a long term childhood friend of mine, who I talk of sociological matters to, “the working classes take their profits in sex, & the wealthy forgoe sex to get the cash”. A little crude but it was a good analogy. But back to the story of climbing out of the abyss – which from the last paragraph’s explanation – is a task for everyone. We are all tasked with crawling out of our own personalized abyss.
So as you crawl out of the abyss, you see the light is getting stronger. Eventually – perhaps after a decade or two of adulthood (if you are lucky or not forever willfully blind) you see that the trail has changed & looks less ‘abyss-ie’. A quicjk surveillance shows that you have now arrived at the foothills of a hazed but surely very real, and at the least ‘partly beautiful’ towering mountain…….
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Anton Martin Smith Writer 