What Happened To Wholesomeness?
Tough love for a suffering society
Yesterday, I talked about the dis-integration of humanity here. However, I skimmed over something even more socially relevant than the discounting of skyrocketing cases of individuals medicating and surgically modifying to cope with their specific dis-integration. The thing is, a specialness has arisen around dis-integration. People who have claimed an identity associated with what I defined in the previous submission as a dis-integration have a sort of higher social capital now (or so it would seem) than those of us who demonstrate balance or wholeness. Look to whom the culture deems brave, courageous or suggests have valuable leadership qualities.
In our society today, a kid with an autism spectrum disorder can walk in with a thousand bad ideas about ecology and zero understanding of meteorology and be touted as a world leading expert on climate change, given a global platform of influence and not one soul is allowed to criticize her ideas. Her special dis-integration places her ideas beyond reproach. Obviously, in this case, she’s a tool. How many cases are less obvious? It’s much easier to divide and conquer society when one can divide every individual against him or herself.
Similarly, I have read posts daily on social media by or about various emotional dis-integrations for well over a decade telling me what those who are emotionally or intellectually dis-integrated want and need. I am also continually told that which they do not want or need. As a mother of a child with an autism spectrum disorder, I am frequently considered ableist or unloving for pursuing diets and ways of working with my son that help him improve his abilities to function in the world as well as, coincidentally, reducing his autism symptoms. You see, autism is entirely diagnosed based on symptoms. If you have no symptoms, you have no autism. If you reduce symptoms, you prove that the imbalance of the brain can improve and that it is a condition. Those who have gained social clout telling others how they “should” treat autistic people, lose their validation whenever a mom cures the condition that they see as an identity with special privileges.
People who are fragmented don’t want substantive advice in the pursuit of balance or wholeness. An example: “A person suffering depression doesn’t want or need advice or suggestions in coping. We just need someone to love us where we are.” This was more prevalent to hear after Robin Williams took his own life. Ok, if you are suffering with any other condition (and it’s just a condition for God’s sake, not an identity) in which you are careening toward the brink of doom, say for instance you are in a lake and drowning, you don’t want a hand, a life preserver or a raft to pull you to safety? You just want the people who witness your floundering to say, “I love you?” Are we to take you seriously?
I get it. You think you’ve got this. With enough love and support, you’ll be able to suffer this horror endlessly. Well, I’m not one who watches a friend with Stage 4 cancer eat cake after every chemo treatment or smoke cigarettes before radiation without saying something. If I love you, the only reason I’ll say those words in that instance is as a caveat to what life preserving advice will follow. I am not an enabler. It’s because I love you that I can’t sit and watch you drown with applause or nodding approval. Those of us who can see you evidently do not “got this” and those of us who actually have the knowledge, tools and ability to help and recognize what getting this takes, shouldn’t apologize for wanting or for offering to help.
Alas, this is where we are.
Worse? The dis-integrated don’t just not want our help. They want to teach us how to respect their floundering in dis-integration. They want to have us all tip-toe around them and their specialness, treating them differently than people we believe perfectly capable human beings. They want us to not merely respect them, but respect their superiority to us in their fragmentation. They see no, none, zero and zilch honor in our achievement of integration, balance and wholeness. They think we were just born having our shit together. Let the first person born with their shit together speak now. This is just a laughable assumption about how we become whole. But, according to their “experts” (who are cashing in on them staying in their state of imbalance), anyone who has achieved balance offering helpful suggestions is sadly ignorant or insensitive, having never been in the condition of imbalance themselves. The fuck we haven’t. The very next thing I have to say might hurt your feelings. You aren’t that special- at least not in this way. The suggestion you are is preposterous. It only validates the competitive edge of the medical mafia in the marketplace of mental, emotional or sexual health. It also keeps those who aren’t ready to face the challenges of their conditions feeling everyone owes them in their special condition to dance around them in a socially prescribed manner.
Fuck the dance.
I’m not sorry.
The antidote is to take advice from people who are overcoming obstacles, and succeeding in life through proper diet, nutrition and integrated mind sets. When you do, you can probably walk away from your dis-integration with integrity in tact. That’s how the rest of us deal with these conditions and attain mental, emotional and sexual balance and integrity. We take the advice of those who are thriving. It is an ongoing practice for all of us. This practice is the long standing value of what was once referred to as wholesomeness.
We are in a culture war, folks. The war is between integrity, balance and wholesomeness on one side and imbalance, fragmentation, disintegration and depravity on the other. I know I am drawing a harsh line in the sand here for my readers. This is not, absolutely not, about who you are. Please don’t mistake my meaning here. You get to choose which side you place value on. This is about values, and you get to choose. Your choice may still determine who you become. Even if you are currently suffering said dis-integrated condition, you can choose to value balance and being whole. Chances are, if you make that choice, you are 99.999999% more likely to embody it in your lifetime than someone who idolizes and chooses to identify with fragmentation. Your psychiatrist told you that what I just wrote is not likely true. Well, I’d say that, too, if I had zero integrity, and saying so secured me a high paying customer for life.
I’m not selling anything to you in regard to this. In fact, my course notes for Say “Yes” to Boundaries are completely free in this blog. I don’t want you floundering. I want all of us, all of mankind, better. It’s imperative that we all do whatever we can to ensure this for future generations as well as our own futures. That includes you. The world can’t get better by leaving some of you behind out of respect for your choice to see dis-integration as social capital. Don’t get me wrong. I am a proponent of live and let live. I will leave you to floundering if you slap my hand out of the way. I will. However, I wouldn’t be a compassionate loving person if I didn’t put my hand out in the first place. That’s how I feel about it. If you want to call me insensitive for trying, you’re going to have to sell that to the rest of the people who buy into your cult of depravity. I am not a member.
I still see the value of nutritious, wholesome and substantive mindsets, food and lifestyle choices. It’s funny, though, as depravity and fragmentation seem to have elevated in social capital, the word “wholesome” has significantly depreciated. It almost holds the value of a dad joke. In some cases, it holds even less clout.
It seems “wholesome” got lumped in with a bunch of TV shows in the 50’s, 60’s and even a few still in the 70’s and 80’s with what was seen as unrealistic and unattainable ideals of aesthetic perfection. The biggest problem was that many people lived the aesthetic principles of the eras perfectly, but were miserable, and untrue to themselves, missing entirely the moral value of those programs. People looked to June Cleaver as to how to dress, what car to drive, what kitchen mixer to buy and what dinner to serve, but missed somehow, the meat that went with her fancy scalloped potatoes. They missed how to care for themselves and treat one another. Wholesomeness somehow became a cliché about an aesthetic ideal rather than the value taught therein. Even Cosby’s sweaters have lived on in fame and nostalgia, whereas Cosby’s values in light of the real man who far from emulated wholesomeness in his personal life, seemed to get flushed away. So, we threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Today, my husband and I still share values through the early Lutheran Brotherhood clay-mation TV series, “Davey and Goliath” with our kids. The wholesomeness taught therein remains relevant even today. Goliath has a humble way of telling Davey something doesn’t seem like a good idea. Where are the humble people in our society saying this to each other now? It seems kids in most schools are not getting these basic lessons anymore. I hear much the opposite. Schooling today is an institution of senseless, arbitrary absolutes. Teachers using conversations about “bullying” to be the very bullies of which they warn, insisting everyone who disagrees with them should be socially ostracized. They talk about health and safety while promoting unhealthy practices like institutionalized masks and vaccines that increase everyone’s risk of contamination or side effects (including DEATH) without any evidence of a clear benefit. This doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, Davey.
Sorry, world, but integrity still matters. Actually, I’m not sorry. It’s sad people valued the kitchen items in “I Love Lucy” over the endearment between Lucy and her family. I don’t think people set out to sacrifice real values for aesthetics. I think it just happened during the commercials and then out in the world. Marketers conveyed that it was the products that promoted the harmony therein. People also were and still are a lot more worried about how their neighbors and friends at church see them than how they treat each other behind closed doors. Husbands were contending with having been in a horrifying war and coming home to make the money to buy all these items their wives saw on TV. It had to make no sense. If you are getting back from a war to “normal” life, nothing makes sense. You are likely to go along just to try to fit in for the sake of your children. Wives felt both isolated and lacking in clarity of purpose or vocation. Propaganda swooped in and gave everyone shitty things to aim for while children took the brunt of their failed targets. Children grew up resenting the models their parents followed. Rather than aesthetics and refinements getting the boot, unfortunately, it seems wholesomeness took the beating.
What I’m getting to is this. Wholesomeness was never about the perfectly prepared pot roast. It’s still not about your terrifically tidy house. It’s not about wearing make up and heels every day for your husband’s affections. In fact, all that has absolutely nothing to do with attaining what is wholesome in your life or relationships. Your husband would be much happier with a healthy, happy gal in a T shirt, messy bun, Legos strewn about the home and her shit together than a wife with a coifed hair, clutter free, Good Housekeeping standard home who is screaming at the kids all day and is always miserable. These aren’t mutually exclusive. Sometimes, clutter makes me miserable, personally speaking.
We all face our unhappy moments. But there are things like nutrition, health, fitness, positive mindset and all that which have to start taking precedence again in social capital. It might be social suicide for me to say it right now, but we need to bring back things that are wholesome. We also need to take a hard look at what we’ve replaced it with. At the present, society is not going in a healthy and balanced direction.
If you are miserable or suffering, asking everyone to join you or stay to watch you flounder in silent approval or sympathy can’t be the answer. Good people can’t sit around watching the world fall apart passively, knowing we can help, without it doing serious damage to us. It’s like taking a hero and making him watch a woman get violated while doing nothing to defend her, simply because he’s a man. Unfortunately, that message isn’t far from where the imbalanced view of feminism has taken us. You have to know what you are asking of healthy humans would bring everyone to your level eventually. You must know that if we were all dis-integrated, your condition would cease to be special, and your social capital would plummet. That’s not the point. Getting everyone to play by those rules is never going to happen. The point is, one side of this culture war has to change their way of seeing things, and I’m pretty sure, it shouldn’t be the people living like me.