“Write about Something Happy”

What happens when you perceive the fractal geometry of families and nations

A fractal is a pattern that repeats indefinitely.

“This term was coined in 1975 to describe shapes that seem to exist at both the small-scale and large-scale levels in the same natural object. Fractals can be seen in snowflakes, in which the microscopic crystals that make up a flake look much like the flake itself.”

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I do write about troubling stuff, I admit it. No shame.

Often an idea sticks in my mind and I can’t attach words to it until it ripens, like wine, or comes into bloom, like flowers.

Like many of us, I am witnessing emergent fascism under #47. Fascism, in its simplest terms, is the elimination of difference in service to one story, a fiction. In Nazi Germany, fascism was the idea of a master race and the wiping out of anyone who challenged that story. Here, the story is one of Christian nationalism. White people came here and made everything better, more civilized. It is social Darwinism, an old idea that some groups are more evolved that others and are destined to lead humanity to progress.

These old idea are powerful, despite being debunked repeatedly. Why?

Because maintaining the current system – the engine that keeps us buying, building, polluting, having, spending, and aspiring to being mini-monarchs on our patch of chain-link bounded property, free to say and do whatever we like regardless of its harm to the common good – indeed, without regard for the common good – requires that we offload some of our anger, resentment, and guilt onto someone who isn’t behaving as they “should.”

It’s not a sustainable system, but who cares?

When I think about the demonization of brown and Black bodies – calling them rapists and criminals, incarcerating them at rates that surpass the rest of the world, erecting barriers to equality and telling the old story of Manifest Destiny – that we are shining beacon of justice and might – I realize that it is the big version of what happens in scapegoating families.

This idea makes tons of sense. You can’t do something on a large scale in a vacuum.

In dysfunctional families, a voice of truth is singled out for shunning, blame, and toxic shame. It’s fascism at the household level. This is not an exaggeration.

The family has a story it tells about itself, that it is happy, pretty, successful. The story is a fiction.

The person who tells the truth about abuse, secrets, and toxic power orchestrated by a power-holder will be smeared, exiled, and told they are sick or constitutionally defective – that old social Darwinist chestnut. That person does blow the whistle, so to speak, not to blame or vilify but because they know there is something better if everyone works for it.

In society, the same thing happens but on a grander scale. Some of us see it. Many do not.

The group that speaks truth to power, protests, resists authoritarian crack-downs, often the group that is smeared, blamed for being ungrateful, and cast out as unbelonging, is society’s scapegoat. They don’t protest because they are ingrates. They do so in service to something better.

It happens globally, too. I am a fierce supporter of Palestinians because they are the moral epicenter of the western world right now. The power holders – Israel and the U.S. - blame them for their own suffering. They are shamed and rejected those who have the authority and resources to protect them but lack the moral backbone to do so. They have been betrayed by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice…just as scapegoated children are abandoned by those who are supposed to love and protect them.

It’s scapegoating and betrayal trauma on a grand scale. The level of gaslighting in reporting about Gaza is fantastic. Even Gazan babies must be killed, says the IDF, because they are animals or future terrorists.

Everyone keeps going about their business, as children burn.

I can’t. It’s triggering. I know betrayal trauma too well. Gazan children follow me everywhere.

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Understanding these dynamics, whether on the family or societal level, is an eye-opener. Once you see them, you cannot un-see them. You cannot un-think them. What you know, you cannot un-know.

I must keep writing about the dynamics I see, as they ripen and burst into clarity. I’m not here to churn out how-to articles.

I’m here to share what I cannot un-know.

Because another idea that is gelling is that understanding these dynamics, whether micro or macro, is connected to saving lives.

Mine too.