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I’ve been reflecting on the wonderful conversations I’ve been having with Andra Watkins about estrangement. The topic matter is difficult, but it’s so validating to walk through the process of abuse with somebody who has a similar experience. We’re working to unpack the mechanism that’s deployed against us, and I feel that’s empowering.

These conversations have churned up some old memories that illustrate our capacity for recognizing abuse even when we haven’t yet developed the emotional maturity to give it a name.

I remember an instance when I was very young, probably less than ten. School was always miserable for me because I was being educated in an environment that perceived intelligence as a threat. It was a rural town with a book burner mentality. I defiantly read books anyway. They’ll take my books when they pry them from my cold, dead, fingers.

But I also knew that my family had certain expectations about me. My defiance at school led to problems. When dishonest people have power over you, they know how to make your life difficult any way they can. This is how they force compliance.

We were coming up on the end of a quarter, and I’d been dealing with a group of Klansmen teachers. I knew they weren’t going to give me the grades I deserved. My father, too, was an authoritarian. If I didn’t bring home good grades, he thought it was a reflection on him and he flew into a rage.

Naturally, he never once helped me on any assignment. Still, when I did well, the achievement was his, but if I failed the fault was all mine.

So, stuck between the rock and the hard place, my emotion rose up and got the better of me. I felt a kind of terrible desperation, a melancholy that I recognize now was the herald of depression.

I shuffled over to my mom. She recognized I was sad by the look in my eye. You can tell something is wrong with a person if you bother to look.

“What’s wrong?”

“I know this isn’t the case,” I said, confused by the need to speak. “But will you still love me even if I don’t get good grades this quarter?”

Naturally she was horrified that I’d even think this. Honestly, I was horrified that I thought it too. My mind knew it wasn’t the case, but my body felt it was.

Sometimes our bodies know better than our minds.

My mom gave me a hug and assured me that she loved me unconditionally. It was what I needed to hear. Those words helped erode some of the power of the cruel authoritarians who were trying to break me.

Sometimes a few kind words are enough to save you.

But the fact remains that even as a child, without a full understanding of my reality, part of me knew that my father’s love was conditional. For him to harbor any affection for me, I had to work hard, make sacrifices, and achieve, all without any assistance from him.

If I failed in any respect, there would be no help. Instead, I’d be shown the door.

That’s the conservative ideology in a nutshell.

We live in a society that’s structured to normalize and inflict abuse. Consider it. Who helps you if you can’t pay the rent? Who helps if you don’t have food? Who helps if your baby is sick?

The answer is nobody.

If you do find a place to help, it’s likely to be transactional. People will demand your labor, or your body, or your self-respect as payment.

We live in a society where achievement is never met with reward. It’s only met with the absence of punishment. The authoritarian abusers try to claim that reward isn’t even possible. They justify this by saying we don’t deserve it.

Meanwhile they take all the rewards for themselves.

The truth is that they are the ones who don’t deserve it.

The time has come to awaken from this nightmare and demand a more charitable version of reality. We can no longer survive as a species if little kids, even without being told, are led to understand they’ll only be loved as long as they do something for the people who hold power over them.

Children deserve to know that they’re loved. They deserve to know that they matter. They deserve to know that they will be helped if they hit hard times, and that when they do well they have an obligation to help others.

All conservatives are committed to a punishment based ideology. They claim that if you “spare the rod you spoil the child,” but really they just get off on torturing children.

Let’s name it for what it is. Conservative ideology is the justification of torture. This is why so many of them go on to become child rapists and child rape enablers.

The worst part is that this ideology is the norm. We have a steep hill to climb. We can’t just climb it, we have to tear it down and ensure it never rises again.

All conservative love is conditional. All their relationships are transactional.

That means they don’t understand love or companionship or humanity at all.

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