“I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgement, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.
I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.
In purity and according to divine law will I carry out my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, even upon those suffering from stones, but I will leave this to those who are trained in this craft.
Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men, whether they are free men or slaves.”
I know starting with a portion of The Hippocratic Oath is a bit heavy, I’ll be honest. Plus you can tell from several sections that it was written a couple thousand years ago. It’s a tad outdated.
See, some days I can’t help but weep silent tears. Even if only in reflection upon the paths I’ve walked myself. Some days it’s for how much further many of us have to go in walking the long road home.
Hedonism, carnage, hatred, vengeance, spite, hurt, hell.
More.
It’s why I walk the path I walk now.
I could wax poetic and get into ethical philosophies, so that some can reckon with the people they have become. But guilt and shame aren’t really the goal, here.
When they do come up, they are often mere tools to push a desired ends via some means upon unsuspecting mentees.
The goal is growth. To help people adapt, evolve, and bloom into the best possible version of themselves they could ever hope to be. Sometimes that does come from shame and ostracization, which is unfortunate, as it’s usually one of my last resorts when it comes to awakening humans from ignorance. I’ve picked up some brilliant wisdom from some of the local elders that have gifted me their time, and which runs along these lines. One can see the cleverness in using humor and gentle teasing to help the ignorant grow into self-aware human beings with the power of critical thinking.
It serves to speed up self-reflection dramatically, that’s for sure.
The trickster is holy to me for that reason, regardless of what culture that trickster is coming from. I can see the wisdom in it. Ends make the means, sometimes. Haven’t gone as far as taking part in a whole community shunning, myself, of course. A tactic used to truly force the focus of the individual towards an identity as part of a greater community.
But that’s always the question, isn’t it?
How do you get people to do what you want?
In this digital era we find ourselves in, we know so much more now. About consent. About fear. Anger. Doubt. Greed. Psychology.
We have the entirety of human knowledge and history from more than a thousand cultures at the tips of our fingers, so how could we not know more than we did even a hundred years ago?
We all know that knowledge is power.
We all know that strength and might is also power.
But where is the morality in the use of power?
Years ago, hell, can’t recall how many now, I chose to take a vow of pacifism. Yes, the “do no harm” kind like the Hippocratic oath. It looks different to everyone, but my personal version is that I will do no physical harm to another human being without their consent. The only exceptions to this are to defend myself, or to defend the innocent.
You can get into the semantics all you want, but that’s the simple basics of my oath.
See, I’m not some hippie-dippie granola minded white woman in her 40s, appropriating spiritual cultures to whitewash away all my sins. I might make the mocking joke that such a person is my ”spirit animal” specifically to poke fun at those people, but I’m extremely aware of the dangers those sorts of people threaten. Both unto people with disabilities like me and also to native cultures across the globe via the act of cultural appropriation.
Dogma is dogma, be it created or imposed.
There’s a reason that I openly confess to being a pretty shitty monk. I’ll definitely never achieve enlightenment, that’s for sure!
But that was never the goal, right?
See, I was a very shitty human being for a very long time.
My sins are vast, extensive, and I suffer them frequently in reliving such vivid memories within my fairly intact long-term memory banks.
Too long for a Pickup Truck Diaries article to recount them all, yeah?
Cardinal amongst them was violence.
Yes.
The stereotype that everybody still places upon disabled people. I know. Go read the article on Ableism if you’d like to know more about how people with neurodivergence are often portrayed as wild animals, prone to sudden rages and lashing out.
There’s a reason I use the Fey as a metaphor, speaking of myself as a beast, an animal, and a wildling in my more poetic works.
But this is where cold logic and facts mix with memory. In the hopes that it’ll help somebody out there who feels alone and misunderstood. Or perhaps by helping them learn from my mistakes.
Who knows!
As the stories go, me and my brothers were often left alone for extended periods of time.
Home alone. As it were. Of course it resulted in wars!
Back and forth battles, usually. One spark would set off a series of combats, what my father dubbed “Global Thermonuclear War” where nobody ever won. Retaliation would slowly amp up in waves, interspersed by running to lick wounds in fear or pain.
While me and my brothers are on better terms now, I remember the night I almost killed one of them with a hockey stick. He fled to a friend’s house covered in bruises, eventually ended up at the hospital, luckily with nothing life-threatening. Just one more example of all manner of schoolyard scraps, retaliatory violence, or the bear being poked one too many times after long episodes of bullying.
I look back at that boy with sympathy, pity, and understanding.
Most of these incidents resulted from wanting connection, and being scorned.
Or simply by being abused by the cruelty of children when that little boy wanted nothing more than to be left all alone.
It took until twelve until that boy learned how to use humor as a deflection, to redirect bullies and their cruelty. It stopped most of the violence, albeit not the henpecking of ignorant youth in a small town, hating the things different from them.
Further, while I didn’t use my fists to settle most disputes, it took until even my early twenties to learn the full nuance of consent, that it was an extension of space and self. I remember pinning an ex to the bed after being slapped or swatted for what felt like the dozenth time. Demanded I never be hit again, regardless of whether it was hard enough to hurt or not. Remember how horrified I felt afterwards, that the old rage had risen after so many years of keeping it locked away in a cage.
I remember the toxicity of ignorance.
This pacifism is an extension of that journey, in a sense. It’s not for lack of knowledge. I was lucky enough to have an excellent pair of mentors. There is nothing more humbling for a fourteen year old with an invincibility complex than being flipped into an arm bar or sleeper-hold by a tiny korean mother a third of his size.
Should have taken that black belt she wore far more seriously, just a tad earlier.
Violence is always the easiest answer. Which is why it terrifies me now. And as most know at even a young age, violence begets violence. Perhaps it’s a good thing I stopped training in martial arts shortly before a black belt. Apparently you become a deadly weapon thereafter in the eyes of colonial laws.
I don’t want to be a weapon.
See, the powerful use violence as a tool. Death, pain, injury, bullying, intimidation, deception, trauma, oppression. It’s all violence at the end of the day. The means to the ends. The end is always to remain in control.
Always.
See, we operate within a colonial context. In that context, might makes right, but it also likes to run via a double set of rules. If it can be hidden, obfuscated, or otherwise swept under the rug, it will be, and nobody will usually be the wiser. Even when used in open vision, violence will be hand-waved away. One set of rules for me, another set of rules for you.
Should those oppressed use violence? They are treated as vile beasts, as I have been, and are either locked up, or in some countries simply executed on sight with little to no pretext.
Here in Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were designed to keep this threat of violence hanging upon the frontier, by diplomacy as a first, but always with the threat of violence as a second.
How does one conquer land, after all?
Machiavellian even by my standards.
What does this mean? It means you’re fucked if you do, and fucked if you don’t.
See, the colonial systems are rigged from the start, to benefit whoever that government views as “the majority.” Use of this violence is usually perpetrated against minorities for exactly that reason. They’re seen as a threat to that majority, whoever they may be.
Lots of people like to use the arguments that there would be violence anyways, so such acts don’t matter to keep “law and order.” But when law and order don’t benefit wide swaths of your population by original design, how could you ever argue for such a system? It goes against the very value of freedom at the core.
So.
You can’t use violence. You’ll simply get locked up in jail or worse. And the colonial system has so many chokepoints and strangleholds designed to bias the system, even if it was successful once or twice in history, it won’t work in the digital context we find ourselves in. The ability of money to sway public opinion through control of the mass media is only becoming more and more apparent. You watch as more and more media personalities reveal themselves to be shilling for “the man” or sitting quietly on the sidelines when it comes to any issues of true struggle. They win by having outspoken voices silenced. And those serving them benefit thus.
So…
What does pacifism get you then?
If you’re fucked anyways, what’s stopping me or you from going full Machiavelli and playing the brutal dictator, cutting the heads off any that oppose me and ruling through fear and terror? Become a Mad Max style warlord! Crush your enemies like Conan the Barbarian and rule with an iron fist!
Well, how would that make me or you any different from them, then? I’d just be swapping out one type of warlord for another. And compromising all of my values to become that warlord in the first place.
I genuinely don’t like hurting people. For all the hurt that I’ve caused. It’s not because I lack the ability to harm that I forsake it. I can kill a man in a dozen different ways, all of which I’d rather not describe here. I’m nine tenths of a “deadly weapon” anyways, remember?
It’s because violence is easy. And walking the path of peace is hard.
Is it any wonder that the weak-minded default to it almost immediately? And I don’t mean weak in regards to strength, or power. I mean weak in regards to willpower. What makes us different from animals, after all? You toss a dog a steak, or a seagull a sandwich, and the need for sustenance drives them to devouring almost immediately. They lack the intelligence or the willpower to stop themselves. It’s why a dog will continue to eat chocolate after it has almost died once from ingesting it already. Humans are different in that we are pack animals with intelligence, yet still victim to those same desires. Remember that the next time you devour an entire bag of chips in one sitting!
Yet again, the answer comes from the elders.
Consensus. Education. Growth.
This is the antithesis to violence, as discipline and self-control are what prevents us from devolving into the animals around us. The ability to talk things out as mature, self-contained individuals and rationalizing through compromise and shared mutual aid.
I dislike colonialism, but I have to nod at what mutualism has built. Looking up at the stars that I can comprehend as balls of plasma in slow motion nuclear fusion, the tectonic plates I stand upon, slowly moving. It took a lot of death to get here.
I have a personal reason for walking this path, of course.
If only to prove myself beyond the stereotypes of disabled people as they stand. To prove to a broken society that I am more than just a wildling, savage, untamed, and violent. Stereotypes that have not only been applied to just people like me…
If I falter, I become exactly what they accused me of being all along.
It’s this line of thinking that drives me to at least try to resemble some semblance of a monk, even if only shittily. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the Gregorians or the Shaolin. They hold fast to the belief that willpower can overcome base instinct. Control of will can lead to some sort of divinity.
Of course, I’m just some dumb disabled logger kid, and an atheist to boot! I care nothing for divinity. Aside from showing honor by respecting the beliefs of those that aren’t of the same mind.
Everyone walks their own path, after all.
Can we become better than we were? Can we pay a lifetime of penance to help a world heal where before we have only added to the hurt? Can we stand as examples to what humanity could become, given the time and the space to grow together?
No clue. Still seeking the answers. Testing my proofs.
I struggle with the populism that has arisen recently. Doesn’t matter if it’s a right-wing republican MAGA Trump supporter or some tankie idolizing Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Almost always, these are white men, some asshole that preaches a beautiful end, if only at the cost of a little. Something always needs to be sacrificed for this utopia! Philosophers have picked these sorts of men apart for millennia. I’m just one of many.
But being so close to the ground as the insects and grass?
You know the value of death.
Know her as intimately as you know the back of your own hand.
Our deaths are inevitable, and I can see the desire to be a part of something greater. To change the world in broad sweeping strokes. If I could argue for the dead to be vindicated, maybe I wouldn’t carry them so heavily. The suicides, the slaughters.
“This is good.”
“This is bad.”
Reductivism at the finest.
But I’m not a nihilist. I dream and plan beyond mere lifetimes.
If you had ever told me that some broke-ass logging family kid would be debating the nuances of Sartre and Foucault? Especially a kid wearing holed thrift store second hand clothes, gum boots, and shorts in the snow? I’d have laughed at you.
It’s even funnier when the disabled man so used to seeing the world in blacks and white has to point out the greyscales of the universe. A morbid joke indeed! But that’s part of the penance I’ll be paying until I die, perhaps. An old man teaching younglings how to use a drill to open nuts. Even if I die having helped a handful see the beautiful truths of this reality, as long as I try for more, I can greet my old lover with open arms for that long black sleep.
Don’t follow martyrs or messiahs.
They don’t exist.
And I don’t claim to be anything like those things, either.
Always just been a dumb disabled logger kid. A shitty monk. Nothing more, nothing less. But one that could see the danger in following some monolithic ideal as if it were a perfect dogma. That’s what these sorts of men always do. They paint in broad strokes to target the masses, ignoring the nooks and crannies where people are left to starve, or who are eliminated from the narrative and then subsequently from history outright.
Lenin’s Red Terror, Stalin’s Holodomor, Hitler’s Holocaust, Franco’s Purges, Canada’s Ongoing Cultural Genocide. So god damn many more, throughout history.
“Progress.”
How do the ends justify the means?
Ask yourself that. If you’re the kind of person that would tell me you’ll kill me where I stand to get what you want, well, you can go ahead and try.
But if your plan is to forego education, understanding, and working together to create a brighter future, I’ll know what kind of person you truly are. Because I know when push comes to shove, you’re just another power monger. You want revolution, or change, or power, or all of those things. Sure. You can say one thing on the surface. I’ve learned to be wary of people like you. That preaches violence as a necessary methodology.
But I will not stand by as innocents are hurt for your “progress.”
Never again.
See, the value of coming from a small town is that you know everyone. I was taught at a very early age to do right by everyone as best you can, because those people are your community. When you fuck somebody over, that’s one less person you can count on to stand by your character. One less person you can help and be helped by in return. One less person you can learn from. Those that preach violence and use the system to harm others are the true brutes and savages. And in my childhood I watched who was rewarded with power, prestige, and money for the harms they did to others. Who purposely or indirectly hand-waved away the violence and betrayal to stand beneath those petty tyrants as lesser evils.
I know how Game Theory works.
Went to the funerals.
Who showed up? Who had words to speak of a beautiful life, filled with helping one’s fellow humans to survive, and even to thrive!? Who was ignored by all but close family when they went to meet her dark embrace, dying cold and alone, despised by many?
I can understand the desire to become a tyrant. To wield power like a stick, and bash the world into your desire. But I also learned the value of foresight. Looking ahead through many lifetimes, perhaps even back through a few.
I will win this new revolution we have only just begun with words and will, yes.
But not with violence and oppression.
Never with violence and oppression.
I’m not a martyr or a messiah. I’m not some great man from the grand narratives of history, trying to be another Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar of Rome. I am merely a mortal man like the rest. Hoping I can teach enough of them from my mistakes to understand why sometimes the harder road is the right one.
I have so much respect for those fighting right now, those facing brutality with willpower stronger than I have ever seen. Peoples standing together against violence. Defending each other. That’s the kind of world I want to create. One where justice and honesty are commonplace. Where petty tyrants and strongmen to be idolized are a thing of the past.
I’m still working towards that.
But I refuse to hurt anyone else along the path.
When I can make the active choice to help them up and educate them instead.
I’m choosing the harder path.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
