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=> dear warrior empress...

dear warrior empress...
Posted by parhad (Guest) - Saturday, December 6 2003, 21:29:43 (EST)
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What you asked is essentially what got us all kicked off of the other thingies and has caused so many of us to run out screaming in the night. The other thingies each represent one faction, one prejudice, one idiocy, one certainty, one village in one country. Seems to me no one can pretend to know what being an Assyrian is and if he or she thinks he or she does, they're talking about being Christian not Assyrian. It's not only one of the best kept secrets, if it's true, but also one of the least explainable things I can think of.

But under that specific question of yours sits, brooding, the whole nurture vs nature argument: How do you know who you mean by "I"? What is "I"? I am the sum total of the reactions I managed to scrape together, usually in self-defense, to all the things breaking over my head from the day I was born? There well may be an essential "I" in each of us...in fact there must be...but where it is and how much of it could have been as easily stood on its head by a whole other set of circumstances and then ten million more variations is what makes it so much fun and being Assrian has GOT TO BE FUN.

Take a Chinese baby and raise her in France and you've got what? Assuming nothing Chinese came with her but her genetic material...and just where in a person are there genes for being Chinese, or French, or Assyrian? There's the physical part, appearances, adaptations to climate and all of that, dark skin, blue eyes, slant-eyes...but what do they have to do with culture or history? Take the same baby and raise her in the France of 1678 and you'll get a different person entirely...or will you?

There are pre-dispositions that come with birth and genetics no doubt...but they must be pretty evenly scattered arund the globe so no one ethnic group is inherently. biologically more pre-disposed to someting, as a group, than another..and not even individual Chinese are going to be that different in their characteristics from a French or German person. Persons is pretty much persons. But what happens to them as they grow sets the tone...gives them the resistance they need to grow against and define themselves.

Same is true of us. We come in all sorts of flavors and most often we've been heavily influenced by outside forces...kind of happens when you have no country but live where you can. But that might not be such a bad thing...if we learn to adapt rather than integrate.

Seems to me the only sure way to get close to figuring out what "I" am is to question everything you were ever told...everything you were led to believe is the way things are "supposed to be". Whether you were raised super liberal or ultra conservative...those labels aren't "you"...it's what's been MADE of you. You're still asking questions though from a central "I" that could be all kinds of a mess...but just that you would do it...or could do it...sets you apart from what you were raised to be cause who in the hell and where in hell is that sort of thing encouraged? If anything it's discouraged in every way imaginable..including stoning to death.

It's like giving birth to yourself again without the fucking over... with your conscious mind working for a change...even though it's already been scrambled fairly well...but again...if you're willing to do such a thing AT ALL, it means a certain amount of unscrambling has taken place already...or you managed to keep a small part inviolable...away from the greasy hands of parents, teachers, priests and politicians. Watch out for parents especially. They "love" you and that gives them the greatest entre to fucking you up of worst of all. Remember it was Chinese mothers who insisted their daughters go through the same unbelievable agony of having their feet broken, folded back and taped for years...made them prance and mince in pain and men liked that...I'd like to cut a man's balls off and take delight in the "sexy" way he dances around too. So watch out for Dad and Mom especially..and right there you see why so few people know who they are...it's too great a risk...cuts you off from those who love you...the way they MADE you to be "loved".

Education is supposed to do that, get you questioning...yeah right. To educate someone is to bring out what is in them...what they were born with. Later on the person can figure out what to do with it. It is NOT to stuff the French Revolution or Differential Equations into them like they were a turkey with their ass-end open for business.

So what's an Assyrian? Anything you want it to be. And if you ask and I ask and he, she and it asks...we'll get away from all the definitions that exist now...which are meaningless as can be and don't satisfy any of us...and we'll begin to tend towards one direction...a direction that at the least insists on asking everything...questioning it all...being afraid of nothing and all of it with the idea in mind that it's an ACTIVE thing we're talking about...talking about for now.

Just doing that...being willing to do that, has lost us all these superfluous Assyrians who've been mucking up the joint. That's an important part of it too.

I trust I've been clear as mud.



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