Outsiders, and the clubhouse door

By littleditty

Sun, 14 Jun 2020
  • 2026 reads
7 comments
 

When your otherness is felt as extreme, way beyond the otherness of me and you, beyond dualities, the binaries…way beyond distancing or criticism, beyond the alienation of loneliness, the alien, the minotaur, the monster, way beyond the disenfranchising, the dehumanising, the ancestral, the historical, the abused…and those disconnects, beyond post past future traumas and their triggers, syndromes and disorders, all the way back to beyond the original disconnect, and beyond that…all that was, every word spoken since, every word, billboard, TV show, internet thread confirms, that beyond muteness, if we ever find a voice, at first we will at best, mumble….stutter, stammer.

Before that, we all will have to negotiate the roar, The Scream, and after, way before we may luxuriate in a ramble, or Howl, we will all need to find and accept some of those lost words.

Because, beyond muteness, where our future psychopaths are born, our cruel narcissists and every other nasty piece of work, and all else forms, we all form ourselves from the sludge of ideas of ourselves taken from those words, billboards, TV shows, internet threads…to toddle off moving towards participation. But, when your otherness is felt as extreme, and muteness is still listening at the edges, outskirts, outside the clubhouse door, then, sometime before rage, muteness is always wondering at structures; the naming of things, at how it must feel exactly, to so assuredly, sturdily, belong. Gestating there, is the social critic, the terrorist, the activist, the intellect. There they all are, analysing the code of conduct pinned to the clubhouse door, to a club that one often comes to know, like Marx (Groucho, not Karl) one wouldn’t want to be a member of, anyway.

Outsiders know Belonging and Inclusion are not the same thing. Other words associated with Inclusion, like Tolerance, are dog whistles, but there’s collateral damage in naming anything at all. The “I” does not yearn to be Tolerated. Being tolerated for the Outsider is what happens just before it gets worse; before exodus, holocausts, and diasporas – the magnanimous welcoming gesture of tolerance for the Outsider, is, some hospitality.

Thank you very much.

Certificate U
Non-fiction
Prose
Reviews

Comments

Submitted by airyfairy on

Agree so much with your words about 'tolerance'.  Tolerance of others is a privilege for the powerful.  

I'm going to be coming back to this one, because there's so much in there to think about.

Submitted by littleditty on

disagreed with me, and asked me to think about the difference between tolerating and accepting, better. So - i tried that...it helped a little :)

 

Submitted by littleditty on

for me, as the last line makes me think things over...i suppose about what can get in the way of acceptance, gratitude, grace and etc etc these type things...re the relationship we have with belonging/being part of...cheers x

 

Submitted by onemorething on

A lot to take in, as airyfairy said, but things that stand out straight away - the outsider does not yearn to be tolerated and inclusion is not the same as belonging. Rachel :)

 

Submitted by littleditty on

and way too poetic for that too - but it is the interesting stuff - have been worried re the world these days innit! Thanks for reading it.

 

Submitted by Ed Crane on

When a group of perfectly normal people are sytematically treated as different outsiders you have to expect a reaction because perfectly normal people will always feel the need to protect themselves and each other.Those reactions -- even extreme ones -- need to be understood and then forgiven. 

 

Submitted by littleditty on