Feeling, but Not Being, Guilty

GUILT, my office mate in graduate school once said, is bullshit. This was sometime in the early eighties. It was true then, and its true now. He went west, looking for a teaching career in California, found it, and also found the love of his life, and married her. Before they had a chance to start a family, he was rear ended and killed on the L.A. freeway, among the greatest personal losses of my life. I believe he was thirty seven years old. How much human talent have we lost to premature, needless death? In his honor, I determined to remember and live his admonition concerning guilt, and to a certain extent have succeeded, Despite my tendency to embrace the poisonous emmotion, it, guilt, plagues me the most concerning my beloved cats and dogs. I would wager that in this millions of people empathize. We all love our pets like the children that they essentially are, and no matter how much we do for them, its never enough. When they die, we are consumed with our needless, bullshit guilt. People will try to manipulate the heck out of you by laying a guilt trip on you. To whatever extent we allow ourselves to be affected by this, shame on us. A friend of mine, a cracker with close ties to the black community, told me that what he admired most about the black culture is that brothers don't play head games. If they have a beef, they spit it out, they bring it. "Yo, dude, waddup with this crap you laying on me?" So refreshing, the clearing of the air. So elegant,so intelligent, as T.S. Eliot wrote. To hell with naunce and the subtle, undertoned expection of boot licking apologetic, feigned, falsely perceived offense. Those who accede to attempted emotionanl blackmail are the suckers have chosen to be,and merit nothing more than the heavy guilt trip that they seem to eagerly to accept when the pile of mental manure is proffered them. The people who are the most sensitive to their own emotional needs always seem to be the least sensitive to those of others. Hell, my cat, like all cats, is a shrewd little emotional manipulater, blackmailer. She makes the cutest little plaintive nosises expressing emotional abuse on the planet, in a close emotioanl race to the top with all other felines. She plays me, or tries hard to play me, like a poorly tuned fiddle which she has determend should be upgraded to a Stradivarius. I would tell my therapist, if I had one, that I am immune to such emotional manipulation, but I would be lying, and he or she would know it instantly. Psycological therapy, like ye olde annual primary care physician check up, would do us all a great deal of good, and should perhaps be considered essential, and routine, covered by medical insurance, fat chance of that. A nice relaxing session, on one's back on the proverbial couxh, say, once or twice a year, and our sick society and culture might, if othing else, at least beign the process of the renewal of the mind, th ehealig of the soul, whatever on Earth or in heaven a "soul" is or might be. Stipulated that we have one such, which is a bit of a presumptuous stretch, it, like our minds and our bodies, can be expected to require rejuvination, rewnewal, no less than the other fundamental components of our beings. Throughout human history humans have roamed around paleolithically, looking for food, water, and survival, mired in the fear which aids our survival no less than it does the horses we tamed, partnered with, and exploited. Anyone who has ever look gaxed deeply ino the abyss like eyes of a horse understand one thing; that horses are driven by fear. Anyone who has ever been a human being knows, or at least vaguely senses, that so are we. Fear, with added layers of brain matter as add ons, piled higher and deeper. We advance from savagery by looking up and reaching out to the universe, and even more, by digging deep within ourselves, and somehow, with a supreme act of the will, conquering the fear and revulsion at what we inevitably must find.