Reflections on revenge

A strange topic to reflect upon, you might think. But after reading Gullburet (The Golden Cage) by Camilla Läckberg (a Swedish crime novelist), I had to weigh in with some of my thoughts and feelings about it. The book itself is lightweight; I wouldn’t give it more than C+, so I won’t exactly recommend it as an interesting crime story. It’s more of an adolescent fantasy about a thirty-something woman who takes revenge on the husband who has wronged her. Her childhood included a violent father, an abused mother, and a brother who committed suicide. Of course the husband who has wronged  her is a standard archetypal role model for real bad boy sociopathic behaviour, including narcissism, physical and psychological abuse of others, betrayal, pathological lying, manipulation, sex addiction, rape, and paedophilia. The list is long. While he (and his cronies who are just like him) engage in all this bad behaviour, they run billion dollar companies, drink the best liquor and wines, eat at the best restaurants, and dress in designer clothes. They live in huge homes in Stockholm overlooking the water that are furnished with designer furniture, drive the most expensive cars money can buy, and have housekeepers and nannies to take care of the houses and children to whom they are mostly indifferent. It’s all for show, including the wives and children, who are also dressed in designer clothes and who must live up to a certain standard. Hence the title, The Golden Cage; women trapped in loveless marriages gilded with all the money they can think of. Why would anyone want to leave such a cage? But of course we know that such men use women and use them up, divorce them, and replace them with younger versions whom they will treat in much the same way as the ex-wives they have kicked to the curb, so there is no safety or stability in the gilded cage. I guess all this happens more frequently in the world of the rich. I for one could not identify with most of the main characters in the book, nor would I want to. I did not identify with the main character Faye whose husband betrays her and kicks her to the curb, because she is also a sociopath who is not averse to murdering others if that is what it takes to rid her path of obstacles on her way toward achievement of the goals she has set for herself. It’s a strange book, but it did put me on the path of reflection about what revenge is and how others deal with being wronged. Faye does get her revenge on her husband and destroys his life, but I had to wonder why she bothered. It all seemed a bit much to me. Moving on from him would have been enough, but then there wouldn’t have been a book to write.

Revenge is “the action of hurting or harming someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands” (Oxford online dictionary). I remember the expression ‘Revenge is a dish best eaten cold’. It implies a cool and calculating reaction to those who have treated you badly—that you should plan your revenge coldly and carefully. I can understand this approach, rather than screaming, ranting and raving toward the perpetrator who has victimized you. Hot anger is much less preferable to cold revenge. Hot anger shows the perpetrator that he or she has gotten to you, gotten under your skin, and that gives him or her power over you. Much better to play it cool and to plan revenge carefully, if that is your thing. In that way, you retain your power over yourself and the situation, and you keep the others around you guessing.

But what if revenge is not your thing? Most people who have been wronged don’t take revenge on those who have hurt them, not in big ways anyway. Most spouses who have experienced betrayal,  unfaithfulness, and/or abuse choose divorce (however messy) in order to be able to go on with their lives in a peaceful and stable way and to protect children if children are involved. Most people who have been wronged simply want to escape those who have wronged them, just want to get away from them and never see them again, or want to have as little as possible to do with them. They may achieve this, or they may not; their lives may continue to be difficult, but I’m betting that for most of them, just being free of those who have wronged them is worth gold.

Our Christian faith encourages us to forgive those who have sinned against us, who have wronged us. We are often told to ‘forgive and forget’. One of the things I reflected on today was that it is one thing to forgive a transgression against us; with time, the intensity of the hurt fades and we are able to go on with our lives. It is said that ‘time heals all wounds’, and that is mostly true. But it is not true that we forget those wounds, despite what the expression says. It is very difficult to forget the hurt done to one, even if we suppress it and go on about our daily lives. In any case, forgiveness is a choice, a decision, an active process, to pardon another person who has wronged us, even if that person has not asked for forgiveness, or perhaps, in spite of that fact. But we often cannot forget the wrong done us, even if we forgive it. The person who has wronged us knows this, knows that the wronged person will forever go around with the memory of who that person is and how they wronged them (a snapshot in time), despite the fact that the transgressor may have evolved or changed into a better person. In other words, true revenge, life’s revenge, is the reality that in the minds of many wronged people, the person who sinned against them will forever be ‘that bad person who hurt them’. That has got to sting. The person or persons who wronged them will not have a clean slate with those they have wronged; they will retain the identity of 'bad person', especially if there is no longer contact with them. The memories of the transgressions will always be there, under the surface. I know several betrayed women who forgave their husbands’ infidelities and consented to live further with them. But ask them if they managed to forget the bad behaviour, and the answer is no. They live with these men by setting aside the hurt and not talking about it as a couple. The men have apologized. But their wives no longer trust them as they once did. Thus these women have ended up with the power to forgive and to forget, but the inability to forget is a type of natural revenge that seals the fate of the transgressor. It locks the transgressors into an identity that they cannot shed, and they end up subjugated to the power of those they have wronged in a kind of penance. That type of power, if wielded correctly, is not necessarily a bad thing since it keeps people on their toes and on their good behaviour. But it does limit freedom. I sometimes wonder if it is possible to rebuild trust once it has been destroyed; I don't have any simple answers.

We are asked to be like Christ, who suffered humiliation, torture and finally death on a cross. He asked for forgiveness for those who wronged him. But it is hard to be like Christ. We can try, and we should try, but no one can force us to forgive another before we are ready. No one can tell us to forget the wrong done us before we are ready. We cannot forgive and forget overnight, and those who think we should do so are fools, or they are people who have never experienced the difficulty of being hurt and trying to forgive. Forgiveness is a process that can take many years; forgetting may or may not occur—it is impossible to predict. It is completely normal to wish that bad things would happen to bad people who have wronged us (this rarely happens and if it does, there is no superstition involved). It is completely normal to hope that ‘time wounds all heels’. It is completely normal to smile inwardly when we see a bad person get his or her comeuppance. My point is that this is usually enough 'revenge' for most wronged people; they don’t need to envision elaborate revenge fantasies and actualize those fantasies; they don't need to take down those who have wronged them. In some cases, the transgressors destroy themselves, in other cases, time and life take care of them, especially if they haven’t learned from their bad behaviour and continue on their destructive paths. Many bad people grow old and end up alone and lonely. I have watched the rise and fall of a few bad people, and it’s hard to feel sorry for them, especially knowing how they treated other people. But if they want forgiveness, they need to prove that they have changed and evolved; they need to earn the forgiveness of those they have wronged. They can start by truly apologizing, making amends, and changing their behaviour for good.That is the only way back.

In praise of NASA

I've been watching the BBC series The Planets, narrated by professor Brian Cox. It's an amazing and breathtakingly beautiful series, and I highly recommend it. So far I've seen the following episodes:

• Life Beyond the Sun--Saturn
• Into the Darkness--Ice Worlds, which covers Uranus, Neptune, the former planet Pluto and the Kuiper Belt
• A Moment in the Sun--The Terrestrial Planets, which covers Mercury, Venus, and Mars and discusses them comparatively with Earth

The final two episodes deal with Jupiter, Earth and Mars, and I'm looking forward to seeing them. 

Besides the wonder inspired by Cox's fascinating presentation of the planets in our solar system, I am in awe of all that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has accomplished since they started their space exploration program in 1958. Founded by President Dwight Eisenhower, this independent agency of the US federal government has delivered time and again, exploring the far reaches of our solar system and uncovering the secrets of the planets and the moons that orbit them. 

But it is the daily lives of the NASA employees that interest me as well--the astronauts, astronomers, cosmologists, technicians, engineers, computer scientists, biologists, geologists--the team of scientists who work together to bring about the success of each space mission. There have been catastrophic failures from which they have learned, and moved on from. But the successes are brilliant and breathtaking, and I love watching the control room explode into joy and relief when a mission has been successful--when pictures are received from millions of miles away from Earth, when a spacecraft lands and begins to move about a planet's surface, or just when the rocket carrying these probes into space takes off successfully. When I think about what NASA has accomplished--the engineering feats necessary to land a spacecraft/probe on distant planets, or to orbit them for long periods of time--I am impressed with the attention to the minutest detail that has facilitated the gorgeous pictures taken by cameras that survive the harshest atmospheres and conditions. Because it is that attention to detail that defines science and real scientists. It is why a scientific career is not for everyone, but for those of us who have worked in science, we can attest to the fact that the success of any experiment lies in the well-planned details. The basic knowledge has to be there first, along with creativity and futuristic visions, and the combination of these leads to the discovery of new data and realities that further our knowledge and expand our ways of looking at things. 

I am proud too of the politicians who envisioned this program for the USA. Despite the fact that it was part of our space race with the Russians during the Cold War era, it grew far beyond that into true scientific exploration. Little did the politicians know when NASA was established that men would actually walk on the moon, that motorized vehicles would traverse the surface of Mars, that spacecraft would travel out into the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system. It boggles the mind, truly, to see what has been accomplished. Yes, it has been expensive, and there are those who would argue unnecessarily expensive, that the money could have been better spent on other things. Perhaps. But when I watch the public response to rocket lift-offs, to moon landings, to Mars landings, it tells me that it is worth the money. Because we are learning all the time, we are doing what man/woman is meant to do--explore his/her surroundings, question his/her origins, and ponder the meaning of life in general and his/her life in particular, on the one planet in our solar system that supports life as we know it. We are blessed each and every day to be able to wake up on a planet that provides all of the conditions we need to live. That by itself is awe-and -gratitude inspiring. 

The Giver of Stars and patriarchal societies

I just finished reading The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes, and can highly recommend it. Moyes wrote a fictional novel about a group of women in Depression-era Kentucky who became the Pack Horse librarians—traveling by horse to the rural mountainous areas of Kentucky to deliver books, magazines, comic books and recipes to households wanting to become more literate. The Pack Horse library project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) set into motion by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. These women braved bad weather, treacherous conditions, brutal men, ignorant people, and despite these hindrances, pushed on, providing a much-needed service. In the process, they became friends, and that is really the book’s story. It is an empowering book for women, because it presents their daily lives and struggles in ways that any woman could understand. It also presents how the women deal with issues of race, abuse of women, unhappy loveless marriages, patriarchal attitudes toward women, feminism, self-identity, self-esteem, love, and friendship. It is impossible to read this book without becoming involved in the lives of these women; you end up rooting for them, admiring their intelligence, perseverance and cleverness when dealing with the patriarchal attitudes and threats from some of the men living alongside them in their small Kentucky town. You also feel their fears; the threats of rape and violence if they don’t toe the line or do what some of the more ignorant men in the book want them to do. Luckily, Moyes balances the ignorant and often violent men with men who are the opposite—open to learning/changing and empathic. The latter are the men who love these women and who support them, in often non-conventional ways. It is impossible to read this book and not reflect on the damage that patriarchal attitudes have done to relationships between men and women, but also between men and their children (both male and female—many of them cowed into submission to brutal fathers). It made me think about how what my life could have been like at that time. Was it just a toss of the coin that led to your being married to a good man or a bad one? Some of the parents didn’t seem to care one way or another if a man was violent to his spouse; in the book, it is not the husband who was abusive to his wife, but his own father---a powerful man in the town and a truly nasty character that you end up wishing would suffer or die or both. One might have expected that the town’s priest would support the woman rather than her father-in-law, but no, it was her duty to return to that house where she lived with her husband and his father. She does not return after she is battered by her father-in-law, and that leads to all sorts of problems for her and her fellow traveling librarians, one of whom is also a target of this nasty man, because she lives her life on her terms, and that is anathema to a man like him.

Those of you who know me, who read this blog, know that I am no fan of patriarchal societies, families, religions, or workplaces. I cannot now (and was never able to from the time I was a teenager), support policies and laws that are unjust to, exclude or demean women. The one way to guarantee that I will fight for something is for men I have no respect for tell me how women should live, work, think, or otherwise exist. If you want to fire me up, that is the sure-fire way to do it.

Firstly, it is important to mention that I respect a lot of men. I have written many times in this blog about my bosses at my first job in Manhattan and how much they supported and encouraged me in my scientific career. I’ve talked about my father and what a good man he was; he never told me directly that I could not do something in the society I was growing up in because I was a woman. We rarely talked about the difficulties I might face because I was a woman, but when we did I knew that was because he wished to protect me from some of the crap he knew I would eventually face, especially in the work world. So many times I wish he was still alive so that I could talk to him about some of the things that I’ve experienced up through the years. One of the last conversations I had with him shortly before he died was one where he told me that he just wanted me to be happy, and that meant more to me than anything else at that time. He did not say to me that I should follow the written and unwritten rules in society for how women should live and behave, he did not say to me that I should abide by the tenets of my religion when it came to my personal life (nor did my mother). He did not push me to marry or to have children or to do any of the traditional things that women were often expected to do. He left those decisions up to me. He would never have forced me to marry someone I did not love. He was no patriarch. Yes, he could be strict and stubborn at times, but he was both a smart and empathic man. He felt others’ pain, responded to it by trying to alleviate it, often at times when he had his own pain, especially as he got older. One of the nicest memories I have is when he called me at work one day just to tell me he loved me. I was lucky to have him as my father. A lot of men simply cannot hold a candle to him.

The men I don’t respect are the ones who want to run roughshod over you, the ones who dominate you in all conversations with them, who do not acknowledge that you have anything important to say, who bully women verbally and psychologically, who never fail to remind you that nothing you do is good enough for them (and of course they know exactly what you should do to better yourself). You might think that they don’t exist in 2020, but they do. They are the men who know best—ALWAYS. They know what is best for you, what you SHOULD do, who become ill-tempered or directly angry when you don’t agree with them or follow their 'advice'. They are the men who berate you for your opinions, privately or in front of others (preferably in front of others so that they look powerful and you are humiliated). They are the men who compete with you instead of supporting you as mentors. They are the men who will offer support but only when they are interested in you sexually. They are the men who make rude, nasty, or sexually-tinged remarks, the ones who think they are being funny by doing so. They are the powerful men who hold others down, women and men alike. They are the ones who work behind the scenes to keep others down, freeze others out, and destroy others’ careers if they challenge them in any way. They are the ones who pull the strings; others should just dance to their tune like the good puppets they think others are.

I want liberty and justice for all. I don’t want a continual war between the sexes, but I don’t want women to surrender in all situations just to keep the peace and to preserve relationships. Some marriages should end, rightfully so, if women and children are treated badly/abused by their husbands and fathers. There is no point in preserving such marriages, and no reason for society to support abusive patriarchy at all costs. This type of patriarchy destroys lives and costs society a lot—abused children need a lot of support to get past the trauma of their early lives, so that they do not grow up to perpetuate the pattern of abuse. Patriarchy may have served a purpose at one time, although I’m not sure what that was. That was a time when men ruled society and women and children were considered to be their property. In modern Western societies, women and children are no longer the property of men, but some of the subtle patriarchal attitudes remain in the workplace and in personal life. Why are there still discussions and surveys about who does the most housework in the home? If both husband and wife work full-time, they should be sharing the chores equally. That brings me back to my father; after a long day at work and the commute home from Manhattan to the suburbs, he had a nap before dinner, and then his evenings were spent focused on us before we went to bed. He made sure we did our homework, quizzed us for tomorrow’s tests, and helped us with different subjects. By the time we went to bed, he had perhaps an hour to read a good book before he ended up asleep in his chair. That was my dad. He enjoyed spending time with his children; he wasn’t constantly running off to pursue this or that hobby, and he didn’t complain about that, nor did my mother. Many of my friends had fathers who behaved similarly; they know their fathers loved them. So not all men who grew up in patriarchal times behaved the way they were expected to behave; not all of them bought into the hype that success meant sacrificing your family on the altar of money, greed, arrogance and betrayal.

Reflections on pride

I've always pondered this--the idea of pride being one of the seven deadly sins. Pride in one's appearance, in one's intellectual acumen, in one's success--cannot be a bad thing, and I don't think this type of pride is what is being referred to. Or I think that one can distinguish between good pride (for example in the things above), and bad pride. Bad pride can be defined as an excess of pride, for example, pride in one's appearance can spill over into vanity and narcissism, pride in one's intellectual acumen can become an attitude of 'know-it-all' (besserwisser), and pride in one's success can become hubris. Hubris is excessive pride, foolish pride, arrogance. Hubris tells others that your worth, your intelligence, and your wellbeing are more important than theirs. Hubris is a feeling of superiority, of haughtiness, that leads you to treat others as less important than you. Carried to an extreme, it can lead to indifference to others (why should I care about them since they are not worthy of my attention) or to abuse of others (for the same reason--others are less or not important). Hubris leads people to selfishness because the only people who matter are themselves.

Christian literature is not always clear about such distinctions. For example, we are told 'not to hide our light under a bushel basket', which I interpret to mean that one should not hide one's God-given talents behind a sense of false humility. We should be proud of our talents and gifts; each of us has unique talents and gifts that should make us proud. So false humility is as bad as excessive pride in my book. If you hide your talents, you deprive the world of them, and they could have helped the world become a better place. If you are a good writer, artist, actress, and you touch people's lives because of these talents and have a sense of pride about that, that is a good thing, not a bad thing. The bad thing would be to pretend you were talentless in the name of humility. But excessive pride leads one to think that one's talents supersede those of others, that without you the world would fall apart, that you are what holds it all together. If we are talented and gifted, we come to a point when we realize that those talents and gifts were supported and nurtured by others, behind the scenes. We are born with talents and work hard at developing them, but our home/school environments also contribute to their development and evolution. In other words, we are part of a team of supporters--family, teachers, coaches--who nurture and challenge us to be better. Excessive pride leads us to believe that we have accomplished what we have accomplished, by ourselves. That leads us to conclude that we know best, that we do not really need others, and that leads to arrogance and indifference toward others.

Things money can't buy

My fervent wish is that the idiots and assholes of the world who think that money can buy everything, would understand this and take it to heart. The problem is that they won't, and the world will continue on its road toward obliteration. Because if it's not a nuclear war that will end life in the world as we know it, it will be nature's revenge on us in the form of a pandemic or plague or extreme weather conditions, for our abuse of this planet in the name of greed (the incessant need for more money).

The same goes for those who are obsessed with power, who think that power and pushing people around can create a better world. Harassment and abuse have never led to anything good. Unfortunately, wealth and power often go together, and it's not a good mixture.