When “I Feel So Bad” Is a Hallmark Card Sent by Murderers: A Hypothesis of Repression as Unaffordable Hostility
When “I Feel So Bad” Is a Hallmark Card Sent by Murderers: A Hypothesis of Repression as Unaffordable Hostility
This piece will be a hard one to discuss. As we know, we are still fresh in the trauma of George Floyd revisited, one of the most absurd and unbelievable acts of cool-headed police brutality that many of us have ever seen. That someone could be so devoid of empathy and finish such an act without a flicker of conscious humanistic presence passing through their eyes remains extremely disturbing and unstomachable to me. Though I have not been proud of the ways I have processed this entirely, I don’t think there is any clean and noble way to go through this pain without also lacking in empathy ourselves. We must hold tolerance for the ways people go through grief without allowing that grief and inability to process the unprocessable to create more tragedy.
Similarly, making rounds I have seen a comic referring to the Daunte Wright case signified below. As we know, in the case the officer, Kim Potter, supposedly mistook a gun for a taser. However, many people on the force as cited by several sources find this unbelievably impossible given that a taser is quite lighter and physically different than a gun. Such an act would belie either extreme trauma or extreme incompetence. Mistaking a method of physical disenfranchisement for a tool used for murder is not a sincere mistake and is far from a casual screw up. What happened to Daunte Wright is horrifying.
The above part of the comic show objects from other police brutality cases that were seen as rationale for including violence in the case. Of course, Trayvon Martin’s skittles make the last of the “harmless” objects mistaken for guns.
What I certainly and absolutely suggest as a line of reasoning is repression is at work; unaffordable hostility is distributed where it is “safe” to be distributed by the trigger-itching individual. It is where there is likely to be less pushback or career endangerment that the predator or bully targets his built up angst and hostility. Like a parent brutalizing a child because they are angry at their spouse, the hostility they have packed into themselves in these relationships is distributed where there is likely to be less structural and career pushback. AKA, the rage and anger is given to where it will be likely to be absorbed and not reflected or even pushed back all the way plus the tax of further legal trouble (for example, it is highly unlikely that a police officer would ever attempt such a thing on a respected and well known police misconduct lawyer.)
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This means that instead of dealing head on with situations where it should be distributed — such as predatory colleagues on the force, witnessing bizarre situations at home, on the street and at work — the mind discounts anything deeply tied to the financial netting and represses it into a rage that shows up where it is supposedly affordable; in a place it is likely to be received without a net pushback that still leaves the predator in the clear (such as an extremely predated and oppressed minority man in the case of George Floyd or Daunte Wright.)
Of course, in such ways, repression is a function of emotional self-deception. It is a way to stay financially backed while being able to evade the true source — the loss of which would result in the loss of many comforts and perhaps even make one the victim of predation. Deep down the mind knows it doesn’t have what it takes to take on the true source and/or the true source is too close for comfort. Letting in the truth of who the true source of fear is would result in an obliteration of the nervous system. Thus, the repressive individual seeks out safe places to dump their terror, yet treats these places as disposable receptacles for their compacted repression in the most horrific way — mainly because they believe these people do not have the means to push back and they can make a net cathartic gain. Disgusting math, indeed.
For instance, one of the easiest ways according to officer A. Cab (pseudonym) on medium is to distribute this rage to the homeless, one of the most grief-worthy things I have read in awhile;
“If you’re tempted to feel sympathy for me, don’t. I used to happily hassle the homeless under other circumstances. I researched obscure penal codes so I could arrest people in homeless encampments for lesser known crimes like “remaining too close to railroad property” (369i of the California Penal Code). I used to call it “planting warrant seeds” since I knew they wouldn’t make their court dates and we could arrest them again and again for warrant violations.”
Yet, in the face of the true source of threatenedness — their disturbingly predatory colleagues, the absolute cruelty insidious in the police force, their brutalized relationships with wives and children, the compacted hostility is not solved internally as a relationship between internal self-fear within the organization distributed to friends and family, but dumped cathartically on the surrounding populations where the predation will circulate and make lots of money.
When officer A. Cab (pseudonym) was forced to arrest a lady who cried all the way to the station in Spanish (which he didn’t know), they state…
“I felt disgusting but I was ordered to make this arrest and I wasn’t willing to lose my job for her.”
When you hear that statement, what do you really think of that person?
His unwillingness to quit even against his obvious moral dissent fills him with a shame that he must repress to keep the job. This makes him more likely to distribute it to those where the pushback will be negligible; the impoverished black, the homeless, and the undocumented immigrant. Instead of losing his job, he loses the quality of his life — his relationships are riddled with rage, his children will resent him, his spouse secretly wants to leave, and the community collapses into a heaving pit of resentment, fear, and death. But, of course the job was kept.
And that’s all that matters, in the end, that what has the insignia of competence — to possess employment — even if it means the whole community loses its employment as the society collapses, and perhaps even their lives. Not to mention the higher risk of sickness such stored rage and shame causes on the body and immediate social environment of the employee in question.
Who knew the momentary social badge of being a successful, community-minded provider of financial stability could, in the end, result in untimely destruction for community, body, and family?
So what does that really mean for providence in the community? That’s the question it’s time those who truly care must ask.
May G.F. and D.W. rest in peace. May we finally solve this problem.
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