a tenth reflection...'humiliation'

The lights in one of the new flats were out this evening.  It’s Monday night, and everybody is back in town from their Christmas holidays.  Except the lights in one of the new flats were out, the big sheet-glass windows black.

Last Tuesday was New Year’s eve, a time when friends, families, loved ones gather together, stay up to the bells and see in the next twelve months of their lives.

On the morning of New Year’s eve, I awoke unusually fresh, left my house and crossed the road that runs parallel with the new flats. 

I was heading to buy provisions for a New Year’s eve bash I’d be hosting – twenty five, thirty of my friends were going to be there, we’d eat and drink, laugh and do whatever else young people of my age get up to.

I looked right, toward the Bank of Swans, a boarded up public house no one I know ever dared set foot in; I looked left, and there outside the new flats were a phalanx of policemen, women, police cars, an ambulance – the road was cordoned off.  We’ve had a shooting on our road before, whichever way you look at it a tragedy, whatever the time of year.

Then later in the afternoon I headed out again - I’d rustled up something of feast in the kitchen and yet had realised I was short of pop for when midnight came, and we would all gather in a circle, sing Auld Lang Syne, swig from various bottles on the go - and heading out I ran into my elderly neighbour who lives in the flat below.

‘Did you see the policemen?’, she said, ‘yes’, I said, ‘it was a suicide’ she said.

Suicide?

Suicide is pretty final; very final – it takes care of everything.

And as Kurt Vonnegut wryly quipped, it also takes care of your mortgage.

Somebody’s New Year’s eve tragedy on the road where I live, a suicide, is an act that has perhaps crossed many a person’s mind when suffering anguish and pain. 

For one person to go through with suicide remains, of course, one person too many, however, mercifully of the people suffering anguish and pain, a sizeable majority do not let the thought of suicide become manifest.

For those however that do, and either attempt to take, or succeed in taking their own life, the root cause, I would suggest, often involves some sort of humiliation.

Humiliation is everywhere in our society today, a society where so many of us absolutely have our hearts set on earning more money, climbing as high up the greasy career pole as is (often unreasonably) possible, attaining through the accrual of possessions (including everything from a plasma television to a partner) some kind of fulfilment: a feeling of all being well we hope will last until we’re too old to care anymore.

Granted, some succeed, but almost always at a cost to others, and beyond a passing acknowledgement, perhaps not enough of us stop to help, or give the time of day to people on the way down, or people who are simply left behind.

Life is largely lived in our heads, looking after number one is perhaps on a deeper, more primal level all we know; the rest is what society and the various communities it has spawned over the years has taught us.

And yet, today, societies and the communities therein are retracting, heading indoors, or online, and away from a communal sense of living where people’s problems were known about.

In an increasingly private world, and a world which values far and above all achievement, we risk alienating members of our community, whether it be a community of friends, a community of indigenous but unrelated people, who perhaps have suffered anguish and pain, or indeed, have always done so, have always known failure and rejection, have never achieved, from one point of view, anything.

With alienation comes hand in hand the feeling of being friendless and alone, with being alone comes sadness and guilt, with sadness and guilt comes anger and fear, anger and fear can result in violent action of one sort or another, including suicide.

Suicide leaves people behind.  It may be that the hardest thing a human being can do is contemplate death, especially the sudden departure of someone close.  And where sometimes there are no traces left, or suggestions as to why a person should choose to take their own life, it may be that the sad sequence of thoughts that conspired in the act began with a humiliation.

I feel too many of us in modern life live lives of quiet desperation, knowing, that by some measures, we can never become successful in the way society today decrees.  We may have very little money, and career opportunity; we may be friendless, and single; we may be ‘mad’, or at a physical disadvantage, whether it be ‘good looks’ (yellow teeth, bad skin, a wonky nose), or unable to use our limbs, our eyes, our ears properly, if at all; we may simply be old; we may be a couple unable to have children – we are all likely to be lacking in some function in life, in fact, we all surely are.

And it is important to realise and accept the failing(s) in ourselves, and the fact they also exist in others, and avoid wherever possible being judgemental, unfair, impolite and risk humiliating one another.

Words are powerful, we must use them carefully.  Words lightly thrown can land very heavily on someone else if we are not prepared to consider how they might be feeling at any given time.

Actions are also powerful, we must try at all times to be kind. 

Some people in life can be too much, but however grating their words and actions, it is important to remember they may be suffering anguish and pain, and it is absolutely vital we do everything we can not to humiliate them and provoke a violent reaction.

Humiliation.

It is not a fact of life (as being born and dying are, as is the oxygen we breath, and the earth under our feet), it has arisen from circumstance, and yet if we are able to live better together, it need not play such a part in the future of the human race, and dare I say it, nor does violence, including suicide on New Year's eve.