Breaking the Spirit

“Sometimes they have to kill us. They have to kill us because they can’t break our spirit.” –Jimmy Looks Twice, Thunderheart

 

Perhaps I dreamt it, perhaps it actually happened, or perhaps a little of both. When I was very young, my mother took me aside during a party and told me something.

She pointed to one of the partygoers, a middle-aged man, very thin, who wore a brown button-front short sleeve shirt, pomade in his hair, whose skin cracked from nicotine and whose eyes yellowed from alcohol and heavy living. He looked as if he was always poised to borrow some money from somebody, and everyone who approached him knew it.

My mother said, “Look at him. Look at the way he is. You already know his story. Study him, son. Make sure you know everything about him. Do not be anything like him.”

Even though I followed my mother’s advice as an obedient son is supposed to do, I never really thought about it until I got older. Why did I study so hard in school? Why did I do my best to stay out of trouble? Why did I stay away from drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes?

Because I didn’t want them to win.

Throughout a person’s life, throughout the histories of civilizations, sooner or later something or someone will come along that will try to break that civilization, break that person’s spirit. We all know the stories so I won’t go into them. And in the wake of most, if not every, oppression is an addiction. There is alcohol, opium, violence, eating disorder, tobacco, something that marked and reminded the oppressed as being that, oppressed.

Whenever something goes wrong in life, there is always the temptation to addiction, that immediate release and numbing of the senses. There are people and forces that revel in the fact that people are addicted, desperate. There are people and forces that profit from it, that are enriched somehow by it, that would like nothing more than to get others addicted. And the only way that they will win is if I lose myself to them. The only way that they will be happy is if I lose my spirit.

And I don’t want to lose my spirit.

If they are able to convince me that engorging myself in food to the point of exhaustion and fleeting euphoria is a good way to go, they win. If they are able to convince me that enough booze in my system will give me six hours of not feeling anything at all, they win. If they are able to convince me to immerse myself in noise and confusion that drown my sensibilities in exchange for a moment of illusion, they win. If they are able to convince me to give up, they win.

Whether they kill me because they got tired of trying to break me has yet to be decided.