I wondered about all the news of defection to IS(IS)(IL) by
Westerners, and looking around at other movements in the western world I think
I figured out something:
People are joining themselves to groups with whom they share
something – not a shared value system necessarily, but a shared dissatisfaction
over life in the west.
If you look around America and Europe today, you see folks
looking for something. The American Dream sounded great when you were just
getting out of World War II, or coming to the Land of Freedom from somewhere
that was ruled by autocrats and poverty. Nowadays you look around and you just
don’t see it panning out like it was supposed to.
“Like it was supposed to.” That’s a sentence that has
Unfulfilled Expectations written all over it.
We expected stuff growing up in America. We were
indoctrinated with the basic Life Script that went kind of like this:
·
you graduated High School
·
you got a job
·
you entered a career
·
you dated
·
you got married
·
you bought a house
·
you had children
·
you retired with your spouse and occasionally
watched the grandchildren
·
and finally you died at a ripe old age ,
fulfilled and successful. You won the game!
If you didn’t successfully complete this game, you were
somehow a failure. You got divorced, you got laid off from your job, you couldn’t
have children, you couldn’t afford a good house, your child turned out to be
gay or selfish and therefore uninterested in providing you with grandchildren, whatever
it was that caused your particular train to derail.
If some event came along to make sure you didn’t pass Go and
collect your $200, even if it completely wasn’t your fault or within your
control, you couldn’t shake the feeling that you were somehow a loser. You didn’t
make it to the end of the game by following the Script, and you felt
disenchanted, disenfranchised, dissatisfied.
Resentment set in. You were upset that your life didn’t work
out the way it was supposed to. It wasn’t fair, because you did everything you
were supposed to. You played your role in the Script to a T, and still you
failed! How could that be?
It was my ex’s fault. It was my religion’s fault. It was my
government’s fault. It was the Illuminati’s fault. It was white people’s fault.
It was black people’s fault. It was the Mexicans!
It’s always someone else’s fault, because if I can find
someone else to blame then I can get some relief from the voices in my head
that whisper day and night, reminding me that I’m a loser. See, it was someone
else’s fault that I didn’t win.
Now I personally don’t subscribe to the Victim Mentality
that gives people a false sense of relief over their lives not working out the
way they wanted them too. It’s an illusion, a sleight of hand that distracts us
from the real issue.
No, the real issue isn’t that in the end I’m still a loser.
The real issue is that I built my expectations on an outmoded rulebook, and those
expectations just couldn’t be realistically met.
The Life Script itself is a lie.
By having expectations of life as if Eisenhower was still president
and the WASP nuclear family was the norm, we are setting ourselves up for
dissatisfaction. We can’t be happy with who we are, or how our life is, because
we are still dragging out this archaic yardstick to measure the validity of our
lives.
Once upon a time the Life Script worked. Everyone had their
role and followed it, so that most of the time everything worked out fine. Today
people romanticize The Old Days to the point of fetish. “Back in my day” was a
phrase that made children roll their eyes, and here we are decades later, the
children all grown and using the same tired expression.
“Life was so much better back when we spanked, or when we
had strong unions, or when we had good men leading this country… wait, don’t
you roll your eyes at me! We played outside, we didn’t have cable TV or video
games… I said don’t roll your eyes! And stop texting when I’m lecturing you!”
Then black people, and women, and folks with mental illness,
and Liberals, and ecologists, and gay people, and religious reformers all
started making noise and stirring up CHANGE! Oh no! That’s not in the script!
Why are they messing up everything with their improvising?
Well, they’re messing everything up for me, anyway. I’m
sticking to the script, and they aren’t. If things are awful, then it’s the
fault of the black people, the women, the Liberals, the Conservatives, etc.
So people begin looking for something to provide their lives
with direction since they’ve been deprived of the guaranteed Life, Liberty, and
Pursuit of Happiness they used to believe in.
Dave Barry once wrote how shocked he was hearing young
people in the 1990s complaining how they wished that their generation could
have a Vietnam. Christopher Titus said people were looking for that galvanizing
moment that brought back that sense of community and America we heard so much
about. Yet war after war, the coalescing hasn’t occurred. So now folks are
following the tune of other pipers.
Perhaps it’s some militia that wants the United States
government overthrown. Maybe it’s some Islamic movement that wants to force
everyone to convert to their particular flavor and will kill anyone who
refuses. It could be a religious group that purports to be the True Religion
and is therefore no part of this crumbling world.
In whatever case, there is a lure to join with zealots,
extremists, or “visionaries.” At least they are offering a new Script to
replace our severely flawed one.
Therefore a person who hooks up with an extreme agenda may
not be fully on board with every tenet and rule of the new group, but at least
they have found family, community, support, fellow feeling over the same
dissatisfactions, and direction in life. They find identity where they didn’t
perceive one before. They are now someone, part of a movement that has purpose,
living a life that has a real goal and therefore now means something.
That also means that the old system is kind of the enemy
now. They let us down, so they have to go. We’ll rebuild everything to our
better specifications.
Man has been trying that for about as long as there has been
Man. Every political, religious, or ideological uprising has been reactionary
to the failure of whatever was in place at the time.
I think that simply waging war against extremist forces is a
faulty half-measure. It drives folks into holes and restores the temporary
illusion of security, but it also reinforces their view of the world and
galvanizes their resolve to make the old world pay.
What we’ve been lacking is a concrete movement to ensure our
children have identity of self. Not everyone lacks that, but as I watch people
streaming to the Middle East while their friends and families say “I don’t
understand it! He wasn’t like that a year ago! She was always such a loving
Christian!” I can’t help but wonder why they didn’t just look at this extreme
group of self-proclaimed Islamic champions and just go “Yeah, right. NOT!”
I guess it’s because someone got dissatisfied with things in
America as it is today. Crime, sex, greed, impurity and immorality wasn't supposed to be the stage where we played our parts in the Script. I think
dissatisfaction is pretty much guaranteed.
And as long as no one helps these people find their way in
the New America with realistic expectations, groups standing for something that
resonates with the disenfranchised will continue to draw them. And it will just
leave the Script Players over here blaming yet another group for their unhappiness.