Loneliness as social control

I'm thinking primarily of the following things:
1) The US currently has more people in prison than any nation recorded ever.
2) Our current cultural obsession with/terror of the Sexual Predator and Child Molester.*
3) We should probably track and register the mentally ill, as well. And then have them live far away.

Again with Armenia! Well, you try being from the newest and biggest and boldest of all countries and living in a village in a tiny powerless and ancient nation and see if it doesn't create an interesting counterpoint to everything you've ever thought. Anyway. I was frustrated there by the concept of community and how it worked; there was a degree of homogeneity and collectivism that my deeply Americanized soul could not tolerate. I put communal and individual societies on a teeter-totter of sorts, in my head. As a neophyte anarchist and shit-kicker, I was well aware of the evils of American individualism and how that dovetails with capitalism and avarice and greed. If we could all organize into nice communities without all this money ruining everything, it would be grand. We would be in Crass.

Then, in the poor village with the community everywhere, I was like: fuck. Because, as on Project Runway, you are either in, or you are out. If you are in (a clan, a family, a government agency) you will enjoy loyalty and vodka and bread if you mother is ill. If, however, you are out (deformity, scandal, mental illness) you are pretty wickedly out. Magooch was the village idiot: homeless, with Downs Syndrome, he would show up at weddings and beg for food. The dudes would make him dance, throw lit cigarettes at him. They put firecrackers down his shirt and he cried. Who can forget my return from spending Christmas at the orphanage? When I showed Arpeek my pictures she spit, she refused to look at them or touch them, she forbade me from visiting those monsters again.

So, finally: the upside of rugged individuality, the downside of communality. More geniuses means more money means more social nets because the community has eroded and every life has value for being a life; a life's value is not based on clan membership or functional value to a given community. Everyone is in, which sort of also means that everyone is out.

This is in broad strokes. But it made some sense, then. Now, however, my brain is mush. For I carry a sad and powerful and tender connection to the oppressed, especially the ones who were wounded in their love places, which appear to be closely tied to their sex places. I pursued that connection and ended up with conclusions I'm not really seeing anywhere else. After working with the 'sexually abused' we must hate the 'sexual abusers.' Especially since, as we all know, there is no cure. But I feel like something else is going on, here. What is going on here, with these men who do this thing that we have determined is sexual abuse? You have known these men. I have known these men as boys. I have known the boys that hurt other boys; we like them now, all victimized and small, but they are going to be big soon, and also, in Chicago, they are probably going to stay Black, which is going to dry up any of the compassion they could have enjoyed. And then again: abused does not become abuser. These connections are weak. Could we have some cultural burden, in this?

Was it always so, is it better to know, now? Now we can talk about these things and protect ourselves and our children. Perhaps I am wrong, maybe we have created a utopia, there are no secrets and monsters: tell everyone what he did, he hurt someone. And then what? They are pushed to the edges, to Pullman, to the nastiest group homes in the poorest of neighborhoods, where we can stop watching them altogether. Or we could stare at them all the time. We have got to be safe. They should be out, because they hurt people sexually and because there is no cure. You don't get to be a part of society. You have lost your chance. You get to be lonely.

Do you feel better? I don't feel better.

You know what else? Men and violence and sex and porn. Read this and get back to me: this is half of what I've ever thought, tied together, and in 1,115 words.

It is times like these that I wish I had a pocket bell hooks, a little compact of sorts, available for consultation. How great would that be? I wouldn't think about loneliness ever again.