It's never Personal in Journal

Abuse, that is.
It is we, the victim, who personalizes abuse. It’s just easier that way. It’s easier when we convince ourselves that we have some kind of influence over what is happening. It’s a way to preserve our free will.
That is why, I think, humanity will never be different until the foundation is realized. Childhood, and children, must be preserved as the highest value and their choices preserved. That would of course mean turning our current backwards schools, pedagogues, parenting, and every unexamined system on it’s head. Religion and telling children lies will be thought of as the horrible crippling of rational empiricism that it is- let alone the sadistic rageful outbursts of ‘parents’ who call their children stupid or idiot or any other thing. Spanking will be thought of as the useless, senseless banal, barbaric physical torture; it will be as black and damning a thing as having owned slaves.
It has struck me most recently the sheer cruelty of putting children into public schools. Perhaps nothing is more traumatic than the act of being abandoned by our parents to be forced into confinement with our most brutal and violent peers, the least compassionate or competent teachers, and dictated to the least common denominator of social and cultural propaganda. The traumatic part being that these actions and choices are not just supported but lauded as the most ethical, correct and helpful thing that could be done for the children. Moreover, after having been for 12 years or more shuffled along and through systems without ever having exercised any but the most trivial and meaningless choices about their own lives, children are jettisoned into the world where choice and consequence are the law. We could not cripple the human mind and make it less fit than the current largely approved of and supported system.
It is a personal choice, and can only be any other way, to reject that abuse. It’s, I think, only the recognition of self in the other, or empathy, that allows human beings to accept responsibility for choice and treat children like people. I can examine and point out the narcissistic nature of my mother’s abuse, which is centered on her preoccupation with her identity as a victim. Perpetually overwhelmed by responsibilities and demands, always busy, forever distracted with whatever new or shiny or ego assuaging thing- rising ranks in her job, saving her brother from medical neglect, caring for her elderly mother or settling her father’s affairs- all chosen pursuits at the expense of her likewise chosen responsibility to have children. Because she had no personal connection with the human, vulnerable experience of her children, it was never about them. If it was more economical, more comfortable, gained her status, or sympathy, she would choose it. It is not just less likely, but impossible for someone to eschew the interests of people they love. Such an action necessarily disproves their love. But to choose the interests of others as equal or even in competition with one’s own interests is a choice that implicitly criticizes everyone who does not love you.
I had a dream in which I- as a young adult/child of maybe 15- confronted my distracted, dismissive, mean, and narcissistic mother about her neglect of me. I asked her, “do you not think that you owe me some kind of communication?” I asked her. It was a genuine question. One that I’m even now fascinated by. Do parents have a right to choose to have children and then act in a way that makes that child feel unwanted? or even worse, to blame that child for their failure to make the parent like them?
I am fascinated in part because I do not know the answer. In essence, my mother, and so many others, do, empirically believe that they have that right. They wield and use that right with all their might, to immense and deep effect. Except that, my mother would certainly deny that she did any such thing. Moreover, she would equivocate her action to be merely a reaction to me. She’s not responsible for her behavior, you see. And to top it all off, she demands forgiveness. On the grounds of course that she is my mother. She claims the virtue of a station without having fulfilled the requirements of or even taken the basic responsibility for that station. And this is reflected in almost every single recount that I’ve ever read or heard of.
So, if to love is to be deeply personal, and to abuse is to be forever in a narcissistic confusion of the world for oneself, then the only way to virtue or happiness or choice is through the Self. This of course, very difficult and very painful. Yet I would pose that virtue requires difficulty, and so it is not a proof but at least some evidence that it is true.