When Love Is Hate

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you’re really successful at something.  Maybe you’ve built a small business from scratch or you’re a great athlete or musician.  You might be some guy whose dad was a janitor, but now you’re a dentist and able to vacation wherever you damn well please.  You’re the type of guy who never got a date in high school, but now you’ve got a knockout girlfriend who’s completely devoted to you.

As you look back at how you got there, you’ll certainly see that you’ve had some advantages.  You may have had a really supportive father.  Perhaps your football coach spent some extra time with you after practice, or your buddy trusted you and gave you a loan when you really needed it.  You probably have some gifts that others don’t, a better build, an aptitude for math, long fingers that help you play every chord on the piano, a strong support network, enough money not to have to live on Ramen when you took some time off work.  These things helped.

However, if you’ve done something you’re proud of, you know it wasn’t just about what went your way; you’ve also had some obstacles.  Maybe you had to study for the LSAT while your brother was dying of cancer.  Perhaps you grew up in a dangerous neighborhood and had to listen to music while you studied to drown out the gunshots.  Maybe your dad was an unreliable prick and you had to babysit for your little sister all the damn time when all you wanted to do was practice.  Kids made fun of you.  Your mom smothered and spoiled you.  These things hurt.

But you got there, you made it.  When you could barely keep your eyes open, you somehow stayed up long enough to balance those books or get that last paragraph just right.  After that redhead sneered at you, you grimaced, spent a few lonely moments in the stall at the bar, but then you came back out and went straight for that little brunette.  You were rejected by thirteen banks but finally got the loan approved.  You played your ass off for two fat guys at the bar who weren’t even paying attention, but now people pay you to shred, and you can tell they really feel the music you play.

Somehow, you took advantage of the stuff I listed in the second paragraph and got through the stuff I listed in the third. 

How did you do it?

You knew how to talk to yourself, you developed some strength.  Sometimes you got nasty.  In fact, you probably got pretty nasty with yourself:

Fuck you, you little pussy–get that weight up!

So it’s another fucking night of Ramen.  You’ll live.

God I wanna go hang with Pete tonight.  Fuck you.  You’ve got work to do.

Tired?  Poor baby.  I bet the guys on the ice are more tired than the fucks in the stands who pay to watch them play.

Some BASTARD stole my laptop!  I was one revision away from being DONE.  Well, I know I got a written outline of that screenplay around here somewhere.

Suck it up and drive on.

You had things fighting against you, but you fought back.  You knew that if you let yourself wallow in those ugly memories of how your dad beat you you never could have met that deadline and gotten your big break.  Pain and lots of it, some of it necessary, some of it pure bullshit.  Fair? 

LIFE’S NOT FAIR.

This is the opposite of leftism, how leftists tell the “oppressed” they should see themselves.  We all have advantages, we all have disadvantages.  Some stuff comes easy, some of it comes real damn hard.  Some people give us a break when we need it, some hold us down just for the hell of it.

To you, it was about ignoring the pain, working through it, past it, learning from it.  To them it’s about making somebody pay for it and make it up to them.  When the refs make every call for the other team, you play harder and smarter.  They use biased refs as an excuse to quit the whole damn game.

Unfortunately, we’re in a feminized society.  The way you talk to yourself to overcome pain is the opposite of how you’re supposed to talk to other people who are going through their own pain.

When the self-made businessman tells the poor black kid his version of suck it up and drive on, he seems heartless.  He doesn’t care.  He doesn’t understand.  Republicans are evil!  What that poor boy needs is more of your sympathy!

What the lefty fails to understand, and what we’ve got to do a better job of communicating, is that the businessman tells that to the poor black kid because that’s what he tells himself.  He might not understand the particular obstacles in this kids path, but he does understand how to overcome obstacles.  Making the NBA, developing a revolutionary new computer program and starting a successful landscaping business have a lot in common.

But the black kid has more to deal with?  Probably true (although not necessarily–you’d be amazed at some of the crap some people had to go through).   Regardless, how much you’ve got to overcome doesn’t matter as much as how you handle it.  If anything, the more strikes you’ve got against you, the more important it is to get a little tough with yourself.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a time to try to rectify injustice, because there is.  However, to the leftist, it’s almost all about what we should do for the oppressed and very little about what they should do for themselves.  Even if they’re right on the facts, on the necessary mindset they’re dead wrong.

And we’ve got to overcome it, not only for ourselves and our own successes, but for them.  The poor will never have what we’ve got unless they start thinking like we do, and there’s no government program that can or will ever change that.

But how do we do it without coming across as the wrong kind of assholes?  We know that the way to care for them, and the way to show others that we care, is absolutely verboten in today’s feminized society.  They’re the oppressors, but they’ve framed themselves as the liberators.  We need some sort of bridge.

What I’ll be proscribing is similar to how I handled my soldiers as a Sergeant in the Army.  If we had some bullshit detail, and some private was working his ass off loading 2×4’s onto the back of a truck because some idiot didn’t know how to operate a forklift, I’d look to see who was having a hard time with it, the soldier who had a bad attitude.

“Fucking bullshit, man!”

I’d go up to him, put my hand on his soldier, and say “Private, I know.”

“Why the fuck should we have to…(blah, blah, blah…) when 2nd platoon gets to…(blah, blah, blah)…”

“Enough!  Because we do.  I know it’s crap.  I get it, but you’re attitude isn’t gonna help.  It’s just making it harder for the other soldiers.”

“I know but…”

“But sometimes life blows and that’s how it is.  Suck it up, private.  We’ve got a job to do.”