The Domino Theory

Has anybody gone to the doctor’s recently for leeching? Attended a cremation ceremony where the wife of the deceased was forcibly walked into the furnace to join her husband? Took place in a stoning to death of a child who talked back to his parents? Got an e-vite to attend a lynching and bring potato salad?

 

If the answer is no, you can thank the people who at some moment in history, both personally and collectively, finally drew a line and said, “This will stop here.” And when enough people drew those lines, those heinous culturally approved and perpetuated practices finally did stop. 

 

And so. There’s a long list of toxic ideas and practices that rode in with our birth, hitchhiking on our DNA and working on our psyche, mostly invisibly, to stay alive like parasites feeding off the host. If through a radical experience called education, we can begin to name them and recognize them and question them, then we also have the possibility of refusing them. Of evicting them from our house and closing the door behind them. And then alerting our neighbors to watch out and evict their own unwanted guests, not answer the door when those wandering ghosts go from house to house seeking a new host. 

 

This kind of line-drawing is what feeds evolution, what can bring healing. It begins in the family when a child suffers from the parent’s alcoholism, physical/mental/sexual abuse, toxic ongoing criticism or apathetic neglect and then grows up and becomes a parent. Do they continue the harm and pass it down or choose the opposite path? In the image offered below—by a child!— do they keep in line so the dominos keep falling forward into a dysfunctional or dystopian future? Or do they step out of line? 

 

Here's the brilliant image and reminder that I found in a Facebook post.

Indeed, there is. But only if we step out of line. The world is waiting.