katya8 wrote:I believe that what you engaged in, was DISPLACEMENT, Nimh:
You were probably very angry at the Romanie couple for fighting and making you miserable with their miserable lives
Well that interpretation certainly took me aback ;-)
Umm no, absolutely not.
And here I'm going to go out on a limb, and possibly put myself out to ridicule: I dont feel that their misery invades my life, somehow, even just that bothersome split moment, because instinctively, immediately, what I feel is that
they = me.
I know that sounds really stupid. I'm a white, middle-class expat in this country. On the material scale, I'm between the two couples, but obviously much closer to the prosperous one.
And yet thats what I feel: immediate identification with the worse-off couple.
They're like me. Thats not rational, because they're not - and they'd be the first to scoff at the notion. I'm probably as alien to them as Bill Gates is to me. But its what I feel.
Whereas when I look at the yuppie couple, I feel only alienation.
They're "them". The others.
----
Perhaps, strangely, the haplessness of the drink/argument situation actually reinforces that reaction.
If they'd been the streetsweepers, I'd have felt the same, but the feeling might have been overridden by guilt.
They work much harder than me, and I earn five times as much.
But the haplessness and turmoil of this couple created a link between them and me. No, I'm not a drunk :-D (I hardly ever drink at all, in fact). But relationships that have spurred downward in a cycle of confusion and helplessness, increasing incapacity,
that I know of - I was in one of those. And one of the problems in that relationship was also made up, I think, by the self-defense mechanisms (on her part) that come with growing up in poverty, which help you to survive but become self-destructive when trying to go beyond that.
Anyway, so perhaps in some way that detail offered something to
personally recognize as well, creating a personal link on top of the social identification.
Because that remains too, as described above. I always have it. Whenever I see a contrast in wealth, I
always identify with the poorer person. Well, 95% of the time. And I want to emphasize that I do so completely instinctively, unreasonedly, viscerally. And that feeling of identification comes, in time,
before the articulation of corresponding political viewpoints. Which is interesting in re to Thomas's later point.
It's also certainly set me apart often from people around me - not friends, because those kind of self-select to be like me, but people around that. In Holland, I mean, here not so much - part of the reason I feel more at home here.
