I, Tin Man – When to Shed the Armor
Children are far more perceptive than most of us realize. I was no exception. As a youngster, I paid close attention to the adults around me. Not only my parents, but my extended family and their friends as well. As all children do, I wanted to know how to be an adult myself. Unfortunately, most of us are exposed to an array of really bad examples and sorting through the conflicting information is a full time job. Not only are we observing the real people around us but we’re also comparing them to the characters we see on television. When you expose your children to the rest of humanity, you’re introducing competition into the marketplace of ideas. If you’re not an impeccable service provider to your tiny clients, they will spot superior value elsewhere and your influence over them will quickly begin to wane.
As a kid, my favorite show was Star Trek: The Next Generation and I consider myself very fortunate to have been exposed to its cast of characters because they served as alternative role models to those of flesh and blood in my midst. In stark contrast to my irrational and violent parents, the characters I became fascinated with were just, rational, peaceful, and ethical. They had a strict moral code based upon reason rather than religion. They were not only intelligent and curious explorers but they were socially sensitive and considered their psychologist important enough to sit on the bridge next to the Captain as a highly-valued adviser. I’d strive to live more in their idealistic world and less in the mess of my parents’ design and as you can imagine, that led to conflict.
As the years crawled by, I learned to associate emotion with irrationality and violence. I saw my feelings as a weakness that could be targeted and they seemed to be part of the same messy package. My parents were quite abusive and in the back of my mind, I was always comparing their behavior to the opposing examples I observed elsewhere. The result was a gradual rejection of my own emotions. I nurtured my brain and deadened my heart. It’s often difficult to notice gradual changes but when I relocated to enroll in a new school at age 15, my new peers diagnosed me instantly. I was asked, “are you smart?” to which I coldly replied, “intelligence is relative.” From that day onward, I was known as “Spock.”
To its credit, my vulcan personality did keep me out of trouble on countless occasions. While my teenage peers were out being drunken, hormonal, neanderthals, I was studying philosophy, politics, business, science, and economics while developing my personal power. I have to conclude that being a sort of android in high school was overall a good thing. I grew by orders of magnitude while everyone else around me was preoccupied with football and beer. Besides, my heart wasn’t really dead, it was just quarantined in a bunker to be let out on rare occasions when safe to do so. I wrote a lot of poetry and fortunately, was able to find someone with whom to share it. She probably didn’t realize it at the time but as the one person I trusted to see my hidden heart, her value really was beyond measure. She listened, understood, and offered valuable feedback. I was more than happy to do the same when she shared her own poems with me. I affirmed her hidden intelligence (smart girls often hide their minds to be socially accepted by their peers) and she affirmed my feelings, which I otherwise kept firmly under lock and key. School eventually ended and a series of cataclysms hurled me to another corner of the universe but the following years would prove to resemble The Wizard of Oz with myself cast as the Tin Man, in search of his heart. Anyone familiar with my cast of interstellar role models should already be able to predict what my next nickname was to be…
When I moved to Vancouver at the age of 21, I started to meet some good, quality people and make really valuable friends. Compared to the small rural farming community of my youth, it was like stepping out of a cave into the warm light of day. Most of my new social circle was composed of libertarians and anarchists and they generally appreciated my hyper-rationality but the ladies in my life, outside of that scene, were the ones to point out my emotional shortcomings. One of them, who was otherwise pretty nutso, took to calling me “Data” from time to time, as a way to humorously point out my reluctance to express my feelings. Even today, after having made a lot of progress, I’m still not a dazzling extrovert, by any means. I can be sociable when I see value in doing so, but my true comfort zone is still that of the introvert.
Having come from a highly flawed parental template, I’ve always taken the subject of parenting very seriously. I see it as the most important job in the world and as such, should not be taken lightly. Parents are service providers with a monopoly. Their customer is without alternatives and is completely at their mercy. I’ve carefully studied the subjects of child psychology and development in an attempt to adequately prepare myself, should I ever become a parent myself and it’s this dominant desire to succeed where my parents failed that has driven me along the path of healing. I know that in order to help others, I must be well myself. I’m actually quite confident now that I’ll do a kick-ass job if/when I find myself in a parental role but in the mean time, there’s really no limit to how much we can refine ourselves and if there’s one thing I’m committed to, it’s lifelong learning.
Being an active member of the libertarian/anarchist community, I can’t help but notice similar traits, trends, and patterns in many of my peers to the ones I’ve exhibited myself. I went through a period in my late teens of being obsessed with world events, politics, and such matters that were far beyond my ability to control. It’s easy to become distracted by such things and neglect those more personal matters that we can actually affect. It’s important to remember that we cannot slay the dragon of government alone, nor can we actually “End The Fed” or solve any of the other multitudes of global problems out there. These great external conflicts, I would argue, are the outward manifestations of the personal conflicts within us all. Why waste time and energy shouting at the wind when you could be building a shelter or even a sailboat instead? In our own lives, we have great power. We can directly influence our friends and family for the better and we can build happy, productive lives for ourselves here and now – not someday when the evil empire has fallen… which, by the way, will never happen as long as we neglect the seeds of tomorrow that present themselves in the eyes of our children. They’re always watching and responding to how we treat them and one day, they’ll repay us in kind. We can make things easy for ourselves later by providing top-notch service now… or we can abuse our customers and lose them forever.
-Gabriel Scheare
www.facebook.com/scheare - www.fortgalt.com
Valdivia, Chile