Intergeneration conflict / suicide

After living as long as I have, one no longer just wonders whether cultural change can be more catastrophic than it is generally assumed to be. One knows it. Perhaps the damage that is done to psyches really revolves around shattered senses of confidence which themselves are caused by intergenerational conflict. It seems to me more than a suspicion that damage from the failed Rhodesian minority political experiment is visited upon the children of the whites – and maybe even of some blacks – of the Rhodesian era.

An obvious reason for this would be that one distrusts one’s children very much for representing newer cultural values of gender and racial equality, rational thinking and liberal values – which one’s program for white Christianity had unconsciously engaged with as an enemy. My introspection tells me that there is such a thing as an unconscious enemy. It is imperative, therefore, to make oneself very conscious of whom one fights. To make everything more complicated, one’s enemy, too, can have a deep unconscious hatred for one, without knowing rationally why (their hatred overshoots what could be considered as rational, for example based on any of the actions one has done to incite rage.) Our experiences as well as early indoctrination form character structures, and one can – and often does – hate another’s character structure without first understanding it, or where it came from (often innocently enough, because of being where one was at some time, rather than from conscious ideological intent). The hatred that Rhodesian whites of the first migrant generation feels for liberals is worked out in practice against their children. This is largely unconscious. Furthermore, the hatred that western leftists (and some liberals) feel for the character structure of the Rhodesian whites is worked out against their more vulnerable children. So it goes.

Every time I hear about a Rhodesian family’s post migration story, I do not need to listen too hard to register the nature of the fallout for the second generation. The first generation regularly presents itself in a very dutiful pose. Often there is mention of an economic struggle represented not as this but as a moral and religious struggle. Perhaps there is even intonation of sacrifice (if the offspring’s condition, which one may wish to account for, seems to be particularly dire). Then the child is mentioned, as chronically depressed. One couple had to leave my wedding early to conduct their adolescent offspring’s suicide watch. The first generation’s quality of suffering could not be portrayed as more paramount. The next generation causes a continual rubbing-in of the first generation’s overestimation of faith, which lead to a losing war. This is the trauma that the parent must repeat, perhaps for better luck with more determination, next time. Only, it is no longer the “poor blacks” viewed metaphorically as children incapable of self-governing, that the Rhodesians’ attentions alight upon. Rather, it is the children of these whites themselves, who must be taught how to obey, how not to be freethinking or liberal.

One by one, the Rhodesian whites extract their toll from each other: chronic depression. I would not have believed that so many children of these whites are forced to enact their parents’ depression at losing the war, if I had not myself lived through a great deal of harranging without a seeming cause. This produces depression. The depression leads to “incidents” which require public displays of duty – the parents dropping everything in order to publically attend to a cry for help; thus externalizing their own depression whilst appearing to be spiritually and emotionally above feeling it. They thus enact their pious hatred of their children.

And many of the Western leftists, as has been noted, also hate the Rhodesians’ children – for having too much of the parents’ character structure! So, the immigrants’ children are punished yet again.

I wonder how many of them have committed suicide for these reasons, to date?