I'm learning that many of us who lived through the 1970's, 1980's, & 1990s psychiatric and abuse scandals see many of toda...
I'm learning that many of us who lived through the 1970's, 1980's, & 1990s psychiatric and abuse scandals see many of today's social issues very differently. I think our vision is clearer. Where once we were innocent and believed nearly everyone's with ease, we don't. We learned.
Thankfully, we had the likes of talk show hosts like Donahue, Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Marsha Warfield, Mother Love, Jenny Jones, and Montell Williams who brought us real-life stories in the middle of our weekdays. Back then, weekday television programming was often much racier than weekend television programming.
It was nothing for us to sit down for an hour and listen to people talk about values, beliefs, thoughts, and experiences that we didn't share.
We listened. We listened, we laughed, we enjoyed. And,....most importantly, we learned.
We learned that even good, well-intentioned people are flawed in ways that can cause harm to others. We learned that not everyone is who they say they are. We learned that not everyone is who they say that they want to be.
Not everyone has the best of intentions. Not everyone aspires to be kind, genuine, or even just safe to be around.
We learned that though genuine horror and people with evil intent exist, People can speak their truth and it still may not be "the truth". We learned that their intent is not always to deceive, sometimes what they told us is all they knew at the time. Other times, they knew more but chose not to share it with us.
We still listen but nowadays, we need more receipts and verification. We are slower to take things at face value. We've grown. We have grown wiser.
And through it all, people were trying to heal and deal with very real violence, abuse, addiction, pain, disability, and poverty.
Here we are still, in the process of not allowing that to overtake us. Learning to be the head and not the tail of life's most painful issues and happenings.