I Need Answers – Suburbia Dysturbia
When you have a story like mine, one of abuse, neglect, and powerlessness, you find yourself searching for answers – a desperate quest for meaning.
If you have any amount of heartache or suffering, the most important question is
“Why Me?”
Unfortunately, our culture is terrible at delivering any meaningful answers to these questions. We live in a civilization that strives for Suburbia – you know the place people move in order to be safe, and clean, and free from any kind of pain or worry. When I was a kid, I lived in the suburban hills above Oakland. But for me, it delivered none of those promises.
For me, suburban life was a place of extreme pain. My mother’s psychosis flourished in such a place. It allowed her personal darkness to hide behind the large front doors of our sprawling home. That suburban veneer only added to the pain. It created a discordant sense of reality between the inside of our home and the outside world that seemed to be experiencing exactly what the suburban dream promised – peace and calm that everyone ran to during that time. For me, the Suburban Dream was a dystopian nightmare, better tagged Dysturbia.
Suburbia, in all its forms, is bankrupt. It always has been. And as society has become more atheistic the cavernous void of answers to real-life issues rings out with predictable hollowness.
The full impact of my Dysturbian experience was bitterly revealed to me in my early twenties. That’s when my childhood memories came screaming back, demanding I make sense of it all. But like the suburbia that raised me, I had no meaningful resources to make sense of anything. Certainly, Suburbia provided no meaningful commentary on my psychotic mother, uncaring father nor the racism that prohibited Liz, our Black housekeeper and ultimate savior, from saving my life much earlier.
So what was I to do? I had suffered so much. I paid such a huge price just to make it to adulthood.
Many people from Dysturbian backgrounds turn to faith. But I had none. In spite of my Catholic schooling, I was raised an atheist. My parents were both atheists. They taught us to think like atheists, to question everything, to rely on just yourself, with no meaningful mention of God or His help in time of need. My mother often declared as her own, the famous line from Invictus – claiming she was “Master of her Fate, and Captain of her Soul”.
So as a young adult, when I was trying to sort out what happened and of course, why it happened, I found myself fully equipped with the emptiness only atheism can provide. It produced the inevitable hollow despair.
It made all of my suffering a shallow game of chance. Afterall, that’s fundamental to atheism. We got here by chance. We have health, by chance. We have all of our human attributes by a chance selection of DNA. We meet our friends and lovers by chance. We gain success by luck (another word for chance).
So how and why was I abused by a psychotic mother? You guessed it. All by chance.
Seriously? That’s the best answer?
According to this bankrupt philosophy, by chance, I have brown eyes. By chance, my siblings have blue eyes. And by chance, we were abused by a psychotic mother. And by chance, that suffering perpetuated because the only true caregiver, by chance, happened to be a Black woman who had no power to save us. Sure. All by chance.
So I guess that means all of that pain and fear and loneliness was just a simple case of bad luck, completely devoid of meaning, and wholeheartedly without purpose. What? All of that, no meaning, no purpose, no value? I was never suicidal, but this conclusion made me want to be.
But that’s all Suburbia could give me. That’s all it was capable of. Everyone ran there for safety. And “by chance” that didn’t happen for me. Oh well. Suburban atheism delivers its message clearly.
The atheists I know are nice people, smart people and well-meaning. But most have never suffered. They are suburban. And like suburban life, they ignore what suffering people really need. Most atheists don’t realize how cruel their atheism really is.
“Most atheists don’t realize how cruel their atheism really is. ”
They’ve spent the last 150 years telling Christians how cruel their God is. I think it’s time to self reflect.
Because cruel it is. It’s excessively cruel to anyone who has suffered. It tells the returning veteran that their efforts will quickly be forgotten. It tells the person with debilitating illnesses that their life is now less valuable because of their inability to function as others. And it tells any victim that their painful experience has no value or meaning and is just “bad luck”, leaving them with no real hope of resolution or healing. No wonder suicide rates are skyrocketing as our culture becomes more secular.
For me, I’ve needed answers. And not those answers. Atheism is equally taken by faith yet with oblivion to real answers. So I’ve searched. Since I came into atheism mostly through a scientific background, which is the logical path for most atheists, I knew that science had no answers for me.
So, I had to look elsewhere.
