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Dub Memories Part 2
At the end of part two, I moved to a suburb on the outskirts of one of Africas richest cities, Johannesburg. Here, suddenly, instead of the pallor and grime of rural South Africa, beautiful mansions, BMWs, and stylishly dressed people suddenly surrounded us.
My family felt a bit left out, since we werent exactly very well off when we arrived. Later on, things began to improve, but for the moment, we were still as poor as dirt. I can honestly say that my parents did their best to take care of my sister and I, and we never went hungry, or lacked for a warm bed, and I truly respect them for that. It is something I hope to do for my kids one day too, if the day comes that I have any.
Starting High School is always a bumpy ride, regardless of your material prospects, looks, or general social stature. Its quite an unnerving experience moving from being the biggest fish in the pond in Primary School (as we call it here) to being seen as pond scum by all your teachers. In fact, one of our more vocal teachers (a cool guy all round, but not one gifted with a subtle way of expressing himself), used to refer to us as wasters of oxygen when our grade began our year at the big High School about a mile away from our first home in Johannesburg. This same teacher also liberally administered Corporal Punishment to the rowdier students. Usually with a small, thin cane. No jokes. Some days, my bum was in supreme pain. This was considered quite normal, to cane children in South African schools, until a couple of years ago when it was made illegal.
Let me describe to you who I was then at that point in time, to assist in understanding the mind-bending experiences I went through during my 5 years in High School. (In South Africa, High School lasts a minimum of 5 years.)
If you could have wandered through the school then, perhaps at a lunchtime or some other occasion when there were a lot of kids running around, you would have seen a boy wearing a school blazer, regulation gray pants, white socks (very much non-regulation, these!), and a white cotton shirt with a collar and the school logo on the pocket. And a belt. This, and black shoes, were all that you were allowed to wear in my High School. South Africa still harks back to the days of British Colonialism, and virtually every school there has a uniform. Few schools, however, could match the sheer, dazzling lack of colour coordination that the designers of our school uniform were blessed with. Our blazers were a dark teal, with thin white stripes and shoulder pads. It felt like wearing the skin of a particularly flatulent elephant, to be honest. Although the blazer would keep you (slightly) warm in the chilly South African winters, it was a massive hindrance during the summer, when most kids would walk around without their blazers on for the lions share of the day.
South African schools are extremely strict. Having seen American schools on television, I grew quite envious of the relaxed, informal environment that these budding Hollywood stars seemed to take for granted. We had to do Physical Education (or Physical Chinese Water Torture, as it was more commonly known), also in regulation school vests (thin) and thin black shorts, and always, it seemed, at the very crack of dawn. Hell, we woke up the roosters with our running around the Cricket fields.
Now, there are some striking similarities between the social aspects of all school environments. To use American-style phrases, you are either a Jock, or a Nerd. You can choose to be a Nerd however, only others can choose you to be a Jock. This is simply the way of young teenagers.
Guess which one I was.
Go on.
So, this young Witness teen comes wandering out of the shadows. Always, whenever there were more than a few people gathered together on the Cricket field, perhaps catching a desultory smoke as quickly as possible, leaving behind a veritable wasteland of cigarette butts, I would observe them from afar. I was quite the loner, as I was shunned by virtually everyone in the school, even the other Dubs! They had little time for me. Now that I look back on it, I can see that they were truly showing the Conditional Love that Dubs are so well known for on JWD and other Anti forums. However, back then, my mindset was quite different, and I was always trying to be friends with them.
One thing that truly grated me was the way they would seem to feel sorry for me and sort of half-heartedly include me in their group on occasion, and this inflamed me quite violently, but, back then, I was not terribly good at expressing emotion of any sort, so I tried to handle it as best I could by merely avoiding them altogether.
This Catch-22 situation regularly resulted in the Elders counselling me for associating with worldly children. When I told them how the other Dub kids treated me, I was met with a well, if you pray more and do more Field Service, maybe those kids will treat you better, since they think youre spiritually weak. What a load of bollocks. Having gone out in the field enough times to notice the distinct lack of said Dub schoolchildren at Field Service arrangements, which I would attend on a regular basis, I noted this, and was then counselled, again not go about slandering others in the Congregation.
Did I mention that these were, for the most part, the children of Elders? Explains a lot of things, doesnt it?
Funny, when I was having my Disassociation Hearing, these Elders were very eager to hear my tales of the many, many sins committed by these same children. Makes you wonder, doesnt it?
Now, although I might be a loner, that doesnt mean I dont crave human company just like any other human being. In fact, to this day, whenever I see somebody who is like me and not very social, I will always go out of my way to be super friendly and kind towards them, and they usually respond very well. This is a little thing that makes me feel good, knowing that I am doing something those supposedly super spiritual Elders kids would never have done in their pride.
Soon, I discovered others who were like me into all sorts of ultra-refined technology, electronics, computer programming. People who could converse with me on topics other people didnt even know existed. Eventually, I found myself a group of four other guys who were all into programming like I was. It wasnt easy to get into their little group, which was a very closed, intimate one, purely because of the abuse the jocks handed out to them on a regular basis, but when they realized that I was in exactly the same boat as them, and friendly to boot, they ushered me into their circle.
How can I condense my thousands and thousand of meetings and Field Service arrangements and Conventions and handful of get-togethers and Book Studies and Cake Nights and Theocratic Ministry Schools into so limited a medium as text? Let me describe to you what our Hall was like. These are painful memories for me.
As I have mentioned before, my mind is a very wild, almost uncontrollable thing, which tends to focus fiercely on one thing at a time, master it, and then move on. This is at once my greatest talent and also my greatest failing. Perhaps I would have been a great novelist like Stephen King or Philip Kindred Dick if Id had the fortitude to actually stick it through writing an entire book! A great artist, if Id found the patience to paint a canvas larger than a greeting card. A ballet dancer, if Id had the money for classical dance lessons. None of these things were what Jehovah wanted me to be. Jehovah apparently wanted me to be a good Cog.
Now, if you are like me, you will begin to understand just how stupendously painful every meeting was for me. To try and fit my mind into the mould, the happy harness, the blinkers that the Tower provided in the form of doctrine, was something I tried repeatedly, but never got quite right. Always, there were the questions. Eventually, these questions were my undoing, as we will soon find out.
Once I really began to socialize with this little group of secretive, extremely intelligent people, I felt as if I had finally found my crowd.
In my healing, my mind has forced itself to forget some aspects of my childhood and adolescence. Knowing that this is a good thing, I have suddenly, stunningly realized that I have forgotten the name of my greatest Nemesis. She was a teacher, rather old, but still young enough to have plenty of kick in her. A Fundamentalist, Born Again Christian, she was also a very, very angry woman. Angry at what, I will probably never know. Maybe she didnt get laid enough, and was frustrated. Right now, it is one of the least of my concerns.
When I was a Witness, Assimilated and still bearing the incredible burden of the Dub Way inside me, she realized that I would not bend to her rather formidable will and worship her God, so she hated me.
There have been maybe three or four times when I have experienced true hatred directed towards me, and when I met and began to be taught by this woman, this was one of those times. It was quite a stressful experience. As there were only a very small handful of Witnesses in my grade by the time I was nearing the end of my High School career, more often than not I found myself alone and in fear in her class, with nobody to support me in my radical Dub views. She taught us English, and then later on she took us for the class formally known as Life Studies, more commonly known to the students who took it as Bloody Waste Of Time When I Could Be Having A Smoke. In this Life Studies class, our curriculum was rather threadbare and left up to the interpretation of the teacher, but included such topics as Sexuality, Drugs, and the dreaded My Career And Studies. Of course, most of the students had a field day with this old fogey, asking her all sorts of uncomfortable questions about Sex and Drugs (and occasionally even Rock and Roll), which caused this teacher to, uh, Rock and Roll. She was a Holy Roller, given to great waving of the hands and calling upon the name of Jesus in earnest.
Needless to say, this bugged me. At first, it bugged me because she was directly violating what I felt was the Prime Directive, i.e. Worship The Society. Later on, it bugged me because I felt she was pretentious, close-minded, and supremely ignorant and blinkered. Turns out, she was all these things and more.
Looking back on those days with the clarity afforded to all of us by hindsight, it seems that she was just as much of a religious person as I was. However, whenever we were in the same room together, there would usually be friction. Of course, back then, I was not exactly the tidiest of people, and my hair and clothes would always be a mess. Being in the Society teaches you that your dress is not a concern, as long as you wear the correct type of clothing, of course. She didnt like the fact that I could score 80% or more in exams and never do anything in her English class other than read a good novel.
Towards the end, all of these sundry factors began to reflect back onto my life as a Witness. Now that I had found a group of people to associate with who liked me for who I was, not for how many hours of Field Service I put in per month, the people back at the good olde Hall began to resemble cardboard-cutout people more than ever. An average conversation with one of the nitwits that would fill the Hall just about every second night would usually start and finish with me wanting to find a large, bloodied axe and just going postal for a few minutes to relieve the mind-numbing tedium of it all.
Even though there is a large amount of hullabaloo about the rigid dress codes enforced by our beloved Elders as per the Governing Bodys requests, the fact of the matter is that this is rarely ever a topic for conversation at a gathering of Witnesses. Its the same way that a prisoner doesnt need to constantly reaffirm when the cell doors will be locked and unlocked during the day Dubs automagically know about the code, and adhere to it silently. For the most part, I never even considered wearing, say, a pair of nice big black boots to the Kingdom Hall. All of this was silently enforced by that most powerful of motivators the need for acceptance. Guilt, in short.
There are so many memories I have from our Kingdom Hall. A seemingly innocuous brown face brick building, with a small parking lot attached, and a sign out front that said Jehovahs Witnesses. No mention of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society anywhere, of course. Strange how Dub wont mention the name of their controller and god (lowercase g), Brooklyn Bethel, or the Tower, on their little signs outside the Hall, when once you get inside, you cannot escape the fact that the Governing Body are utterly in charge and control everything!
Once inside, if you were a new, worldly visitor, unaccustomed to the habits and eccentricities of Dubs, you would first be given a good old look-down-the-nose type of reception, and then you would be love-bombed. Love-bombing is a wonderful phrase that perfectly captures the way that Dubs make new recruits feel happy and joyous when they first arrive at a Kingdom Hall. The actual physical intensity of the love-bombing would be determined by how Dub-like you appeared to be. For instance, someone wearing a suit would get a very warm reception indeed, whereas someone wearing a 30-centimeter high Mohawk would get a slightly more tepid reception and fewer hugs, apart from one or two from an adventurous 30-something Sister looking for marriage material!
Every Kingdom Hall I have ever been to has been a devastatingly drab affair on the inside, and on the outside for the most part too. Imagine dozens and dozens of rows of identical chairs, stretching down a perfectly uniform, monocolour carpet, darkly coloured curtains, and a little podium at the front.
Flourescent lights, to illuminate the people of Jehovah painfully.
My mind can still recall the absolute crispness of the letters in my Literature. It was such a blessing to do the Watchtower during the day, when some natural light was allowed in, even though the Brothers still insisted on having the harsh fluorescent bulbs running right through the meeting anyway.
This is bringing back so many repressed memories that its not even funny. Today, I would probably not even be able to stand a meeting for much longer than 5 minutes, let alone the 120-minute plus stretches required of me during my Assimilation period. Its like sleep-walking, the voice of the speaker lulling you into a different mental state altogether, your mind too tired and stretched to resist and questionthis, truly, is where the greatest power of the Watchtower Organization is, in their meetings. Do not underestimate the power of thousands of hours of sitting in meetings, letting those words from the platform seep into your mind, banged in there over and over again, until your mind becomes a thing of Doctrine, an inescapable, impossible Truth.
Probably the only thing that saved me was that I remember how to be free. My mind knew, dimly, of a time before, when my circadian rhythm wasnt clamped to 5 meetings a week and Field Service and Street Work. Once, I was free. Now, I am free again. At least when you are in a human jail, then you know you are behind bars.
Jehovahs Witnesses do not know that they are imprisoned, and that is perhaps the worst imprisonment of all.
This is why eagles that are placed in cages after being captured in the wild suffer from bad health and die earlier than eagles born into captivity. They also remember the freedom afforded them by their wings, the absolute will to go anywhere, to live as their wings require them to. Have you ever seen a killer whale caught and then taken into captivity? Their powerful dorsal fins bend over and fold, and it looks hideous. They know that they are in captivity. Most Dubs dont.
Our minds are our wings.
You can clip an eagles wings, but you cannot stop it wanting to fly. This is what I felt like at least, the whole time I was a Witness. Early on in my Dub days, when I wasnt fully aware of the real reasons for my Witnessdom, having been Assimilated not against my will, but prior to my having any real sort of will at all in any significant way, I had been a happy child. Being a Dub is not a healthy experience for any human being. That eternal grinding stone that you have to place your nose on, pandering to exclusive groups of men who seem no different from yourself, yet are afforded Godlike power by other, even more exclusive groups of men, is not the way humans are supposed to be.
Probably my primary undoing was being afforded a peek into the lives of real people, worldly people, bad people, people who were going to die. They certainly didnt seem bothered about it.
One Field Service experience I remember with great clarity was about 6 years ago, a time of rather intense hormonal earthquakes inside my body. A semi-friend and I were working the doors one morning, and suddenly a door opened on us, and behind it was a girl, one of the most beautiful ones Ive ever seen, hair tousled, obviously freshly-woken by our knocks. She was wearing bright red underwear, and was (poorly) wrapped in a blanket. Her feet, toes, hands, and lips were perfect, as was the rest of her.
She didnt seem to mind at all that she was going to die at Armageddon.
Neither did her man, who came trudging up behind her shortly afterwards, held her, and gave her a quick kiss.
How could Jehovah destroy a creation as stunningly gorgeous and perfect as this?
In the next Part, there will be more details about the excruciating borefests known to Dubs as Conventions, and in the last part, my final decision to Dissasociate will be explainedthanks for reading!