Back in the day, we used to say lines from the old show "Sanford and Son" to each other that we had memorized by heart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_and_Son), having heard the same lines over and over again, like our parents compulsive "jokes" that were often told in times of stress and/or drunkenness, when they didn't know how to fill in conversational spaces with other humans correctly.
"Old Man Sanford" would clutch his heart in mock anguish to deliver the well-honed line to his son that he was "on his way home" to see "Ouisie", his wife who'd passed on already, because he was "havin' the big one" that was so often threatened on the show but never actually came about. Oh...so, it's just a lie, then. We kinda felt gypped by the lack of "sudden death" action on t.v., like the nonsense our hysterical parents would blab out loud that was even less funnier than the sitcom stuff repeated for years on t.v. Yeah, sure. I know this line.
It became symptomatic of the psychological distress we'd see in the world that was the response of someone who uses their medical condition(s) as a manipulative tool(s) to get out of work, or human discourse, church on Sunday, or family visits. For a people who felt bereft of power, my parents and their friends employed a handy toolkit for the insane that included veiled threats (and not-so-veiled threats) that they often combine(d) with violent cursing and escalating acts of physical violence, which, rather than convincing us to obey their demands, made us want to stay even further away from their trouble spots. For them, their sickness became weapons for gaining leverage in the home and at work, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
It was silly and wasteful, but so were/are our parents, accustomed as they were to an ever-booming economy fueled through the machines of war. We wanted something better. We wanted something more from them and society, and the world at large. We wanted actual communication over the trite tricks brought on by so much t.v. viewing for the compulsively-addicted brain, followed by periods of paranoid non-engagements that could last just as long as their patterned routines that they inserted in lieu of actual thought. We talked to each other as a social group, and we wanted to see real conversation brought back, egged on as it was by the "shock" tactics of our disc jockeys and talk show hosts. A lot of it was the same old bullshit, but occasionally we broke through the static with our own hard work. See? Repetition does bear results, and I can talk about it at length, too.
How's that for power tripping?
