I must admit to getting badly triggered by this week’s hot topic of news, actor Will Smith slapping comedian Chris Rock at the Academy Awards.. I do not approve of physical violence but acting on impulse is part of being both animal and human and when we cannot protest things become problematic.. That said perhaps it was a low point of Smith’s life to be so triggered, but the news that he is to be punished (and effectively shamed) by the Academy for standing up against verbal abuse angers me in many ways. Apparently he ‘needs to be made an example of’ so people do not get the idea this kind of behavior is condoned. So in the eyes of ‘the Academy’ its okay for Chris Rock to poke fun at a medical condition and he gets away with that, all in the spirit of comedy while Will Smith is the one to be punished.. I just do not get it and it makes me angry.
I let it go anyway when I realised I got so triggered by it that I actually yelled at the radio and Jasper didn’t run away he looked concerned and it may sound crazy but I was trying to explain the situation to him.
Its true I do love some comedy but some of it feels to me like fingernails scratched over a blackboard, grating, grazing and hurtful in the extreme not to mention sick on some level often a projection of the comedian’s own psychology. What I do not enjoy to watch I just turn off..
Now there is another dimension to this elaborated in the post I re-blogged earlier, namely that Chris Rock has a condition that may make him lack feeling towards the sensitivities of others. We could see this as just a wounded ego issue on behalf of Will Smith which I do not feel is fair, and yes perhaps a more grounded person who has less of a hair trigger due to his own trauamtic and abusive past may have been able to brush this off… But Will Smith was not that person and he did receive a standing ovation when he went on to accept his award. To be honest I haven’t watched the footage, I just listened to numerous reports on the radio.
Sadly, perhaps if I had more to be getting on with in my own life then this may not be something I would or perhaps even ‘should’ be focusing on.. When all is said and done does my opinion on it matter? Not much, is the short answer. At the same time I recognize it as a trigger to me. In no way do I condone slapping anyone, (not even a child) but we are human and it happens and in time the person may deeply regret that action, still knowing it was a legitimate trigger, so surely there should be understanding and compassion shown around that rather than punishment, meting out of shame and consequences in the name of being ‘politically correct’?
Post script.. after writing this earlier and making lunch and reading another blog from a bully survivor who has injury issue it occurred to me that if he hadn’t landed that slap on Chris Rock who knows if Will Smith or his wife may not have had a prang or something else on the way home from the ceremony? Just a thought.. Exercise is important for those of us who get painful shit landed on us so we can at least try to find someway to externalize hurt that does not end up hurting anyone else.. banked up inside of us it can lead to self injury.
Emerging From The Dark Night 