Rehabilitated

What makes us rehabilitated to be accepted in today’s society? In fact, what does the word rehabilitated mean?

In a scene from one of the most amazing movies ever directed, The Shawshank Redemption, the character played by Morgan Freeman is asked before the Parole Committee if, after serving 40 years of his sentence, he fells rehabilitated. His answer to the parole officer is remarkably anthological.

In fact, not  only  does he provide the answer, he also  conveys the idea that we should not be defined by those who believe to be entitled to judge others or establish moral or  behavioral conduct.

I myself have difficulty understanding who entrusted  these self-proclaimed superior-beings with the right to advise us on how our life should be lived or the kind of attitude we should have towards a challenge or, especially, the kind of question we should come up with. Especially that since they are on the pedestal, observing us from such a height with their self-righteous attitude, it is impossible that they may hear anything beyond their own egotistic voices.

Have you ever seen any of them? They are everywhere, always ready to provide you with some advice. Everything is obvious to them, but not because they possess the monopoly of truth, but because they are unable to think beyond their own mediocrity.  They always have the right word to any situation, not because they are knowledgeable or educated, but because they have memorized acronyms and technocrat words and sentences usually extracted from either self-help books or symposiums, religious dogmas or family and corporate meetings.

But the worst of all, for them, is the fact that you represent a menace to their existence. By producing a thought,  you disclose brave new worlds that show that the control volume may feature other body contours than those confined in their pathetic black boxes.

They are unable to listen to understand, but just to reply.

In fact, if you have an argument or a dialectical thought development, one that looms as an obstacle to their immaculate and untreaded paths, they will endeavour to deconstruct you , not through debating on the level of ideas, but by degrading you as a human being.

You must have experienced that, either with you or with a colleague or a friend. They will belittle you by  labeling you as a radical or a freak.They will mar your character just because you may eclipse them by disclosing their obscurity and shattering their professional ambitions or personal beliefs.

They will associate your behavior with the fact that you were born in a different country, or that your culture is flawed, or that you have no faith, or that you read too much, etc etc etc. That your problem lies on the fact that you question, think and discuss too much.

And , therefore, you are not able to live in a perfect world, their brave new world. They may even condescend that are even a good and competent person, but your attitudes overshadow your good aspects, therefore disrupting the fabrics of society and making you defective and unfit to live among the others.

Consequently, you must be rehabilitated. You must embrace the mass hysteria, like the city inhabitants in The Crucible did. You must comply to Nurse Ratched orders and expectations, as the patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. You must silence when  Professor Crawford humiliates your classroom colleague in Meeting Forester. You must accept your doom as a failed part and  move clockwise as in The Midnight Express. You must condemn another person to die without debate as the jurors in Twelve Angry Men.

Never can you be McMurphy, John Proctor, Jamal Wallace, Horace, Spartacus or Petronius, for these are not rehabilitated people.

However, deep in their hearts, these unmarred beings grapple with their own demons. They know that regardless of how they label or mock those who menace them, they also know that their only reason to ridicule  opinions and  smirk at ideas from those considered to be unfit or pariahs, is to be able to wear a suit and tie and have a job.

One day, they become the real outcasts by embracing careers rather than ideas, by  defending corporations and personalities rather than people, by  undermining different opinions and not unethical attitudes, by relinquishing their reasoning and not their fear of the difference.

In fact, they are the ones who need rehabilitation, but  to retrieve their soul and live again as human beings.