Victimhood Diet
“You can’t hold on to your victimhood and get on
with your life. You have to choose one.”
—Jordan Peterson
Most people who riot
were raised on a diet
of slights and oppressions
from past grievance sessions.
The wrongs made against them
were real and incensed them,
but scabs that keep peeling,
will never start healing.
These people assemble
with those they resemble,
who then sit comparing
how much they’re despairing.
While they sit convening,
their lives get more meaning
as they climb the lattice
of victimhood status.
Groups with these abjections
have got intersections,
and those most affected
are much more respected.
They share the strong feeling
that in every dealing,
there’s one who has power,
while all others cower.
They constantly clamor,
but do more than yammer,
about retribution
and redistribution.
Their victim-condition
gives them full permission
to make the world fairer
by unleashing terror.
Thus they have been tempted
to think they’re exempted
from legal constrictions,
and moral restrictions.
The hate they’ve been spewing
springs from what they’re chewing.
Their victimhood diet
is awful, don’t try it.
Warren Bonham is a private equity investor who lives in Southlake, Texas.
Warren:
I love this poem! Perfect meter, great rhyme, apt message, it has everything! My favorite line is “These people assemble with those they resemble.” Terrific job!
Thanks! I woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning. Writing when irritated makes poems like this easier to write.
Warren, you certainly provided a perfect perspective of a segment of our society and skewered them repeatedly.
I’m not normally a Jordan Peterson guy (he usually goes over my head), but this quote about victimhood hit me hard.
Great analysis of the victimhood culture! Fun meter and rhyme, too.
I’m glad this one resonated with you!
I like it! Very nice rhythm. It is fun to read. I like the heavy rhyming with all the double syllables.
I like doing double end rhymes. It definitely takes more effort, not that I’m playing the victim card or anything.
Unfortunately, victimhood seems to have become common currency, not exclusive to one segment of society. Riots in Portland, an attempted insurrection at the Capitol. I can’t get my poetry published because it rhymes, boo, hoo, hoo, yet lots of publishers take rhyming poetry. Replacement Theory? Isn’t that another cry of victimhood, especially when white South Africans get a pass to bump up the WASP demograph?
I still get a bit irate when I look through submission guidelines for my writing and am excluded because I’m white, or male, or straight, of the wrong nationality, not young enough, or am a published author, but that’s just the way it is. I move on to the next listing.
Anyhow, thanks for highlighting the phenomenon of victimhood, Warren. Alas, it’s getting more pervasive by the day.
Let the victimisation begin!
Unfortunately, I have to agree that no one is immune. We all need to fight the urge to grasp victimhood rather than getting on with life as Peterson sagely said.
Warren, your sketch provides an evolutionary history of the type. Some bullies presenting victimhood as their complaint have indeed suffered bullying in the past. They do think it’s THE way to achieve or preserve power, once they can gather a group–and make the space safe for anyone agreeing to chew on hate. It’s a real temptation for almost everyone, now that powerful self-righteous victims demand adherence and threaten exclusion. Your advice to avoid the diet is the very best possible nourishment for getting on with life, making real friends, and finding the genuine happiness that always eludes those feeding on, and yet starved by, belligerent group victimhood. Your verse says it all in a compelling way that confirms those with a brighter, more sympathetic outlook.
Thanks for the insightful comments. Life sounds easy when reduced to verse with a pithy conclusion. I wish it was easy to reject this diet. It tastes good for a while but does irreparable damage over time.
So much to the point – or to so many relevant points. All in punchlines that are indeed punch-like, evoking a punchbag being mercilessly hit. The most horrible consequence of all those serial victimhoods is that true victims of real crimes are ignored – not only because false victims gain undeserved benefits but because the limited public attention space is taken over, inundated by them.
That’s a great point. Victims of very significant wrongs get ignored which, over time, builds up enough collective resentment that it leads the pendulum to start swinging in another direction. When that happens, the pendulum always over corrects. That’s a pretty accurate, yet depressing, view of human history.
Well the poem is perfect. You have revealed the playbook of governments and religions that create “victims” in order to “intersectionalize” them against non-victims. Why… for money and power, of course. They have even victimized earth and her ice!
Too bad our cultural influences are more Gramsci, Foucault, and Marcuse and not nearly enough Solzhenitsyn, Frankl, and Orwell.
The intersectionalized “victims,” real or imagined, on all sides of every thing (current or not) are being marched into serfdom.
Refuse victimhood.
Thanks, Warren
Great poem, thank you, I love it. I’m going to print this out for future reference, in case I have to explain to someone why I’m not going to support their cause.
Peterson is surely one of the leading thinkers of our time. He gets a whole lot of things that have little to do with his training as a clinical psychologist. You should see his debates with the Four Horsemen (Dawkins, Harris, Dennett & Hitchins). He single-handedly takes them to task.