Suppression? Nope. It's Worst

I was reading the New York Times when I came across this article about a play regarding gays in the 50s in London. This reminded me of something I have been thinking about for a couple of years now, which I describe in a bit.

If you know anything about the Honors Program at Augsburg, you would know that students in the program are required to take certain interesting classes. One of those classes is this one called The Scholar Citizen, which was about pragmatism and the cultural genocide if it takes over (at least that's what I wrote about in my last paper for that class).

Now, during class, we read a biased book about Freud and Lewis, which talked about both men and their views about life, religion, love, etc. Along with the class, we had to take this Theatre Lab where students more or less came up with vignettes concerning the book about these two men. Well, Freud talked about suppression of feelings. And my group decided that we will go with that (vignette on suppression of feelings).

[vignette members]

So, in the vignette I was a gay brother of this dude with this friend and I had a girlfriend. And somehow at the end I came out because my character was suppressing his feelings of being gay. But, after reading this article, I realized what I had thought all along: the problem was not 'suppressing feelings'; the problem was society not allowing people to be who they are!

The whole idea of 'suppression' is nothing else than a sinister societal evil. And that was the big revelation of the day for me.