Supporting their girl Marjorie Taylor Greene before her hearing today, her fellow travelers in the House issued this statement:
“The left’s attempts to politicize the courts to achieve what they cannot at the ballot box puts America on a dangerous path.”
NICE!
Today there was sworn testimony in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Georgia voters contesting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to be on the ballot, as someone who took an oath to defend the Constitution and who then advocated loudly for extra-constitutional remedies to an election she claimed was stolen. The case was brought under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The hearing was live streamed to anybody interested in hearing it in real time. I heard about an hour of Marjorie and then the closing arguments of both lawyers. Here are some new things I learned from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s testimony today.
She seems to have a fairly spotty memory for someone her age. She didn’t recall making any of the strong statements she made about the need to stop the peaceful transfer of power. When her own words were played on video she said they were taken out of context, but didn’t elaborate except to call CNN a lying outfit. She swore she had no recollection about people she talked to before or after January 6th because she was very busy running her new Congressional office. Her recollection is particularly poor when it comes to specific contacts of her’s who were arrested for the violent assault on the Capitol.
She says she really has little control over what appears on her Facebook page, or on her Twitter feed. She said she has many staffers and does not directly authorize the videos, even ones that have been on her facebook page for a year-and-a-half, prove good for fundraising (Biden stole Trump’s presidency and the radical left thinks we’re idiots) and are never taken down.
Marjorie believes that socialist liberals are out to portray her as stupid, her followers as not smart people. But she insists her supporters are smart enough to know that when she encourages them to show up in numbers on January 6th to flood the Capitol because it’s a 1776 moment, or that Pelosi and others might need to be executed, and we need you all there to help us right this evil injustice of a stolen election, that she is only referring to a peaceful lawful march to the Capitol to keep the pressure on fainthearted Republicans to legally overturn a stolen election. In other words, free speech. Plus, after the riot was stopped she immediately urged everyone to be peaceful and to obey the law.
I may have missed it, but when she spoke of a planned peaceful march to the Capitol, I thought the lawyer questioning her should have asked her if she was aware that the organizers of the January 6th Stop the Steal protest rally had not sought a permit for any kind of march that day. Why involve all those extra police and spend all that extra money when you can all just march down there as a bunch of individual free citizens and go into the people’s house which you already own and don’t need an invitation to, or permission to enter, even when its closed for a joint session of Congress?
And besides words like “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore”, or her “we can’t allow the peaceful transfer of power Joe Biden wants” are obviously metaphors meaning be peaceful, don’t insult the police, don’t hit them, gouge their eyes out or spray mace at them, if they tell you the building’s closed obey their lawful orders, and all like that.
And, of course, when she said that Nancy Pelosi had committed treason and that treason was punishable by death, she was a private citizen, in 2019, come on, she was just a regular person trying to get elected to Congress. In other words, she hadn’t taken the oath of office yet, the oath to defend the Constitution, so like are you going to go all the way back to when I was in high school looking for things I said that you can use to crucify me? (her lawyer interjected that bit about going all the way back to high school for compromising comments she made a year or two before the riot) [1].
And what we learned most of all is that she, like Boof Kavanaugh and her party’s raging leader, is the victim of a dark money-funded nefarious witch-hunt campaign, by cannibal pedophiles, no doubt, to bring shame to the people who voted her into office as their duly elected representative. (in the very election that was rigged against Trump!)
In summary, she is merely the victim of enraged, insane partisans trying to stop democracy by taking her off the ballot on some weird and farfetched old legal theory about not helping and encouraging, aiding and comforting, people who want to violently overturn a corrupt and evil election and stop them from “peacefully” putting a monster in the White House.
Her lawyer’s closing focused on the need to look only at the peaceful, lawful rally at the Ellipse that preceded the riot, something that was 100% protected by the Constitution, to wit, the First Amendment rights to free expression and to peacefully assemble, and that it’s not fair to punish someone merely for supposedly aiding and abetting a riot she later tweeted, once it was underway, should be done lawfully and peacefully. In fact, he took pains to read “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” right out of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Once the briefs are filed next week and the judge has a chance to weigh all the evidence and arguments, this could be a very interesting and helpful case going forward. Brad Raffensberger will then have to weigh the administrative law judge’s decision against his own political future and the number of death threats he recieves before likely leaving Marjorie on the ballot. I found it fascinating to watch how outwardly calmly Marjorie conducted herself during most of the part I saw, Like others before her she preferred to come off as a pinhead with the memory of a housefly rather than truthfully answer almost any question under oath. Her composure was particularly surprising after some of the overheated rants she made on right-wing media in the days leading up to her forced sworn testimony in a baseless case launched, no doubt, by moneyed Jewish space laser wielders and four black elected women she denounced by name in recent “out of context” rants.
[1] from the commies at Business Insider:
“She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene said of Pelosi in a 2019 Facebook video, according to CNN. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”
Gail is Gail Collins. Bret is Bret Stephens. They write for the New York Times. As the Gray Lady styles it:
Ms. Collins and Mr. Stephens are opinion columnists. They converse every week.
Gail: Lord help us. Even if Twitter tanked, wouldn’t there be some new post-Twitter communications system coming around the bend soon? You’re 10 times smarter than me about this stuff, so tell me what you think, and I’ll adopt it as my theory. At least for the spring.
Bret: Maybe in the distant future a big media company will create a platform in which non-unhinged adults can exchange ideas, air their disagreements without rancor, make a few jokes, have their claims fact-checked before they are published and then go out for a friendly drink.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that social-media companies should try to honor the spirit of the First Amendment, even if they aren’t legally bound by it. But the idea that Twitter is a good forum for speech is silly. Trying to communicate a thought in 280 characters isn’t speaking. It’s blurting. You don’t use Twitter for persuasion. You use it for insults and virtue signaling.
A healthy free-speech environment depends on people talking with each other. Twitter is a medium for people to talk at others. The best thing that could happen to Twitter isn’t an acquisition, by Musk or anyone else. It’s bankruptcy.
Gail: Wow, I’ve always pretty much avoided Twitter, but it was mainly out of laziness. Now I’m cloaked in righteousness and am deferring to you on all Twitter topics.
When former President Donald Trump told an angry mob that had burst into the Capitol that Mike Pence had betrayed them, it was not the first time in American history that a US president advocated hanging his own vice president. Perhaps there was no irony involved in the fact that the other president was the largely ignorant Trump’s favorite president, noted man of violent temper Andrew Jackson.
Unlike Trump, who with perfect deniability (his intent is still being debated by great legal minds) merely noted that his vice president was a traitorous coward and incited an angry mob to make good on their threat to hang him, Old Hickory announced that he was ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang his seditious vice president. You can’t make this shit up.
John C. Calhoun, employing an early version of the now new again Independent State Legislature Doctrine, secretly authored South Carolina’s refusal to obey a federal law under a States’ Rights argument. He argued, arguably seditiously, that a state need not follow a federal law that it found repugnant to its traditions or offensive to its own interests, in this case the harm it would do to slaveholders to obey this federal tariff against Great Britain. South Carolina announced, almost thirty years before taking up arms against the US in the “War of Northern Aggression,” that it was officially nullifying this odious federal law in South Carolina. Predictably, Jackson was furious and ready to go down to South Carolina and personally hang John C. Calhoun.
It wasn’t that they disagreed about slavery, Andrew Jackson a self-made man of the people, had risen from modest circumstances, made his fortune in the slave trade. Jackson was not a man who took kindly to being undermined by his second-in-command, which is not hard to relate to, really.
Read all about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, in the online Britannica encyclopedia: https://www.britannica.com/topic/nullification-crisis
It only makes sense that I didn’t know this additional origin of the term “motherfucker” until recently because we are in a country where one can live to be an old man without ever hearing of the Red Summer of 1919. Red Summer, an exceptionally long and ugly season, had little to do with the communist scare, the decades-long J. Edgar Hoover-driven Red Scare that was the rationale for cracking down on workers’ rights. The red of the summer of 1919 was the blood spilled in over 36 American cities in pogroms against blacks, many of them returning veterans from World War One, the War to end War (and make the world safe for democracy). You know, as enraged citizen mobs do from time to time in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
And so I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the plausible description of the supremely flexible term motherfucker that my father laid on me as a boy was only part of the inflammatory word’s origin story. After the year 1807, when the “importation of such persons as the states shall see fit to admit” via the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed, the plantation system labor market would have to be replenished by native slaves reproducing so their monetized children could be sold.
So we learn of breeding farms, where these slave selling motherfuckers would force slaves to have sex with each other, to impregnate the females and produce more human capital. The men who ran these farms didn’t give a damn what degree of relation there might have been between the slaves, anymore than they would have considered the ancestry of a goat or other farm animal they were breeding, as long as they were of sturdy stock. More than one female slave was forced lie with her own child, in order to produce new baby slaves. A strong slave man would be forced to have sex with his own mother, to produce offspring his masters could sell. Who is the actual motherfucker in this scenario, is not hard to reckon.
This is a horror story, though true, documented and painful, that must, according to the faithful of MAGA world, never be discussed among today’s innocent, white, Christian school children. To force it on them is as evil as once upon a time forcing a young man to have sex with his own mother! That’s why we made it illegal in several states, so far, to teach this horrific racial, uh, stuff.
Jesus, it is so hard not to hate the present day evil motherfuckers who perpetrate this brazen, shameful erasure of vast, destructive, evil crimes that went on, with perfect legality, for generations. Ah, anyway, at the risk of seeming righteously angry, fuck those motherfuckers.
It hit me last night during a walk, after a day sadly considering the ongoing righteous anger of people I’ve known for years, that anger is a powerful emotion that often masks even more painful emotions. It is unbearable to sit with the pain of feeling unloved, rejected, abandoned, ignored, powerless, harshly judged, vilified, unfairly punished. Shame, of course, is a famous goad to violence, a cycle observed in every prison, in every slum, where people kill each other for the capital crime of disrespect.
The easy fix for terribly painful feelings is a nice surge of anger at the perpetrators, or those you focus your anger on, which works just as well. In the clean, harsh, black and white light of anger, all becomes clear. These merciless fucking fucks deserve no less than the full force of my manly wrath!
Anger is an automatic reflex to being hurt. Easy as kicking when the doctor expertly hits your kneecap with that little rubber hammer. It also has the great advantage of closing off any conversation that might make you feel uncomfortable, possibly force you to confront whatever terrifying personal demons you are trying to hold at bay. Anger is far superior, and feels much more empowering, than crying in pain about something beyond your control or ability to heal from. It also has the inherent advantage of making you the victim of the person who made you mad. Being the victim is very important for a feeling of righteousness and personal integrity since it lets you off the hook for doing anything you’d be at fault for if you had not been the victim of the person you’re rightfully getting back at with your anger.
On a mass level, which is the aggregate of millions of individuals, anger works exactly the same way. You have middle class citizens who work hard and play by the rules, losing ground every day in a world where your savings are constantly losing value and only the casino of the stock market offers the kind of interest banks used to pay depositors, although you can lose it all when you place your small nest egg on the Wall Street roulette wheel. The job you work hasn’t seen a raise in decades, the union is gone, the plant is about to close so the corporation can make a bundle for the shareholders by moving production to a country with no regulations at all about anything. You look around and more and more “minorities” are getting ahead, they’re on TV, in the movies, winning awards, championships, these rich, spoiled bastards complaining about being mistreated, the victims of systemic prejudice. The so-called party of the working class is openly owned by billionaire corporate donors, just like the other party has always been, and has done little to protect what is being taken from you every day. It’s a billionaire’s world now, and you don’t stand a fart’s chance in a hurricane of getting out of this in the comfort your parents enjoyed at the end. We all know who’s to blame. Time to get some payback!
Make America (insert any country’s name here) Great Again! Like it was in the good days, when everybody was prosperous and before a bunch of activist commie dupes on the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the longstanding protections we all enjoyed during perfectly legal racial segregation. Women knew their place in those days too, did their duty and gave birth to whatever was in their womb, as God intended. And the so-called gays kept their perversions to themselves, on pain of a nice ass whupping, or worse. We put Jesus Christ into the Pledge of Allegiance, for fuck sake, and still the godless communists keep coming, for our God, for our guns, for our children.
Much easier to feel rage toward all these hyped up perceived enemies than to realize you’ve been suckered, divided, conquered, force fed a gallon of stinking bullshit, down the old gullet with a funnel and hose. The problem was never a vast cabal of powerful pedophiles, no such cabal exists (except in fevered fascist propaganda, it’s a favorite charge of Putin) these destructive creatures are universally hated (even when protected and hidden in hierarchies, or by their great wealth and political connections) and don’t last ten minutes in prison. The problem was never most of what you are constantly told it is. Believe it or not, it’s not even a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and I would know. if it was
The problem in the US and elsewhere is that the super-wealthy 0.01% have finally taken over the political system. Here they’ve orchestrated the appointment of a hand-picked Christian corporatist majority on the Supreme Court, installed by them, that decides what’s constitutional and what must be struck down as contrary to our democratic values. These super wealthy include the eternal vampire psychopaths, created by our courts, known as corporations. Endowed by federal judges with feelings and rights, and even personhood, equivalent to an innocent embryo, these artificial persons are entitled to do whatever they feel necessary, legally spend unlimited amounts of secret money to make the laws, and have the government, that protect themselves, and their profits, the best.
The thought that anger is just a mask, much of the time, for more threatening emotions, struck me as a good starting point to think about a lot of things related to non-harm and kindness. The easiest thing, and it is part of basic survival, is to simply get mad when you feel mistreated. Fuck the fucking consequences, I don’t have to take this kind of treatment from an actual piece of shit! I will rage, and feel righteous, and the unbearable pain and life-sapping fear that lurks inside when I start to consider the harms that were inflicted on me personally will be replaced by a surge of being 100% in the right to smash your fucking face, asshole.
This mechanism, I realize now, was the emotional engine that drove my father, from his shameful childhood to his deathbed regrets. A man, particularly in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, could not give in to the need to have a good cry about the painful betrayal he experienced in his earliest life. Feeling humiliation is unbecoming, unhealthy, crippling, weak. Fuck that, a man takes action!
Sometimes, sadly, that action needs to be righteously bellowing at your children. It’s your right, you feed the ungrateful little provocative bastards, and clothe them, house them, bust your ass working two jobs to give them a life a hundred times better than the horror show you experienced. I understand the anger itself, I saw it regularly, daily, for almost the entire time I knew my father. It was only once, not long before he breathed his last breath, that he had his first inkling that maybe there was a better way to be a human being than raging at his children, keeping his wife on a short leash.
Lack of imagination is a crippling handicap, and a very common one. Without it, you cannot imagine better options than variations on the old standard you inherited from your own fucked up parents. It’s like the corporate insistence that it’s either unregulated worldwide capitalism (freedom) or totalitarian communism. Limited in your seeming choices, you are bound to justify everything you do as the only real choice. Real choice, of course, being limited by what you can imagine your choices to be.
If you do something, and feel totally justified doing it, it must be universal, otherwise, shit… it could be abnormal. The thought of not being normal was one of the most terrifying things my father, who never forgave any hurt, was ever confronted by. When I told him once that he was weird, his brain almost short circuited. The odd expressions that played on his face as he repeated the word “weird” with incredulous inflections made a big impression on teen-aged me. Luckily, for him, everyone in the family knew how fucked up and abnormal I was.
In the tit for tat, kick ’em hard, anywhere you can get a boot on ’em, marketing-driven world that is American politics, the advertising hungry corporate media still plays along, faithful as a terrier to the idea that fairness means presenting both sides of everything as having a more or less equal argument. It plays beautifully into a prevalent technique, persuasive to masses who already believe, hammered eternally by one side that is actively much worse than the other: whataboutism.
On one side, you have a long, well-funded multifarious plot culminating in a Hail Mary riot to stop the certification of Trump’s loss in Congress, after a “stolen election”. You have the wife of a staunchly conservative Supreme Court justice urging the outgoing president’s chief of staff to take action, in the name of Jesus Christ and all that is holy, to overturn the election results to keep Trump in office, somehow. We’ve read Donald Trump Jr’s seditious texts, starting a couple of days after the election his father was about to officially lose, about keeping his father in power no matter what, using the leverage of his massive government power. You have pinhead real estate fortune heir Jared Kushner, months after leaving his appointment as Trump’s minister with a dozen portfolios (Covid, peace in the Middle East, ending the Opioid epidemic, rooting out government corruption, making business deals with wealthy sheiks. etc.) getting two billion dollars from the murderer of a journalist, Muhammad bin Salman, a close friend of his he met as his father-in-law’s informal Saudi envoy.
On the other side, you have a shady character named Hunter Biden, son of the current president, and some shady consulting deals he made for large amounts of money. When Giuliani was making wild, unfounded claims about fraud that wasn’t actually fraud, your Honor, and lunatics like Sidney Powell were threatening to release a Kraken she later claimed (as defendant in a defamation case) no reasonable person could have believed existed, one GOP talking point that was out there, after Trump failed to get Ukrainian president Zelensky to announce a fake investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption, was that Hunter Biden forgot a laptop at a repair shop that was loaded with incriminating details (including, of course, the now ubiquitous Republican charge of sexual deviance) about him and his criminal father, Trump’s 2020 opponent in the presidential election. Giuliani announced on FOX that, along with proof of a stolen election, he had the incriminating laptop, or knew someone who had it, or had seen it, or heard about it. Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post pushed the theoretically devastating Hunter Biden story too, the story was Murdoch’s exclusive, claiming they had the laptop, or had seen it, or knew somebody who claimed to have seen it and did a thorough unbiased forensic study of its highly incriminating (for Joe Biden) contents.
What has been the Republican party’s corporate media-abetted answer to the many serious allegations against their top officials, the trove of devastating new evidence we see every other day, the proof of multiple crimes committed in the name of party loyalty? The loud, childish but effective (with corporate media dutifully playing along) GOP response to the mounting evidence that many of them participated eagerly in Trump’s mad plan to stay in power was “what about fucking Hunter fucking Laptop fucking Biden?!! What are the Democrats hiding and why?”
As stories about the insurrection culminating in the January 6, 2021 Trump riot at the Capitol (and continuing energetically since) continue to come out, as damning details create an increasingly gigantic mountain of evidence of a frenzied, sometimes insane, many-pronged plan, involving many prominent elected Republicans, to keep the losing candidate in power, the NY Times and the Washington Post both ran front page stories asking why Democrats had not believed or seriously investigated the sketchy Hunter Biden laptop story. Serious journalism, 2022, Tucker Carlson style — why did Democrats not seriously investigate this implausible story about a cunning criminal, son of their president, too stupid to cover his tracks? Just asking…
Read this post mortem from the Washington Post and see what you can make of this obvious horseshit story about a seeming scumbag who has, significantly for any intelligent analysis of this instance of Whataboutism, never worked in the US government, not for his father or anybody else. Thank God, say Republicans under their collective breath, that intelligent analysis is no longer even a thing when it comes to US politics!
Now warning about Hunter Biden laptop disinfo: guy who leaked it.
Jennifer Rubin, in today’s Washington Post, with an excellent analysis of corporate media’s yawning attitude toward a radicalized political party intent on taking power by any means necessary. Mass media treats GOP elected officials who refuse — seventeen months and counting — to concede their man Donald Trump lost a fair election in 2020, including those who plotted to “legally” overturn that election, as ordinary politicians.
There is nothing ordinary about pretending a last ditch riot intended to seize power never happened, about a far-reaching, well-funded, months’ long, coordinated plan to overturn a free and fair election, nothing ordinary about a party that insists it never lost literally hundreds of court cases (most before the election, trying to limit the “illegitimate” vote) on the merits, simply because they could not prove allegations of fraud they still insist, citing alternative facts, they have massive evidence of.
Nothing ordinary about a party that insists that what you are seeing, reading, watching has nothing whatsoever to do with what millions of faith-based Americans honestly believe about the other party and their most famous supporters (hi, Tom Hanks) sodomizing babies and drinking their blood.
Here’s Jennifer Rubin, preaching to the choir that includes about 60% of us, in a thoughtful word to the mass media called The media still haven’t learned how to cover the GOP threat to democracy.
https://youtube.com/shorts/TFauAjkcfAM?feature=share
There seems to have been a nice move by WordPress, overnight, now embedding a youtube video is a premium feature you can pay extra for, the old clawback technique, removing useful features and selling them back to you, making you pay extra for them, used to great shareholder profit by Apple … The corporate personality will monetize their mother’s farts for a few extra copeks…
Anyway, watch this short, it makes a beautiful point about remembering that everyone you meet might be facing terrible challenges you’re not aware of, and that we never know when we’ll face something similar. So do the decent thing with the benefit of the doubt. Great, very short video:
This has got to be one of the hardest things humans have to do. A feeling that causes pain, and is left unaddressed by the people involved in causing it, leads to anger or depression (anger turned against the self, in an apt description I read), after an increasing bitterness that becomes impossible to ignore. The reflex in most will be to turn anger on the person causing the pain, simply blame them, or to quietly take the pain on yourself as confirmation that you deserve no better, somehow. Hard to sit with corrosive emotions, though sit with them you must, sometimes.
There are a few reasons a loved one will not hear you when you ask them to, few of them are very promising for the relationship. Particularly if they, understandably, demand to be heard at once when they are in pain and then tell you just to wait a few more months to talk about what’s bothering you.
Parents, for example, may feel supremely challenged by a very smart child. The kid will have to learn to navigate around the insecurity of the parents, find his or her own way forward, without the help of the parents. Sometimes just a difficult question about something that perplexes the kid will set the parents off. How do we explain something that gives us so much pain to think about? Nobody knows the answer to human evil! Why do you ask such goddamned questions all the time!? Jesus, can’t you just be quiet?! The kid derives various lessons from this consistent feedback, adjusts the best they can.
Some people cannot be wrong. If you point out something they did thoughtlessly, or unfairly, you are pointing to something intolerable, something inhuman, unthinkable to them. “You don’t seem to understand, I cannot be wrong. It’s not that I don’t like being wrong, I can’t be wrong. How do you not know this about me after all these years? I will not be wrong, I will not be challenged to defend my actions, you have the problem, not me! I am loved by everyone, you’re the only one with a problem, look at your own life!”
My dear old dad had this feature, an inability to admit fault for anything. It endured through almost fifty years of constant war with his children, two provocative little shit snots who constantly challenged him, and lasted until the last night of his life, when he realized how much of a horse’s ass (his phrase, only time I ever heard him use it) he’d been to see the world as black and white. He wistfully imagined the world he could have been living in instead, full of nuance and color, rather than the bleak high contrast warscape he inhabited and imposed on his young children. He apologized for forcing my sister and me to grow up in the grim shadow of his irrationally limited emotional worldview. I appreciated the apology. He died a few hours later.
Once, two years before he died (two years of the meaningless fake small talk he demanded at the end) he told me I had to respect his right not to respond to concerns I raised. For once I was there with a reply I couldn’t later improve on. I told him I understood that he was choosing not to talk about a difficult subject but that I certainly did not have to respect that choice. He then demanded we keep our conversations politely superficial, talk only about sports, health, politics, and so we did, until that last night of his life, when he admitted he’d felt me reaching out to make peace with him many, many times over the years. He regretted, that last night, that he hadn’t been mature enough to reach back, even once. He’d been too afraid, he told me. And so, to avoid pain he could not bear, we’d had to pretend to be a loving father and son, on his strict, limiting terms, until I was there to support him as he died.
Sometimes, I have to say, I am the last one to understand the full scope of a situation. Sometimes it feels like I’m the last to realize that something I’ve long cherished is already dead. My efforts to not react with anger, to fully process what needs to be said so I can speak without the anger, must make me some kind of aggravating holier-than-thou freak to loved ones who get anger off their chest and move on, without the need to understand anything about what set off their anger (since, after all, they know who to blame). By the time I put my thoughts together, particularly after a couple of follow-up challenges (threats like “I’ve dropped people from my life for doing less to me than what you did”) the subject is ancient history, being dredged up needlessly by a troubled person, and nobody in their right mind cares about that stuff.
My best advice is to somehow make peace with the bitterness that churns up when your needs are dismissed. That bitterness is to be expected when you are stonewalled in your need to be heard. Forgive yourself for being unable to stop feeling it. I find that setting things out clearly on a page provides some temporary relief.
You will have to leave the embittering situation in the end, if you can’t find a way to make it better, it is Survival 101 for anyone but the hardcore masochist. Remember that making peace requires goodwill and openness on both sides, you can’t do it alone. In the meantime, finding the patience you will need is a great challenge, a mind-fucking challenge some days, as is maintaining a posture of peace, when the sides seem to have been drawn in black and white, the final irrefutable victim story irrevocably arrived at, all details agreed to, and the terms of any possible peace treaty have already been carved in stone.
Picturing the familiar festive table without you is a little foretaste of death, the place we all must go in the end. If you’d been hit by a truck, or died suddenly of a heart attack, the effect would be the same. A chair you used to sit in, occupied by someone else, as life goes on, as it must.
gratuitousblahg 