Category Archives: Ahimsa

Chapter 53 negotiating with terrorists

There are people, imbued with righteousness forged in unbearable injustice, who believe that their suffering allows them to do unspeakable things.   They inspire terror by their willingness to behave viciously, in the name of never being wrong.  When someone in your life makes it clear that they will behead someone you love and force you to watch the video, your prospect of reaching a mutually acceptable compromise with them is pretty much done.   

“If you don’t accept what I tell you to accept, my personalized version of history, and accept all blame, then I will rain holy hell down upon you and everyone you love, I will fucking destroy your world,” is an inauspicious starting point for a productive conversation.

If someone is truly willing to kill you, destroy your good name, your friendships, trust, throw away years of loving mutuality, in the name of never being in the wrong, accept that there is no fixing that.  You are dealing with a damaged, destructive soul, too desperate and determined to make peace with.  You cannot make peace with someone willing to kill anyone who makes them feel in any way bad about themselves.  These people are terrorists and are absolute in their demands.

This impossibility of solving problems with someone who cannot be wrong is a painful, but important, thing to digest.   If your best efforts to be patient, kind, fair and honest are met with dismissal, anger, recriminations, you’re not going to find a way to fix things with that person.  

It may seem impossible to imagine that someone you love, someone who loved you, can become an implacable enemy, but it sometimes happens.  When it does, you need to look at it without sentimentality, realize you are no longer dealing with any form of love, and get away from it.

The therapist asks “what do you think your role in these recurrent situations is?”   It is an important question.

In my case, maybe it is no more than my infuriating insistence, in the face of irrefutable evidence of incapacity in the other, that an old friend must be as vulnerable as needed to feel somebody else’s pain.  And my belief that empathy, and the ability to put yourself in a hurt person’s shoes, always leads to a desire to help heal that pain.   This belief turns out to be tragically, masochistically misplaced when dealing with someone who cannot be wrong.

My insistence in the face of their inability must be fucking maddening to the point of violence to them.  I suppose it is that stubbornness in the face of implacability that marks me for the violent endings, the displays of rage and idiotic denial I sometimes have had to face at the end of long relationships.

A person who reserves the right to rage, with or without reason, and never to concede fault or responsibility for harm they may cause, who needs to control others and be viewed as perfect, especially when they act destructively, is not a good partner for peace talks.   

Over time you can understand how badly they are damaged, how violently they feel compelled to react when criticized, but, sadly, that understanding gives you no tool to help fix anything broken in them.   

No amount of patience, kindness or understanding can help them change anything about themselves.   The only change possible is your own point of view, and learning to make yourself scarce as soon as you see that you are locked in a conflict with this type.   Any conflict with this type, no matter how seemingly easy to resolve, must end in death, as it is written.   Save your own life by learning when it is time to walk away.

Cancelled

Like it or not, we are all now living in a black and white world where irreducible moral sides must be immediately taken, to the death. Whose side are you on, freedom or tyranny? Who is good and who is evil, Israel or Palestine? Who is mostly perfect and who is an irredeemably sick fuck with no right to speak who must be silenced forever? Take a view I find hateful, after hearing just the first few words? CANCELLED!

As I recently wrote to a righteous old friend who had no intention of ever talking to me again:

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing our friendship.  In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

In righteous anger you instantly, satisfyingly cancel the motherfucker who makes you angry. Boom — dead! Then, that person being dead to you, you have eliminated the risk of being infuriated again by someone who keeps maddeningly insisting there are at least two sides to a story you already wrote the fucking ending to.

The great virtue of buying into a belief system is that you don’t have to be blindsided by so-called facts, cause and effect and the rest of the exhausting, caviling so-called nuances you already firmly believe are bullshit.

Reading about the recent cancellation of a book-related event by an author who wrote a nuanced book about Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the firings and forced or protest resignations of others who made points about the horrific conflict in a way that was deemed indelicate, I had a creepy realization. What a cohort of old, dear friends did was cancel me. I’ve been cancelled.

Back to Israel and Palestine, for a flaming example. It is apparently a deadly sin, to some, to observe that Hamas behaved like blood-crazed Nazis, 100%, when they went on a murderous pogrom, and that Israel is behaving now, even if understandably in some ways, not like non-Nazis. To slaughter a Jewish baby is a Nazi-type war crime. To slaughter a Palestinian baby, in revenge for inhuman Nazi atrocities … what do you want to call it, boss?

The conversation is apparently taboo now, you have to be very, very careful how you phrase your opinion on the ongoing civilian slaughter in Gaza as Israel pursues the demons who hellishly rampaged recently. Israel has every right to protect herself, many people believe. But if you justify the murder of children on one side, you justify it on both sides

Got to be so fucking careful these days that you may as well say nothing about raging controversies that make people ready to kill each other. Your silence, of course, is assent. Whatever is going on, whoever is holding the noose, and pitchforks, and spewing hatred with veins popping on their necks, the torch bearers, the ones outside the makeshift jail chanting “bring him out!”, by standing among them silently you are part of the lynch mob, my friend.

That’s my basic problem with the righteously silent. Fuck those putos. You may cancel me now, asshole. And happy birthday, dear.

The difficult art of making amends

Ask your spiritual advisor what true repentance is. They will tell you that it is sincere regret for a wrong that you did to someone and a determination to make it right in whatever way is possible.  

Repentance contains an acknowledgment that you’ve hurt somebody, with an admission that what you did to them would have badly hurt you too.  Key to repentance is a willingness to help in the healing and the promise not to do that thing, or anything like it again, to that person, a soul just as precious as your soul.

The opportunity to be forgiven is a gift a hurt person can give to another, but the words “I’m sorry” and “I accept your apology” are meaningless formalities much of the time, as many of of us have experienced.  

Most of us know how easily a formal apology can be turned into a club to beat your victim with “I fucking apologized to this unforgiving asshole ten times, it’s never enough!”

The heart of repentance is atonement, the true determination of the person being given the gift of forgiveness to return that kindness in kind.

The human propensity for cannibalism

Given the right horrific circumstances, every human being is capable of eating another human being. We live with this hard to digest fact the same way we live with the certainty of our own death: by putting it out of mind as much as possible.

We are social creatures, human babies are more helpless than most baby animals and need the most care if they are to survive. We feel tenderness toward babies, even if they are strangers to us, and most of us have a reflex to leap to their defense if we see one toddling into traffic. At the same time, we are also programmed to survive.

In my first semester in law school we read a British case from the height of the British empire, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. Dudley and Stephens, sailors, had survived a shipwreck with two other guys, one being the teenaged cabin boy. There were four of them, barely alive in the lifeboat in a remote area of the ocean, day after day. The kid was close to death, but hanging on. Reasoning that the boy was going to die very soon anyway, and that they’d all die if they didn’t eat him, two, Dudley and Stephens, voted to kill the boy. They killed him, over the moral objections of the third, and all three men ate and were eventually rescued. The principled cannibal gave evidence in the criminal case against Dudley and Stephens, who were sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead.

The verdict was designed to send a message to the civilized British navy. You cannot eat the cabin boy until he is dead of natural causes. Once that lesson was imparted, the queen (Regina) quietly commuted the death sentences of Dudley and Stephens and that was that.

In real life, recently, I have seen this impulse toward cannibalism among friends I’ve had for decades. When you are under enough stress, and feel desperate enough, you will believe any lie that makes you feel alive, part of a loving group and righteous in your shared fury. It is a short trip, step by step, from angrily denouncing someone, based on an ugly lie, to hating them, to hanging them from a tree, to eating their barbecued corpse.

We are all capable of this kind of abominable group behavior, in an extreme enough situation, but some are able to do it even when there is no direct threat to their own life. I don’t want to sound judgmental, God forbid, but my best advice is to avoid this kind of grimly transactional motherfucker, once you see that hungry gleam in their beady eyes.

The Fundamental Terror/Beauty of Life

The most terrifying thing humans are up against is the erasure of our right to exist.   This is why my grandmother used the phrase “screamed bloody murder” so often, why she drank so heavily as she got older, why she got tearful when her vodka-fueled gestures of affection toward us made us uncomfortable.   She had good reason to feel this way, her entire family had no doubt screamed bloody murder, though their screams were drowned out by drums, out of tune brass and drunken catcalls, in the ravine where they all met a nightmare end.

Death is one thing.  We can be philosophical about it, since it is inevitable, but until we find ourself in unbearable, unrelievable pain it is not an option anyone finds palatable.  Life is the precious, irreplaceable thing, and feeling grateful for our place in this ongoing miracle, breathing and loving for the wink of an eye that we exist here.

The most painful thing, as far as I have experienced, is having your feelings erased, contested, fought to the death by people who claim to love you.   It is a pain I recall well from my childhood, it is a pain I revisit every time something I say is met with silence, dismissed, contested, fought to the death.  I don’t want to fight to the death, but many cannot restrain themselves, they must fight to the death, these clueless gladiator fucks.  The alternative is the humiliation of being wrong, admitting imperfection, which is unbearable to this type. 

I can fight as well as any clueless gladiator fuck who has ever come against me with a sword or ax.  I have had to fight, from my earliest memories.  My life has been a long, slow journey away from the need to fight these senseless, idiotic battles with people who profess to love me.  I spent decades learning to control my temper, with some success, although never enough sometimes.  For example, I still suffer from instant Tourettic outbursts whenever I am buggered by technology.

Having a supportive social network is one predictor of longterm health.  Sadly few people have these networks in our modern, corporate world.  There is an epidemic of loneliness in America, which expresses itself in deaths of despair.  If nobody gives a fuck about you, after a while you conclude “what the fuck?” and whatever you must do to answer that question seems legitimate, even if it kills you.

The only antidote to this life threatening isolation is talking to someone who cares.  It is a true horror that so few get this chance to be heard when they need it.

If you have a painful medical procedure and find yourself abandoned by your social network, amid recriminations and expressions of your unworthiness to be loved, your recovery will be slower than if you are visited, checked up on, wished well, sent jokes and funny videos.  As Martin Luther King, Jr. observed “in the end it is not the words of our enemies that we remember, it is the silence of our friends.”  Dig it.

An anguished soul can be a heavy burden to carry from day to day, even for people who love you.  I have to be sensitive to Sekhnet’s frayed nerves and her endless worry for me.  I isolate myself today and tap here, speaking silently to the universe of anyone who may stumble on these words, instead of troubling her.  We all need a day off.

This is where imagination and creativity come in.  I noticed at a very young age that I was closing myself in my room with the intent to set my dismissed feelings out on a page.  My drawings were often disturbing.  My writing was grandiose and rambled, trying to cover every subject in the world at once.  Sixty years on my drawings are often oddly cool, my writing focused and somewhat compressed.

The beauty of writing is that you can go back as many times as you like, comb through ambiguity and weak expression to make your writing as clear and elegant as possible.  A piece of writing is as perfectable as our delicate, malleable human souls. 

The phrase neuroplasticity is used to describe the ability of a pain damaged brain to heal itself.  It doesn’t happen without hard work, but what better work is there, during the wink of an eye we get to participate in this ongoing, if often tragic, miracle?

Morality is not theoretical, it’s practical

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing a broken friendship. In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

Given the choice between redemption and condemnation always choose redemption when it is within reach.

If your parents lie to you

If your parents lie to you, you’re fucked, kid

Trust me when I tell you that your parents cannot help lying to you, if they are the kind of parents who tell their children lies.  Liars truly cannot help themselves, except by telling lies.  Whatever actually happened to make them this way is too shameful for them to talk about at all, let alone honestly.  Impossible to share this with children whose love and obedience they desperately need.  A good lie covers that painful, gaping wound, though it comes with a cost.  

The cost to the child is almost incalculable.  It is impossible for a five year-old, a nine year-old, to consider that her parents are lying.  For years the most outrageous lies are taken as true, until such time as the cognitive dissonance in your head makes it impossible not to question the more outrageous lies you’ve been told about yourself. 

When your truth-challenged parents tell you anecdotes to illustrate your terrible fear, when you were tiny, they are telling you about their powerlessness to protect you, to overcome their deep pessimism about anything beautiful coming out of life.   When they tell you that you were a fearful, untrusting, oversensitive little kid plagued by nightmares and hypochondria, that’s as close as they can come to telling you they surrendered, because they couldn’t do any better, because nobody can change, because we’re all already doomed to our fate.   We are already doomed to lie instead of confront anything painful about ourselves, and if you don’t believe it, we got some serious pain for you.

What lesson can a child healthily take from lying parents?   An understanding that nobody lies to someone they love unless they are supremely damaged and live in terror of their shame.  Shame is the motivator of all violence, and lies are a special category of violence, they damage your ability to trust, to perceive reality, to act with integrity based on simple cause and effect.  

You can learn from your lying parents’ inability to be vulnerable, to acknowledge faults in themselves, their mad need to never be wrong, their inclination to punish those who insist on “truth”, not to be like them.

You can understand that the greatest treasure in life is making loved ones comfortable enough with you that they can be vulnerable.   We are all very vulnerable.  Only an asshole can deny this, and they always do. 

Don’t be like them, don’t close your heart to everything but the need to protect yourself at all costs. 

You will be much less unhappy once you can consciously act with integrity, based on real experience in the real world, instead of conforming to a twisted universe of lies.  You never have to confront lying parents about their lies, it is almost always futile (and can expose you to desperate rage), but you have to acknowledge in yourself that you were lied to about essential matters from the time you could form memories.  Then you adjust accordingly, the work of a lifetime, boys and girls.