Category Archives: Ahimsa

Chapter 60 Be the change you want to see

If you find yourself in a fight with someone close to you, feel threatened and believe there is no way out, you will fight to the death, or flee forever. If you are in conflict with a loved one, and knowthat experience and adult insight offer you more tools to resolve conflict than you had as a child, there is hope of healing.

In the first instance, the fatalistic belief that nothing ever changes for the better will keep you at war. In the second, there is a real chance for peace, if the other side also believes in learning from past mistakes, accepting human foibles, acknowledging the importance of reciprocity, mutuality, adjusting better to the other person’s actual needs.

My father, for whom the pain involved in trying to make his life less painful, a life rooted in hellish abuse and deprivation, was unimaginably intense, always argued that people cannot change themselves in any fundamental way. Those who “work” in therapy, he said, are merely deluding themselves, real change on a deep level is not possible. You cannot change your inborn nature, he always insisted.

I argued against this hopeless proposition, pointing to the improvements people I’ve known have managed in their reactions to frustration, sorrow, guilt, bitterness, the need to blame others. I offered my own changes for the better, my improved control of my temper, for example. He always dismissed the so-called change as self-delusion, which he could always prove, for many years at least, by goading me until I finally lost my temper. That was his triumphant proof that nobody can really change for the better. See, you claimed you can control your temper, but I can make you lose it, you haven’t learned to control shit! Even when I eventually learned not to lose my temper, it was only an act I was performing, one he could easily demean as superficial, self-deluded performance art.

Relentless in his unshakable opinion, as anyone arguing for fatalism must be, my father always argued that people might succeed in changing some superficial aspect of their behavior, but their fundamental nature was as innate and unalterable as mortality itself. His position, I have to say now, is a supremely depressing, deterministic one.

It is also characteristic of someone who cannot be wrong, no matter what. My father was right for himself, as I realized recently. He could not change, the first step involved was crippling to him. The same goes for anyone stuck in the narcissistic person’s tragic trap – either seeing themselves as perfect and never wrong or abjectly, humiliatingly unworthy of love and self-respect.

For someone who lashes out in pain and believes experience plus insight can lead the way to changes that will result in less pain, change is a tangible goal. You can learn to control your angry reactions, for example, and with practice you can become better at it. This step forward can lead to another, and so on. We are all works in progress, if we’re willing to work with our limitations, talk things out and learn new things. Except for those who truly cannot change because acknowledging the need for change involves looking at things that are terrifying to them.

Someone who lashes out in pain and cannot be wrong must believe themself perfectly in the right whenever they are in pain. They are in pain simply because they are the victims of some fucking devil. That devil must be killed. There is nothing that can be done except to identify, isolate and kill the source of pain.

If your emotions are inflamed, in a conflict with the wounds of a traumatic past reopened, and you can change, you have a chance to learn to redeem a ruptured relationship. If your emotions are on fire, in a painful conflict, and you are certain that change is impossible, you are simply fucked up and beyond the reach of redemption. All that is left is retribution against the devil who has wounded you.

If you also cannot be wrong, you must convince everyone else in your life that the person you are in a conflict with is 100% in the wrong and irredeemable. If a person is a piece of shit, has done horrible things to hurt you, and people can’t change, as you know deep in your heart, that’s all she wrote, set and match!

From time to time I try to imagine the accusations against me that caused a group of friends of fifty years to unanimously agree that I was beyond redemption. How atrocious my crimes must have been! The anger could not have been more unyielding if I’d molested all their children, repeatedly, while brutally blackmailing them all into eternal, shameful silence, while I’d been poisoning everyone’s food and drink for decades while lying with every fetid breath I exhaled as I pretended to be funny and angrily denied I was the living incarnation of Adolf Hitler, with a field of corpses to prove it and very proud of myself for what a sly pretender I am.

For someone as evil as this, unless they apologize to everyone they’ve been raping, assaulting and trying to kill for years, admit their heinous crimes and despicable nature and beg for the mercy of the jury, there is not even the remotest possibility of forgiveness. Welcome behind the scenes of the greatest, deadliest shit show it has ever been my horror to participate in!

I also note how painful it must be to live in a world that is as hopelessly, painfully rotten at death as it was during the earliest painful memory. The belief that people cannot change is truly undefeatable in people unalterably deformed by crippling past pain.

When my father insisted that people can’t change, he was speaking with 100% conviction. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that someone like him, someone so deeply damaged that he could not be wrong, on pain of feeling utterly, contemptibly, self-loathingly humiliated and undeserving of love or respect, could not change. Being certain you cannot change will effectively prevent any effort to do so and keep you convinced, since if you can’t do something nobody else can, that people, all people, are incapable of making meaningful changes in their lives to have more peace and less war to the death.

As for somebody who makes a little positive progress toward a less painful life? KILL THEM!

The desire to heal vs. the need to win

If you want to heal a conflict with a loved one, you need to listen to everything they need to say and consider it carefully, without getting defensive or angry. This tricky process requires talking about harmful patterns in the past, behaviors on both sides that led to the conflict. No one (even fucking historical revisionists) can change the past, of course, but with the desire to heal a valued relationship we can safeguard each other’s feelings going forward — once we know best what the other person needs. We can only do this if we honestly hear what has caused the other person pain, learned our role in causing the other discomfort and anger, and both parties make merciful adjustments in the days ahead.

The need to win is much easier. All you have to do is assign blame. One side is right, the other side is 100% wrong. One side is moral, human, good, and perfectly justified in their anger, the other is wicked, inhuman, willfully hurtful and eternally, unforgivably unforgiving. Life, to a winner, is about convincing allies to support you in a war to the death. Do this repeatedly and you win. If you live in a culture of Narcissism, such as hyper-competitive America 2023, you are seen as a winner every time you righteously smite a hated enemy, no matter how many lies you must tell in order to “win”.

The reservoir of pain each of us carries inside ranges from a gigantic sea in a traumatized person to a fairly small pond in someone who was supported and treated lovingly in their formative years. We each maintain a wall that protects us from this pain in a variety of ways, some healthy, some harmful. Take a wrecking ball to someone’s wall and repeatedly smash that dam and you create a flood of pain that will sometimes drown a hated enemy. If there is something praiseworthy in doing this, I can’t think of it. Outside of being an undefeated winner in the psycho sweepstakes.

Two sides, at least, to any conflict

If you find yourself in a conflict with someone who says, over and over “nothing you can say will ever get me to change my mind or take your side” believe them. These are the words of someone unwilling/unable to resolve conflict, except on terms they will dictate to you. Accept the terms, or you are dead to them. They tell you this up front and every time they fly into a nasty mood and blame you for causing all of the problems between you.

This kind of person will be familiar to anyone raised by a bullying parent. The insecure, prone to rage parent cannot be wrong, so no matter what they do, no matter how neglectfully, hurtfully or abusively they may act, they will always blame the child. They bring this personality quirk into every relationship. They can be charming, generous friends unless a conflict arises, in which case the problem was created by the other side. If the guilty party does not back down, the conflict is inevitably fatal.

Living with integrity is much harder than going along to get along. You ignore your own pain at your peril. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk demonstrated in his book of that title. Your sleep suffers when you feel abused, your blood pressure and resting heart rate rise, your digestion gets fouled up. If your suffering continues, beyond bodily manifestations of your psychic pain, and you continue to push the causes for that pain down, you eventually find your health compromised all the way down to your immune system.

Integrity is the best gift you can give yourself, challenging as it also is. When someone tells you they will kill you if you don’t comply with their demands and pretend their abuse is completely justified, you are dealing with what the literature calls a piece of shit. You cannot reason with them. Get away from them and save yourself. Being true to yourself means listening to your body while it is painfully telling you the score. The alternative is betraying what you know is right for the sake of an imaginary peace.

There may be two sides, or ten, to any conflict. But one of those sides is more true to what actually happened, makes much more sense, than the other stories. Learning to base your actions on reality is much healthier than basing them on the fond hope that those who treat you with contempt will come around to love you one day, if only you can find a way to their hearts. There is no way to the heart of someone so damaged they will silence others to prove they cannot be wrong.

Not all stories are of equal validity. Your body will tell you when you are being force fed a load of shit that will eventually kill you. Ignore this truth at your peril.

Y’mach shemo

There is an expression in Hebrew, y’mach shemo, which means “may his name be blotted out”. This expression is reserved for particularly heinous enemies of the people, murderous villains like Hitler, Himmler, Haman. People sometimes accompany this expression with a spitting gesture, or an actual huck toward the spittoon, to suggest the casting out of the hateful poison these inhuman types inject into the world.

I’m here to say, you have not truly lived until a group of your closest longtime friends agrees that your name needs to be blotted out, henceforth and until the death.

What crimes have I committed to make me deserving of inclusion in the worst people in history? Don’t ask. I made two people feel bad about themselves, forced them to lie just to defend themselves, was so relentless in my demand for “honesty” that a story equating me with Hitler was the group’s only alternative. After all, just because the oldest son of the couple I so mortally attacked was committed to a locked mental ward two days after he returned to live with his parents is no reason to make any judgments about their ability to be honest, loving, nurturing, supportive or vulnerable. How dare I bring such a viciously unfair idea into the world!

Sure, blame the parents. It’s always the parents’ fault when the adult child suffers from depression, is susceptible to self-doubt, self-sabotage, cannot form lasting friendships, according to the most childish among us. I am among the most childish, according to the hideous story of my irredeemable evil that justifies the blotting out of my name forever.

Every gathering of people who have written me off as deserving of permanent enmity, you know, for being such an unforgiving, smart, formidable fucking enemy, is like another funeral for me. The accursed name of the justly hated corpse will never be spoken aloud in mixed company. No question about me will ever be asked again, nothing I have ever said or done by way of empathy, humor, sensitivity, kindness or generosity will be recalled.

Only the danger I pose to the community of those who must accept the well-established, if slightly twisted, version of my threatening aggressiveness must be kept in mind. After all, if they could blot my name from history, what can they do to yours, fuckface?

Tribalism erases doubt

It is terrifying to feel isolated in this cold, chaotic world, and a great relief to find your tribe. That tribe may be small and specialized, other guitar players who love Jimi Hendrix and Django Reinhardt equally, or the gigantic tribe of a religious or national identity group. A tribe may be just a group of old friends who love each other, laugh together and comfort and support each other in times of pain and sorrow.

One benefit of membership in a tribe is the erasure of doubt — tribe members get absolute certainty. You belong, and that is the most important thing about tribalism, a beautiful thing you need never question. Disagreements may sometimes happen among members of a tribe, but the main thing is that we are a tribe and have a bond, and common values, that transcend our individual disagreements. The tribe has an uncomplicated view of the world, of life, usually a simple turn on love vs. hate or good vs. evil, which all members take as true, the tribe being on the side of the gods in every case.

In my small tribe of guitar players, people I’ve rarely ever met, half-tone bends are very groovy, as are whole tone double stop bends, if you know what I’m saying, standards and three chord vamps are equally cool. These are core tenets of our beliefs. (Sadly for me, both of my electric guitars are out of commission, so I can’t work on Si Tu Savais today with the looper.)

Research shows that people with a supportive group around them tend to live happier, less stressed, longer lives. If you have a few true friends, even one or two, you have a better chance of thriving than someone without good friends. If you come to hate somebody, and manage to alienate their friends from them, you have exacted a wonderfully effective revenge, increasing their pain and isolation and actually shortening their life expectancy. Bingo!

The American epidemic of loneliness, no doubt also a worldwide problem, leads lonely people down rabbit holes to join with other lonely people. You have nobody you can call when you are in pain, nobody who will answer your call, listen, make you feel connected to another person who cares.

Capitalism has devised an addictive cure to this lucrative loneliness: “social media”. In your painful isolation you can sit at your computer, or with your phone, and find many people who feel just like you, are as angry as you are about the same things you’re mad about. What a relief to find a tribe! The more you check in with your millions of new friends, the less alone you feel!

Think of the giant room full of guys Mohammed bin Salman has working for him, sitting behind computers, each one controlling a thousand spam bots and fake social media accounts, writing and disseminating messaging for the tribe. 100,000 likes for something you already agree with, minutes after posting, the algorithms have tailored each message perfectly for your opinion and those 100,000 likes tell you you’re not alone. An hour later a million of you, in perfect agreement! What you believe is shared by millions and millions, so how can you possibly be wrong?

The beauty of tribal identity is also the ugliness of the world, the reason the history of mankind is written in the blood of helpless victims. My tribe can beat up your tribe, bitch. My tribe is right, no matter what, and your’s is wrong, no matter what! The life of each member of my tribe is of infinite value, your tribe, which hates mine, are all vermin. Suck on that for a while.

When allegiance to a belief system conquers all questions of right and wrong, the stage is set. There is nothing the group can do to somebody outside of the group that you will question. There can be no mercy for evil. If you have any hesitation about what your tribe is doing, just remain silent. All your tribe needs to continue marching is for you and other waverers to keep your hesitation to yourself. After all, if you express dissent you risk expulsion. Expulsion from the tribe leaves you in the cold, alone, and ready to die before your time. Beware!

Chapter 54 Self-soothing behavior

Many of us, particularly if we suffered as children, develop behaviors to soothe ourselves when we feel up against it. Some methods of dealing with stress are more productive than others. While I have bad habits that make me feel a bit better than not doing them, I have one that feels productive. I always take comfort from expressing myself clearly. It is a great relief to feel heard and understood.

I enjoy conversing with someone, or writing clearly to someone, who grasps what I have to say, adds their personal observations, allows me to reflect and refine my thoughts and feelings. This essential human give and take is a beautiful thing, and at the root of much learning. Expressing myself as clearly as I can, while listening as closely as I can, facilitates this exchange. The next best thing to this human back and forth is writing and its mirror twin reading.

I was sensitized to not being heard early in life. My parents alternated listening to me anxiously with studiously ignoring what I had to say. This strategic, selective silence was more the practice of my father than my mother. With my mother, who could flail and fight with the worst of them, I always knew that in a calm moment afterwards I could approach her and, most of the time, be heard. I was even able to persuade her from time to time, which is no small thing for a child to receive from his mother. Understanding after angry disagreement is one of the great balms of love.

This balm is something neither of my parents experienced much growing up. My mother clearly got it a bit more than my father, but my father got pretty much zero understanding from his angry, religious fundamentalist mother or from his father, a damaged cipher unable to protect his son, himself, or anyone else. The little brother he bullied throughout their lives clung to him as the big brother was dying, but prior to that time there seemed little love or understanding between them. My father found understanding, appreciation and love in his wife, my mother, and that was the greatest blessing of his embattled life.

The damage inflicted on my father throughout his childhood rendered him largely helpless against frustration and rage. I understood, shortly before he died, that he’d truly done the best he could, based on the monumentally shit hand he’d been dealt in life. I think of the rage I was regularly faced with at the dinner table. My father’s vehemence and abuse was a shadow of the horror my he’d gone through, but bad enough for me.

Unconsciously I knew that to respond with rage, which I sometimes did, would be final, terminal, irrevocable and the harm of it could never be revisited or undone. Over time I resisted going to that rage zone when my parents were furious. I eventually became pretty good at masking my rising emotions and reining in my anger. I have noticed over the years that for a type prone to humiliation it is humiliating, when in a rage, to be confronted with superficial calmness. They are out of control, and calling out their enemy for a good Western saloon-style fistfight, and their would-be opponent remains mild, unruffled, expressing honest confusion about the disproportionate rage blazing around them. Talk about humiliation.

What could be more provocative, for someone ready to deliver a righteous punch to the face, the gut, followed by kicks in the stomach, than a mild reply? They are enraged and you remain enragingly, humiliatingly composed as they circle for the attack. I realize now, given the set-up, that I couldn’t help becoming that way. I had no choice but to learn that survival skill when my father made me his adversary from before I even had words.

It is no surprise, given that background, that using words to present my view as clearly as possible would become supremely soothing to me. A good talk reminds me of the basic goodness of the world. The most painful type I still have to face sometimes is the righteous, angry person who will not let me speak. They insist on the right to silence me in spite of the many years I’ve listened to them as a good friend, brother, colleague, in spite of many excellent talks we’ve had over the years. What gives someone the right to tell another person they may not speak is another, hideous question.

We meet people like this sometimes in life, we may become close friends, having no reason to suspect how badly they will act in a moment of pressure. We don’t discover, til a moment of supreme tension, that a friend or other loved one may be so damaged in their souls that they truly cannot listen to someone else’s pain. In fact, another person expressing hurt and expecting sympathy is infuriating to them, given the right circumstances. Nothing is more hurtful for this type, at a vulnerable moment, than to be reminded of the fragile emptiness of the shell they created to make themselves feel better and more important, than others.

This is a certain type of asshole, the snarling, angry one standing on their right to anger. You can easily picture them in a lynch mob. Nothing you can say will make the slightest impression on their anger because they will never acknowledge wrongdoing of any kind without blaming you, somebody else, everybody else. They also always insist on one condition for any conversation once there is a conflict: you shut the fuck up about your goddamned feelings. The one condition I can’t agree to.

There is a deathly pain associated with being silenced. When you are prevented from speaking by someone else, it is a direct negation of your humanity. It presupposes the right of one person to make the other person shut up. Enforcing silence requires force, or the credible, frightening threat of force. Once you have shown your mercilessness to the others, say be ostracizing one critic, there is no reason to demonstrate your power again, unless strictly necessary. Your reputation as an indomitable competitor not above a quick kick to the shorts precedes you in your social milieu. Brutalize one and the rest tend to fall in line.

So on a bleak day, thinking about the silence of longtime, now former, friends, their unshakable, righteous enmity, to the death, I console myself by presenting my thoughts and feelings as clearly as I can.

I set the basic idea down quickly, once it’s in my head. I read it again, trying my best to make like an innocent reader seeing it for the first time. I clarify things that could be confusing. I elaborate on things I didn’t develop, condense whatever seems tedious. This work is a pleasure, considering my words and their effect, as I refine them into successively better reflections of myself and my views. When everything is combed through and smoothed down into its simplest form, I put it up in an online journal, another example of my soul doing its best to make my notion of a good life tangible on a given, otherwise shit, day.

The dilemma of trying to maintain integrity in a war to the death

When I was very young, and first learned that Switzerland had been neutral in World War Two, I took that as a good thing.  They fairly didn’t take sides, the Swiss loved peace, I reasoned in my childish brain (they also made delicious chocolate, as I knew very well).  By the time I was eight, and saw nauseating film clips of what the Nazis had been up to not long before I was born, I understood that Swiss neutrality was essentially an acceptance of Nazism.   With friends like fair and balanced Switzerland, who needs Franco’s Spain?

How do we negotiate a world that demands a black and white taking of sides in so many cases?   Nuance is the weapon of obfuscating, timid pussies, we are told over and over by those with an interest in division and the loudest megaphones on earth.  The criticism of liberals and progressives often focuses on their presentation of detailed nuance rather than fierce, no holds barred, smashmouth, simple to grasp angry political rallying cries.  The right is not afraid to act like Nazis, including threats of violent reprisal against political opponents, why are the good guys so “principled”? 

There is something brutal about all politics, especially if one side is out for actual blood.   How do you discuss poisonous subjects with integrity?   The difficulty of this is hard enough to stop us from even trying, most of the time.   Can you actually come to a compromise with a Klansman, unless you somehow agree that their point of view is somewhat justified?  A separate question: why would you want to?

As I watch the unfolding horrors in Israel and Gaza I also watch the clannish response of so many.   Israel, as a haven to long persecuted Jews, has a right to exist.   The people of Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians, have a right to exist.   May I go so far as to opine that all people, all creatures, have a right to exist?

There is an extreme right wing/religious fundamentalist government in Israel, the most extreme and divisive in its history.  The government is so extreme that hundreds of thousands of Israelis regularly march to protest Netanyahu’s ongoing plan to curb the Israeli Supreme Court, an institution that has long been Israel’s protection against anti-democratic and inhuman practices.

This fight between Israeli democracy and religious and ethnic autocracy provides the perfect historical moment for a murderous group, purporting to represent the persecuted, to attack Israel and inflict a grievous wound in horrific fashion.  No need to propagandize, Hamas provided the torture, burnings, slow death of parents in front of terrified children and vice versa.   They bragged about it themselves and took two hundred plus hostages.  No secret, Hamas said, we went to your villages to terrify you, make you feel vulnerable, enrage you, provoke the bloodiest possible response to make you look like the blood thirsty mass-murderers you are.

Now the world is divided into two simple camps on this awful question, as on most questions today.  The Jewish state has a right to exist, and to do anything necessary to survive, particularly after the Nazi-style atrocity on October 7.   The other side points in outrage to Israel’s long oppression of millions of Palestinians, to the open air prison conditions in Gaza and the impunity with which violent settlers dominate the West Bank, and demands that this oppression end now.

There is a moral core, and righteousness, to each argument, to both sides in this violent dispute to the death.  What does a person who sees both sides do?  In my case, I look up the history of the creation of the State of Israel, a country I’ve spent a lot of time in, whose language I speak.  

Nothing clean about that moment of international guilt, when, in the shadow of death camps for Jews, the Jewish state was “created” as a haven for a historically despised and persecuted minority.  Read about Mandatory Palestine, it was a shit show.  The British, as the Ottoman Empire was being defeated, were given control of newly created Palestine and all the inhabitants thereof.  There was also the “creation” of Lebanon, Jordan (Palestine was part of Transjordan), Iraq and the rest of the current Middle East, national boundaries drawn by the victorious European nations who had ousted the Ottoman Empire in World War One.  

The British Mandate was won in a war.   The winners imposed the rules, the local inhabitants had nothing to say about it.  Nations in the former Ottoman Empire were created by drawing lines on maps, in some cases combining, in the old British practice, warring tribal and ethnic groups in the same national boundaries.  The better to control them, if the newly created Iraqis themselves were fighting and killing each other, so much the better for ruling them.  European colonial powers had perfected this technique in Africa.

You had Jews displaced by Hitler’s plan to kill them arriving in Palestine, intercepted by the British, who were also fighting Hitler.  You had the “illegal immigration” of thousands of such persons.   You had Arabs who had lived on the land for generations and owned over 90% of the land.  You had the Jewish claim to the land rooted in the Old Testament, when God promised the land to His people.   That biblical claim, one must concede, is as problematic as any claim made in any holy book anywhere.   You had violence and killing, including by Jewish terrorist groups intent on ousting the British by any means necessary.  You had Arabs occasionally killing Jews, many of whom had escaped Hitler’s death machine.  There was a decade or more of desperate dealmaking, dealmaking that rarely included local poor people, Arab or Jew.

The vote for the creation of the state of Israel in the newly created UN was hotly contested, as was the map of the new state.   There was no worldwide recognition of the need for this Jewish state, in spite of Hitler’s heroic efforts to demonstrate the need for such a nation and our collective memory of this rare moment in history when support for Jews overcame long hatred.  Israeli independence squeaked through, with all kinds of compromises.  The British couldn’t wait to get out by then. 

Soon after Israel announced its independence the new country was attacked by a huge force of its Arab neighbors.  The war went on for months.  Israel’s existence was touch and go.  During the war 700,000 Palestinians became refugees.

We have the Israeli story of this exodus: Arab nations broadcast messages to the Palestinian Arabs to leave so that the Jews could be forced into the sea.  Once all the Jews were gone, they could go home in peace.  There were such broadcasts, but that was not the only reason Palestinians left.  

There was a war raging.  There were forced expulsions of Arabs from their villages in what was now Israel, war crimes, documented (see Deir Yassin) that terrified Palestinians and made them flee.  There was the usual displacement of any war.   There were multiple compelling reasons Palestinians fled.

At the end of the 1948 war Israel had expanded its borders slightly and the new status quo did not include the reintegration of Palestinians who had fled.  While understandable, from an Israeli point of view, that unaccomodated mass of refugees, which has lived in poverty for generations now, planted the seeds for what has followed.

The Israeli government’s position has long been that those refugees are Arabs and should be taken in by other Arab nations.   The Arab position was a hard “fuck you.”  The Palestinian refugee crisis was too good for Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and friends to pass up.  Nobody likes impoverished refugees, so how about a resounding, righteous international “Fuck Israel” instead?

Not to say that the Israeli position on Palestinian refugees being the responsibility of other Arab nations made much sense.  All of these talking points, if you take them one at a time, are easy enough to debunk as bullshit.  The practice of partisans on both sides is to have a few self-serving, one-sided talking points ready to deploy when needed, to make a complicated problem the sole responsibility of the enemy.

We cannot talk about these things calmly.  The killing of children, of old people, always rightfully enrages us.  I heard a journalist I love and respect (Amy Goodman) point out that Hamas had treated the 85 year-old Israeli hostage they later released humanely, even kindly.  Really, Amy, Hamas gets points for not beating and raping an 85 year-old hostage?

So back to the question: how to talk about what an Israeli fascist/theocratic government is doing in response to a hellish masterpiece of terrorist strategy in a world where Putin and Trump are the biggest beneficiaries of this kind of explosively divisive war.  If you have any idea, I’d love to hear it. 

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.