Think, write, feel better

A friend once called me at 2:45 a.m. to tell me he’d received a note from me in the mail that made him very upset. I was upset to be called at that hour by an upset friend who couldn’t wait until the next day to cry to me about how upset he was. 

You have a right to wonder what kind of sick friendships I keep, but this guy and I have been very close friends for forty years or more, helped each other many times over the years.  He’s going through some hard times recently, has trouble facing his anger and how trapped he probably feels.   

So I didn’t tell him to fucking fuck off with his upset, I tried to help him out at 3 a.m.  I didn’t respond with anger, I responded with Reason.  When he complained that, unlike him, I have plenty of time to think, and write, and rewrite, I didn’t say anything mean about a life where even having time to think is impossibly hard.  I asked a question.

“Was there anything unfair, inaccurate or even unkind in what I wrote to you?”   The subject of my note was the crucial things I am suddenly not allowed to talk about without him getting mad.   He was too upset to answer.   

I was able to remain patient.  When we got off the phone I found my body poised to fight, I was wide awake, hyper awake.  Finding myself unable to sleep, my temper eventually exploded that this inconsiderate call — expressing hurt that I am not allowed to express under the sick new rules of our old friendship — had left me holding a bag of flaming dog shit, destroying a night’s sleep on the eve of a trip when I needed to be up early every day.  I vowed never a-fucking-gain.  I texted him “do not call after midnight unless previously arranged” and he quickly agreed.

Here’s what I want to point out, though.   No matter how insane somebody’s demands are, if you care about the person, you can put aside the insanity of the demand, respond as calmly as you can, and continue to think things through.  Thinking will not fix anything, though it will lead you to understand your situation as clearly as possible.  Then, as I always do, you sit down to write.  

This is the best practice I know for working through extremely difficult emotions.  Put them clearly in order on a page.  Read them over.  Clarify anything that is unclear.  This process leads you to removing excess anger, provocative comments, snideness, not having to assemble all the proof of your case.  You don’t need all the proof of your case.  You need just enough to make your point in a way that has a chance to sink into someone stubbornly insisting they are right and you’re wrong.  When you read the final product, you will feel a little better.

While writing I can put aside the righteous notion that I’d be completely within my rights to tell an old friend who is suddenly behaving like an impulsive, angry, solipcistic child to fuck off.  There is also something deeper at stake.   Part of it is affirming the value of patience, compassion and the truth in resolving conflict with people you care about.

If you encounter a year of sustained denial, reframing, anger, blame, threats, silence, doubling down on an irrational zero-sum war created by anger and fear, justifications, excuses, gaslighting, selective amnesia, etc. most people would not blame you if you just went silent.  Silence is the instant cure for all of that shit, unless you care.  If you care, silence will continue to bother you, because the impossibly unfair situation you’ve been placed in by someone else’s weakness will keep gnawing at you.

You can always walk away from people who behave like self-pitying, angry children with no ability to empathize with anyone else.  If walking away is difficult, you can also think, write, clarify.

In the end you come to a baseline of true things you will not fight about, will not compromise over.  Setting out this baseline is important, and writing it down, I’ve found, is very helpful.  If you can agree that you unfairly blamed me for things that were not strictly my fault, that my reactions were not unreasonable, unfair or mean, we have the first step on a long road back.

My upset old friend sent me an email about hiring a professional to help us (me, his wife, Sekhnet) resolve our estrangement.  His email was efficient, vague and hopeful.  Mine requested clarification about what he hoped a mediator could do for us, since I was not seeing an issue a mediator could broker a compromise to fix.  His reply was vague but hopeful.  He thought the mediator might help us answer questions like “how can we talk to each other without making each other angry?”  I brought up, in three or four paragraphs, the compelling reasons I am just about out of hope for fixing things, unless he (and his wife) are prepared to admit that they are having a hard time with their anger.   

I understand anger as well as I understand anything.  It is a difficult emotion, it makes us feel righteous doing godawful things to each other.  Anger can become humiliating afterwards if not immediately justified, the justification desperately clung to. I was raised in a home of sudden, implacable anger, rage was common, it was a fight to the death every night.  I know few things as well as I know anger.  

I know the first thing to learn about anger is how to control it in yourself when it begins to spark into a bonfire. The second is how to make amends after you hurt someone with anger.   I also know that in situations where the other party takes no responsibility for angry interactions, often the only thing to do is get out of that situation.

Not everyone is capable of introspection, sadly.  Self-criticism is very hard to practice.  I get this.  At the same time, if you have a problem and need to blame me for your inability to do better, you know, I can say this as politely as possible, but fucking fuck off.   Or do some work, on your own troubled life and stop blaming people who are already exhibiting tremendous patience under great pressure that you have created, as you keep denying that anything is fundamentally broken, that the entire problem is the fault of the one exerting himself to not tell you to fuck off.

You know what I’m saying?

Heather Cox Richardson

Heather wonders about the wider political significance of the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and the callous MAGA response, coming during an epic battle of faithful election deniers versus a potential tsunami of voters, especially young, especially female. The deranged attack on Paul Pelosi, 82, who survived at least one hammer blow to the head, has become fodder for sly MAGA sadists joking about the violent home invasion on right-wing news outlets. As Adam Serwer wrote, the cruelty is the point. Heather:

“Anecdotal data point,” conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted this afternoon, “Had lunch with an old friend, a fellow former [Republican] (but not in politics or media or anything) and he said that things feel different after the Pelosi attack. Not sure why. I feel the same thing; not sure that it’ll matter, but have that same sense.”

Perhaps it is the echoes of lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 on television confronted Joseph McCarthy as the Wisconsin senator shredded people’s lives by accusing them of being communists: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Perhaps it is the many observers pointing out that in a time when more than half the Republicans running for office have refused to acknowledge that Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when Republican legislatures are claiming the right to choose presidential electors without the input of voters, “American democracy is on the line.”

Or perhaps it is the sheer horror of Republican politicians joking about a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, an attack that left her elderly husband with a fractured skull, but Nichols is right: something feels different.

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/november-2-2022?r=74gv9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Then she quotes extensively from an excellent speech Biden delivered tonight about the present struggle to preserve our experiment in democracy.

The klan’s only weapon is terrorism

Whenever you want a small group of wealthy men, with unpopular ideas, to weild absolute power, over the wishes of the majority of citizens, you need to employ deadly violence. These powerful autocratic men need deadly groups of violence fanatics, like the Ku Klux Klan , as enforcers of their will.

The Ku Klux Klan would be powerless without their credible rep for torture, humiliation and terrifying death, unpunishable by the law.

See that picture in your mind of laughing law enforcemeny klansmen at their attaignment for murdering three civil rights workers. They couldn’t look more relaxed, one of them dipping into a bag of Red Man tobacco, his buddy with a big Lyin’ Ted smile on his face. Those are good old boys that mutilated three voting rights advocates in Mississippi, looking forward to Justice at the hands of a a jury of their white peers, under the state criminal code, and local customs, of Mississippi.

Without groups like the Klan it would be very hard, in a democracy, to effectively suppress minority voting, that is the voting of the local majority. The majority will win elections unless intimidated by terrorism so they will not cast a vote. Hang, burn and dismember just a few of their leaders and watch how quickly the rest of them will hide on Election Day.

That’s how it’s done whenever you want a small group of wealthy men to rule absent the consent of everyone they rule. The only way to do it is by force, you have to have the threat that you will actually be able to legally torture and murder as many motherfuckers as you need to make examples of, if not all of them in the ultimate solution, or as Mr. Hitler’s colleagues called it die endlösung.

Take it from the Grey Hag

The Gray Lady hastens to remind readers that our elections are won by the party with the best slogan, a winning market-driven vision that encapsulates a compelling narrative in a single phrase, MAGA, for example, or, even better, Q.

It follows that a political party does not win an election by highlightting a wide range of policies they’ve enacted, against determined, lockstep opposition, to help millions of Americans, they do it by using effective single-issue branding and messaging.

So, according to the Grey Lady’s top headline a day or two back, top Democrats are hissing at each other because, once again, they’re going to lose because they’ve concentrated on the wrong metrics to win, instead of picking one (like “Make America Great Again”) in a majoritarian democracy where money is speech, time is money, and the citizens’ attention spans are two and a half seconds long.

If it is not a single idea that fits on a baseball cap, and it doesn’t inspire blind single-minded purpose, the battle is lost, in the considered opinion of the Grey Lady’s headline writers.

They also had a top headline that Joe Biden made two verbal gaffes at a recent campaign stop. Imagine that! MAGA GAGA, NYT. I don’t know why you do it, but nobody does it better.

Top Democrats Question Their Party’s Strategy as Midterm Worries Grow https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/us/politics/midterm-elections-worrying-democrats-strategy.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuonUktbfqYhlSVUbAibIRp8_qRmHmfnE2_s5h3PiITKQDDtGwu8JAo-G4ALSYrB5dto10HGXSdpGO6UmWOc31fNFNlBgRBjuooeBnN5NBRQJnr-JfzF82YPRD_d_-CX2b2K9JaByzefj40_cOn28CKPZzXEhIAx6qMZgJUWh3iAMzvvFRrEh39FuzLx2UMABMDQKYSeAu_HtCgwve4nVK0GBtXRlHr1RSjrRntWD67ofcQ00CljOSHJ34WlU-8oLcZpMf_65d0h8DZK41bYBCWVoL5OqB4kyQ-XUlbZtuL3Or3-c2aVHIphJmuuQVoWn6X1P6OU

Complying with unreasonable demands

Sometimes you will be confronted with unreasonable demands from others.  People at times set conditions for relationships that are grimly unfair:  whenever I’m upset with you, I get to confront you immediately; you have to patiently respect my right not to deal with your hurt until some time far in the future.   I cannot be patient when I’m in great pain, you must always be patient and calm with me when you think I hurt you.   Shit like that.

You can say these kinds of conditions are endgame scenarios, they are imposed when everything is so fucked up betwen people that all they have left is their reflex to defend themselves at all costs.   I wouldn’t argue.  In a mutually empathetic relationship you will not encounter these kinds of unreasonable asymmetries.   They arise from long held grievance, which accrues until the weight of it becomes unbearable to one party, who then feels compelled to inflict it on the other party.

These childish conditions are imposed in an unthinking attempt to make things right, somehow.  Everything harmful that I do is purely unintended, a mistake, forgivable human weakness, for godsake, and everything bad that you do flows from your disrespect, malice and sadism.

“You are a reflexive sadist, I realize you can’t help being a sadist, probably, but that is your default setting for treating others, or at least for treating me.  You’re aggressive, threatening and mean as a goddamned snake.”  If you have a productive response for that, one that will change the view of the speaker, you’re more inventive than I am.  When someone frames things to me that way, in stunning black and white, it’s time to move to the next car.

I have a friend who listens patiently to my horror stories.  He is sympathetic, offers whatever insight he might have, tells me a related story from his own life.  That is truly all a friend can do when we are up against it, listen, relate, offer his best ideas.  Our need to vent sometimes has us persist, once a friend has done all these things.  At that point my friend would nip that shit instantly with a simple “wee, wee, wee!”, said in a mocking, singsong cadence reminiscent of a crying cartoon baby, or piglet.

“Wee wee wee!” is a great, shorthand evocation of this kind of childish need to insist, beyond the limits of all reasonable conversation.  It makes me laugh, snaps me out of it, as I realize I’m now behaving like a fucking giant baby — and that I don’t have to.

Violent crime by state

Television pundits tell us that Republicans have successfully made a huge voting issue about violent crime, predominantly in “anarchist (and antichrist) jurisdictions” run by godless heathens, presumably. The GOP has focused on the rise of violent crime all over the country, under the watch of “soft on crime” communist Democrats who control two branches of the federal government and are therefore responsible for all local criminal behavior.

A few seconds of research on the internet tells a different story. Here are the top 27 States, (including one that should be a state but is not), ranked in order of prevalence of violent crime.

Looks to me like the old Confederacy, the MAGA heartland, that region of the country who never bowed to “Negro Rule”, never lost any war, except by being cheated out of victory, leads the pack in violent crime.

Hmmm…

Meanwhile the FBI and Homeland Security have both issued reports that domestic terrorism, white supremacist violence, is the gravest threat we face as a nation going into the midterms. Talk about yer violent crime…

Death during life

The finality of death is a crushing thing.  A cherished conversation ended, forever.   The chance to fix a once-precious, broken thing, irretrievably gone.  Traces of the little quirks that endear us to each other remain, remembered fleetingly, painfully at first.  Death reduces the dead person to the memories of those who loved her.  That we all must go there is little consolation, it’s the opposite of consolation, really.

Death during life?  That is the death we decree on others who have crossed a painful line too many times to endure.  “You’re fucking dead to me” is the cry of pain we direct at those who prove over and over that they will not yield, for any reason.  Once they are dead to you, of course, the painful dilemma — trying to unilaterally resolve things you cannot resolve to save a relationship that is already dead — is over.  The gangrenous foot is surgically removed, a prosthetic foot is attached and, after a short period of rehab, you walk better than you have in a long time.

I think most people have experienced this addition by subtraction, the relief it produces to finally not force yourself to bang your head against an immovable object,  a locked door, an adamant refusal to acknowledge hurt a loved one cannot personally feel. Your hurt reduced to peevish triviality when weighed against their own pain and anger.

I recall the wonderful feeling of lightness, waking with a great weight removed from my shoulders, neck and head, after an unusually good night’s sleep, when I have finally told someone turned monstrous to get out of my fucking face.

Whenever I’ve found myself being bullied by an old friend, given an ultimatum, held responsible for their pain and inability to behave reasonably, urged that only denial will solve what is bedevilling my sleep, the only relief, in the end, is removing myself from the situation.   You win, I lose.  I take myself off the chess board.  You are absolutely right, have a nice day and a very nice life.  It can be done politely, if you want, but the finality of it, when that moment comes, is also unmistakably clear.

I am dead to them while still alive.  Their pride will prevent them from reaching out, no matter how painful my death during life may be for them.  I have rejected their version of love, after all, an unforgivable thing for a dear friend to do.  In a case where I reached out after several years of estrangement, my old friend, although delighted and relieved to hear from me, was unable to reach back, being too neurotic to resume the friendship he claimed to value above all others. I don’t take it personally, it’s not about me, intimacy is not in his skill set.

Though it’s a very painful thing, there are worse tragedies than death during life.  Few relationships live forever.  People change, come to value different things.  People grow apart in their beliefs and their needs from others.  Understanding is not the universal coin of human affairs and love is not a magical balm that can heal things we can never touch or understand.  We are “wise apes” and we do the best we can in a violent and largely irrational world.  Sometimes we resort to cannibalism.  What else can you do when the place you used to live is now under the sea and you and your twenty million neighbors are on the move with nothing but the dead to eat?