when a friend shows you what they are incapable of, believe it

Sometimes, sadly, we hurt people we care about by our actions or inactions.   When we become aware we’ve caused pain to someone we love, the only thing I’ve figured out to do is acknowledge causing the pain, take responsibility for acting badly and sincerely ask for forgiveness.  I don’t know of any other way, though some people buy gifts, take special care of the person they hurt as a way of making it up to them.  Not everybody is capable of taking responsibility for cruel things they do in anger.

Anger itself is partly to blame, it is a famously terrible emotion and as difficult to sit with as grief.  When you’re angry you can only see the thing that makes you angry, in vivid black and white — no gradations of any kind.  When you’re mad you can’t see the harm your anger may be making you inflict.  You let the arrow loose from the bow in an act of righteous anger and it finds its mark, and even if it doesn’t inflict a fatal wound, it can still kill.

If somebody shows you their shock and anger when you ask to discuss something they did that hurt you, believe what they are showing you.  They are not capable of anything beyond that.  Believe them.

Fair and balanced for the MAGA 39%

Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing network is the only news source for a good proportion of the US population. Here is how they cover the controversy over Merrick Garland’s hesitancy to appear “political” by indicting the organizers, funders and inciters of the “extralegal” plot to overthrow the election and the accompanying January 6th riot:

If this was your sole source of political infotainment, you’d never know this double talking, lying, attacking, weasel motherfucker is defying a subpoena from his colleagues after refusing to voluntarily appear to give testimony to a committee he claims are a bunch of illegitimate libtard cucks. His talks with the boss on January 6th are, like Kevin said, that, that, that’s, that’s that’s that’s between him, him and the boss.

Fair and balanced, we report you decide, dummies. Remember Benghazi!

Harder to sit with sorrow than with anger

Sorrow is draining and terrible, it forces you to feel the pain of loss in its pure form. Anger, while blinding, gives you energy, purpose and a bracing sense of righteousness.

If you are quick to anger, try sitting with sorrow sometime, feeling the loss of a soul you love. It is an illuminating exercise.

My father found it humiliating to feel vulnerable. His early hurt made him unable to risk giving anybody the power to hurt him, so he never let his guard down. His fists were always ready, his blows were struck with glares and harsh words. If he had begun to taste the pain of the ocean of pain he was thrashing in, he would have drowned.

But I couldn’t have understood any of that while I was still his adversary. I couldn’t break free from that endless, senseless vying until I learned about his traumatic infancy. Seeing him as a whipped two year-old flooded me with compassion, and opened a window, for the first time, into his valiantly defended, tortured soul.

Supporting segregation makes you look racist, banning abortion is a moral, conservative Christian duty

Mehdi Hasan lays out the grim history of how determined, organized American reactionaries, realizing segregation was a bad look in the Civil Rights era, galvanized Evangelical Christians behind the religious Catholic doctrine that a fetus, even a one minute old zygote, is a fully formed human life and made opposition to abortion the unifying principle of the extreme right.

Nothing racist about forcing women, even if they’re poor and Black, to carry even a rapist’s seed to term. It’s God’s will, motherfuckers, ask Jesus!