I grew up watching Disney movies where the Prince would always pick the girl who worked hard and did the right thing. I grew up watching the Wicked Witch of the West melt and her flying monkeys cheer when they were finally released from her oppression. I grew up watching the hero ride in on a white horse.
What a crock. What a total crock.
Democrats, we gotta realize that karma isn't going to save us. If it does, we won't live long enough to see it. Karma takes a long ass time to arrive. I don't know about you, but I need health insurance right now. Waiting for karma or the ying to meet the yang and everything to balance out is driving me nuts.
I am watching and listening and remember the girl I used to be, back when I believed in heroes and princes and white horses. I used to believe that everyone around me was operating like me, from a sense of altruism. It's only through a few really painful experiences that I've become someone who doesn't get eaten alive anymore. Looking at the people around me as potential predators who want to eat me isn't the way I want to be. But it is the way I have to be.
Or in the end, I get eaten.
I am not getting into why or how we got here. I am not getting into the pain of what we are going through right now.
But I do kinda want to slap the Democratic Party upside the head. WTF were you thinking???
We know who we are dealing with. We know their mission. We know how they operate. For cripes sake they warned us AGAIN and AGAIN that it didn't matter what we wanted, or how many votes we had, they were going to stop us. They told us. We knew it. This is not a surprise. Or at least it shouldn't be.
It's like the lion came up to us and said:
"My dear gazelle, I am hungry. You are tasty. I plan to hide behind this strip of tall grass and attack you from the right. I plan to isolate you from your herd, and I will pin you between me and the deep water of the river. There I will hold you, alone, and force you to either drown in the river or provide me with a tasty lunch. Now, how would you prefer to die - to be ripped into shreds by my claws or to drown peacefully in the river? Either way, I will get what I want - lunch."
Folks it's time to realize that bad things do indeed, happen to good people. In fact, I'll bet that bad things happen more often to good people than happen to bad people. Why? Because bad people know how to take it in the gutter.
Sooner or later we have a choice when dealing with someone who is set on eating us for lunch. We either fight or we get eaten. A predator relies on our 'goodness' to make it easier for him to eat us. That's actually exactly why we are chosen as lunch. The predator knows we won't go into the gutter. That we value our integrity and our character too much to fight dirty. And in the end, it's our undoing and we end up with a side of carrots and mashed potatoes.
Back when I used to believe in white knights, I thought we were all connected. That we all realized that we were in this together. Every day when I live my life, I have to trust that the person driving along side of me will not purposely crash his car into mine. I have to trust that the people at my son's school will protect him when I am not there. I have to believe that when I call the police for help, someone will respond.
We live our lives trusting in one another, and that's the way it is supposed to work.
Well, we all know it doesn't work that way. We've seen tragedy after tragedy when someone turns on us for no reason at all, except to hurt us. Except to prey on us, on our goodness and the very trust we put into them. Just today, this story is breaking here locally:
Shenandoah police were accused of previous Hispanic abuse
SHENANDOAH - A police chief charged with trying to cover up the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant by white teenagers was named in a 2006 civil suit that made a startling claim: Borough police beat to death a Hispanic teenager, then hung him from the bars of his holding cell to make it appear a suicide.
Nice huh? Protect and Serve.
I think today might be a good time for all of us to realize that we aren't fighting with someone who wants a fair fight. We are fighting with someone who wants to win, to crush, to eat us. This is pure predator and prey, and for me, it is what is pissing me off about the way the Democrats are playing a game while the Republicans are ripping us to shreds.
I don't blame the Democrats. I don't blame the President. I was once this way too. Wanting everyone to get along. Wanting things to be fair. Seeking justice and karma. Thinking that God was up there keeping score and would see to it that the bad guys paid in the end.
Listen, with all due respect for God, there's no way I want these predators to be allowed to eat me alive and have their 'punishment' come after they've been allowed to live a life like this. It's bullshit. I used to think there was a hell. Now I know it was just a Republican right wing tactic to get me to believe there was some karma in the next life somewhere, so I would just keep sitting here and allowing them to beat the stuffing out of me.
I often refer back to the blog written by the late Kathy Krajco in times like this. She was an avid tennis player who grew up in a home with a few malignant narcissists. She started a blog where she just sets things straight, probably as much for herself as for others. She was pissed off about how she was treated, and she taught me too, that turning the other cheek or listening to people who say "Yea, they can just do that to you," is bullshit.
Making nothing of treating me like crap makes me nothing. What the Republicans and all those who are simply working to impose pain on us are doing is making nothing of me. They are vaulting themselves up on me. What they've done is not nothing. They've screwed us. And it's something.
I found some interesting posts on Kathy Krajco's site today, and wanted to share a few with you. She died last year and her blog is in pieces now, with broken links and no ownership anymore. I will post a few of her writings here in their entirety because I don't think the links will work, as there is no owner of her site anymore. If you click through the top section of posts to the left of the page, you can see a lot of her stuff. It's worth checking out.
Narcissists and Conflict
One simple but easy-to-forget thing about narcissists is that, unlike normal people, they don't mind conflict. They enjoy it.
Conflict makes normal people uncomfortable. We try to minimize it in our dealings with others. Oddly, we love it in fiction (Conflict is the gunpowder of fiction, and it's near relative - controversy - is the gunpowder of journalism. Maintaining constant conflict is the secret to storytelling success). But note that this is "safe" conflict. In real life we hate what we love to see characters go through in fiction.
Narcissists have a whole different attitude toward conflict. They use it strategically to manipulate. They seek conflict. They become impossible people, flying into conflict with you over anything you think, say, do, feel, or wear. As if THEY have the right to determine what you say, think, do, feel, or wear.
This isn't just arrogance. It's a game in which you're damned if you do and damned if you don't, because they are being deliberately impossible to please.
When this is the motive, what happens when you try to defuse conflict, when you try to appease? The narcissist sees that as a sign of weakness, as sign of backing down. It just makes him bolder. This is no testing run at you anymore: now he is serious about running you over. He sees your "weakness" as REASON to come on stronger = to get madder and even more impossible. It's how he's controlling you.
In other words, trying to smooth it over, trying to appease the narcissist just backfires, making him more aggressive, not less aggressive.
So, don't do it.
This is just one of many examples of how normal human behavior backfires in Wonderland, simply because of a narcissist's alien mentality.
Krajco asks us to think of how we would feel if someone gave us a new red sportscar. And then to our horror, we witnessed someone banging it with a sledgehammer.
We'd be outraged. We'd stand up and try to stop them. We'd scream for help and we would do everything within our power to stop it - and protect what we value.
So why didn't we do this with health care reform - we saw the Republicans (and other evildoers) standing there next to our car with their sledgehammers - they TOLD us they were going to smash it. We had fair warning, yet with each bang, we were told that the car was still able to be driven, and to be glad the tires weren't slashed.
Huh?
Like Krajco says,
The Good Guys Don't Always Win
Yet another thing we victims of narcissists like to delude ourselves about. I'm sorry, but there is no Master of Universe out there running the show to make sure goodness triumphs over evil in the end. Simply because of their diabolical cheating, most narcissists never get their come-uppance.
The Bishop of Beauvais who made a forgotten demon out of Joan of Arc for several hundred years died in his bed and was buried with full sacramental honors. Stalin died in his bed. So did Mao.
And did Hitler really get his come uppance? Where would Saddam Hussein be today if he hadn't incurred the wrath of a nation he couldn't bully? He'd still be regarded as a hero and worshipped.
Twenty years his execution, before the cult of Christianity got started and the New Testament was written, who was the winner - Jesus of Nazareth or the Sanhedron? He was still a criminal and they were holy men.
Don't think your narcissist can't pull off the same stunt.
Even so, it is just as superstitious to believe that narcissists always get away with it as to believe that they never get away with it.
Yes, superstitious. It's nothing but superstition.
Some narcissists do crash and burn in the end, and some don't. The odds are against it, however, simply because they cheat on good people playing by the rules, which gives narcissists a huge advantage.
They get away with 99 exploits before they get caught red-handed pulling off number 100. Is that justice?
Why don't the other 99 victims get their share of it?
Yes, the truth outrages our sense of justice. This is why, if you write a novel, never try to sell one that has an unhappy ending.
But we do the same thing narcissists do if we create our own little world according to our specifications, one in which the good guys must win in the end and the N must fall. This is delusion, and all delusion is bad for us. If nothing else, it has the victim sitting there waiting for the Master of the Universe to come save the day instead of doing anything herself to bring about a happy ending.
We gotta fight folks. We can't keep operating this way. We have to treat others as they have treated us. It is right and normal to be pissed when someone screws you over. There is nothing noble about rising above it.
I wish it wasn't that way. But we can't make the world a better place by allowing the good people to be abused. We have to use our power - together - to smack down the predator. There is truly safety - and power -in numbers.
We've been warned. We know what we are facing. We know we are on the menu. It's only a matter of time before we're totally cooked.