The Abuser Has Two Faces

I am not going to tell you who you should vote for, since I have no idea what issues are most important to you. I will, however, suggest how you should vote. You should vote with an attitude of love and hope, just as you should do all things with an attitude of love and hope. For love and hope grow stronger and spreads to others the more we practice it, just as fear and hatred tends to spread like some contagious disease.

If you vote with hate and fear as your motivations, you will create a system that furthers hate and fear, it really is that simple. If you believe that you cannot support either of the major party candidates in a spirit of love and hopefulness, then walk away from the system because the system does not offer the solutions you or society needs. When we can no longer bring the better angels of our nature into the voting booth with us, it is the system that is broken. And when the system is broken, working within the parameters of that system is supporting that system. To support either of the two-party candidates is to support the two-party system. That is what we’ve been doing for generations now and it has led us to where we are now. There is no logical reason to assume it will be different this time, that voting for the lesser of two evils will bring about the change we really need. It will at best delay the inevitable, permitting all that is wrong to become further entrenched.

Of course, if you are comfortable with the situation as it is, then there is no problem. If you believe that the vote you cast will make for a better tomorrow, by all means do so. But if you vote in fear of what will happen should you not do as you are told by those who know better than you, then you are not behaving as an autonomous adult in touch with your human potential and ability. You are alienated from what makes you a truly independent and powerful human being. You are, in fact, behaving like an abuse victim.

It is a trap nobody expects to fall into. One day you suddenly realize you are reacting in fear all of the time. You feel helpless and you feel stupid and you feel like a bad person no matter what you do. You find yourself timidly acquiescing in hopes of receiving the lesser punishment, hope to deal with the less threatening face of the abuser, but his abusive behavior will continue as long as you continue to play the abuser’s game. If you ever want to break out of that prison, that box that has Democrats as the left wall, Republicans as the right wall, a front wall that has the corporate media as your window to the world, and the ever present wall of fear at your back, you will have to refuse the parameters that have been set for you. You cannot permit yourself to give into the fear and the hatred. You have to have faith that there is something better and transcend the walls that have you imprisoned. You must trust in others and in yourself.

We have lost faith in our fellow humans and in ourselves, handing over that faith instead to institutions and figures of authority. To abusers. We see all too clearly our shortcomings and do not permit ourselves to see what we as individuals and a society are capable of. We give our inalienable rights away to abusers who promise to make things better and always end up making things worse. Why else would we vote the way we do except that we let ourselves see the worst in others and in ourselves? We fear true democracy, afraid that we will have to make real decisions. Why else would we tolerate the political advertising that pollutes our airwaves and our souls and allow ourselves to believe there is no better way? There is a better way but it is up to us to find it.

That’s the way abusers work, by getting us to stop seeing any beauty or goodness in life. For them it is about keeping you in a constant state of fear and uncertainty. But if you are ever going to make things better, you will have to walk away from the games, the threats, the controlling behavior. You must first see yourself as more than helpless if you wish to be something more than a mere extension of the abuser.

An abuser has two faces. A victim of abuse always tries to curry favor with the more peaceful side of the abuser so that he or she doesn’t have to face the violent side. Donald Trump is the ugly, violent side of the abuser. Hillary Clinton is the side that says: “I’m sorry I hit you, baby, it won’t happen again. I love you. I know I voted for that war in Iraq and I was for all those trade agreements that took your job, but I changed.” Of course the implied threat is that if you don’t deal with the Hillary side of things, the Trump side is going to bang your head against the wall.

It takes courage to leave an abuser, courage and a plan. For too long you have convinced yourself that if you just go along with him you can make him change. You constantly compromise what you feel is right so that you don’t displease him. Then the violence occurs, followed by the apologies and the promise that it will never happen again.

But he won’t change, he will never change. The abuser has you in his power and power is the one thing he loves more than anything. He will never really love you, he will merely seek to control and possess you. This is a sad reality that most victims of abuse are slow to realize because they cannot imagine anyone is actually capable of thinking this way. But this I promise, he will never change and it is up to you to get out from under him.

In the meantime he will cut you off from everyone who tries to tell you he’s no good for you. He will cut you off from your family and friends, anyone who is not within his thrall. He will make you feel utterly helpless and at the same time blame you for everything that goes wrong. “I lost because you didn’t support me enough. You didn’t believe in me. I wanted to pass a health-care bill that would cover everyone but everyone is out to get me.”

The abuser wants to make you feel ignorant, that he has all the answers and you better not try to question him. He will tell you the most absurd lies imaginable, and he will demand that you believe him. He wants to make you feel helpless to do anything on your own to make things better. He wants you to believe that you are worthless without him and that you are lucky to have him.

The abuser wants you to see one of his two faces as the real one. He wants you to think that if you love him enough that the other, uglier face, will just go away. But it has kept getting uglier, hasn’t it? The violence more intense and often. Some day you’re going to have to realize exactly who it is your dealing with. It’s time to start working on your courage and your exit strategy, because he is never going to change. It’s time to reach out to all of those who he said was bad for you, time to start making connections with the outside world again. They may be Republicans or Democrats, but they’re abuse victims just like you. And we all need to be strong and support each other if we’re going to ever be free.

I might not have all the answers—I suspect nobody is that smart—but I know the kind of fertile soil from which a healthy society grows, and it is rich in love and hope. Nothing good will come of hatred and fear. If that is all you have within you, stay away from a polling station. No, that is not good enough. That is the abuser in me talking. Instead, find the love and hope that is in you and find a way to make a positive difference. You’ve been inside the box too long.

Let's Build A Wall!

Things were different in my grandfather’s day. Back then, when someone wanted to employ immigrants to drive down wages for American workers, they did it the legal way, by getting politicians elected who would increase the immigration quotas. It’s not fair that we punish those who buy politicians the old-fashioned way by allowing people to hire illegal immigrants.

And so I make what may sound like an unkind suggestion, but one I feel is necessary. I believe anyone found employing illegal aliens should be rounded up and immediately deported to Panama, The Cayman Islands, or whatever country they claim as their corporation’s nation of origin in order to avoid paying income taxes. For simplicity sake, let’s just send them all to the Cayman Islands. That way we can build a 50 foot wall around it. And make them pay for it! And we’ll make them pay living wages to those who build it too, not the $3 an hour under the table they were paying their illegal employees who were too afraid to speak out.

After all, it’s not right that those who hire illegal aliens are being treated better than our veterans. After fighting wars overseas that make for even more people fleeing their countries in hopes of finding a better life in the U.S of A., our soldiers come home to find their jobs are taken by those same refugees. Meanwhile, our government is paying those same companies who hire illegal immigrants here at home to rebuild the countries we blew up at their behest. And like as not they’re not using American labor to rebuild Saddam’s prisons.

Don’t tell me Americans won’t do the jobs immigrants do, it’s just a matter of how much money they want in return for their work. Let me explain the law of supply and demand to those who don’t get it: the less supply, the greater the demand. The less workers available, the greater the wages those workers are able to demand. Of course, those who hire illegals know it, that’s why they’re willing to open the immigration floodgates in order to reduce wages.

They say they can’t find anyone here that is willing to pick fruit or clean their pools for them, but guess what? If they paid enough, I’d gladly do it. Raise the wages enough and there will be people willing to do any job. Just look at how many attractive young women are willing to marry wrinkly old billionaires. It’s the magic of the market place. Of course, if they pay the pool boy too much they might not be able to afford more than one swimming pool per mansion, but nobody’s promised anything in this life.

It hurts me to see people tampering with the magic of the market place. After all, the market is only able to work its magic when it is allowed to act freely. The market is sacred. It is the source of all that is pure and good in the world. Flooding a nation with excess labor is equivalent to the Federal Reserve flooding the market with un-backed currency: it is destined to crash the system eventually.

So what do you think, Donald? Isn’t that a better idea than trying to trace every Western Union payment sent by all the less-than-minimum-wage workers in the country? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build a wall around the Caymans than the entire Mexican border? Wouldn’t the Cayman Islands be a nice place to vacation after a tiring presidential campaign?

Because you know Donald Trump has made some serious money hiring illegal immigrants rather than the American workers whose vote he’s got wrapped around his little finger. Construction and hotels? Nah, no illegals involved in those trades.

I’d be interested to know how much money Trump puts in his pocket for every illegal worker he got to replace an American one. I’m guessing the average would be around twenty grand each per year, which doesn’t include the overall dampening of wages for everyone else. And I’m guessing we’re looking at thousands of workers, because Donald Trump has his fingers in a lot of pies. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. That may not be a lot of money to Trump, but I’ll bet it’s plenty to a veteran who’s looking for work.

Come to think of it, if those who hire illegal immigrants are so concerned about saving money, I’m sure it would be cheaper to deport them somewhere like Siberia or Somalia. With the money we’d save, we could make that fence 100 feet tall!

The Media And Elections

Remember that no matter how much you may dislike a given candidate, the real enemy is the media. The media is the god to whom all bad candidates pledge obedience. As much as candidates try to play the media, in the end it is always the media that plays them.

I even feel sorry for Donald. Seriously. Watching Chris Matthews goad Trump into making an inane comment (as if he needed encouragement) was hard to watch. Donald, even Donald, was trying to avoid a nonsensical question, but eventually Matthews wore him down and got the sound bite he wanted.

Hillary too. I’m not talking about conservative talk show radio, which does an unspeakable butcher job on her while not dealing with the relevant issues that they could actually pin her to the wall on. I’m talking about the mainstream media. No matter how Hillary tries to portray herself, the media always paints her unsympathetically.

Of course, while I feel sorry that they are both victims of the media, they are after all guilty of playing the game. Instead of trying to put forward an appearance that the media will accept, she should worry more about being herself than projecting the right image. And Donald Trump has been playing a game this whole time, knowing how base and immoral the media is that they will lap it up like the sick puppies they are. He had to have known, or should have known, that eventually the media would turn on their favorite circus monkey once the routine got old. Live by the media, die by the media.

Perhaps with this current presidential campaign, though, the populace is finally starting to get it. Perhaps they see that the problem is not so much the candidates but what the candidates have to do to get the attention of the media. I truly believe that the citizens, both liberal and conservative, have finally realized the most corrupting influence on politics today, a media that prefers sound bites to substance so that they have more time for commercials. News organizations that feel no moral obligation to actually report the truth but to bring in more viewers by titillating their audience. Perhaps with the advent of the internet, we are so flooded with click-bait that we now feel we have to sort through all the nonsense in order to find what is meaningful to our lives.

It is the media that has made the election cycle the cesspool it has become. If the media were doing their job, they would winnow out the wheat from the chaff rather than throwing it all on the fire in order to create spectacle. The media is interested in one thing, and that is money. To that end they reduce the amount of reporters they have to pay, avoid controversial issues that they would have to commit to, and accept news uncritically from whatever source is willing to give it cheaply, no matter how untrustworthy they may be. Thus the government, corporations, any powerful figures—the exact people journalism is supposed to protect us from—are able to use the media as its mouthpiece.

Conservatives have learned how untrustworthy the mainstream media is, though they seem less aware that they face the same issue with conservative media. And I really do believe a new generation, that is perhaps a little more media savvy, realizes the media is nothing more than a device for promoting mindsets the powerful interests want you to embrace. Perhaps it is a little more difficult for us who are older, because we remember media that was able to give us, if not truth, then at least scraps of honesty and bits of enriching programming. But we too are getting to the end of our rope.

It’s not over yet, the media doesn’t realize how far from reality or the needs of the people it is supposed to serve it has gone. In the next few months you will be able to see on exhibition all the skill of the competently corrupt media infrastructure spin out its poisonous web of useless and misleading information. It will present for you a final freakshow that will leave Jerry Springer and Marilyn Manson envious.

But it’s breaking down. No structure built on such shoddy foundations that seeks to reach so high can last for long. True, the damage it will cause as it crashes will be severe, but we’ll all be better off once it has fallen.

Random Political Thoughts Part 2

If failing government institutions are privatized, shouldn’t any failing private institution be seized by the state?

If a law is made so complicated that the average citizen cannot understand it, it is likely made deliberately so.

The difference between politicians and crime bosses is that politicians don’t own crime bosses.

You would think that the one thing a capitalist society would be able to teach people would be the value of thrift, the idea that in a world where nobody owes you anything that you shouldn’t spend what you don’t have. But in fact it teaches you the exact opposite. Billions of dollars are spent in advertising in order to entice you to buy what you do not need and cannot afford. The message is driven into your head that “you’re worth it”, “you deserve a break today”. You are repeatedly told not only on television and radio advertisement that your value as a human being is reflected in the kind of car you drive, the kind of clothes you wear, and the size of your television set. Your lawn cannot look adequate unless you spend on the proper tools and chemicals, your skin is repulsive if you do not use the proper acne cream and moisturizers, your gym membership means nothing if you aren’t dressed in Under Armor. Furthermore, you do not adequately care for your child if you do not dress him in the stylish clothes, nor do you love your dog if you do not buy the stuffed toys in the form of the latest licensed television or movie characters. And yet there are those who blame the government for society’s sense of entitlement.

The difference between the market crash of 1929 and 2008 was that in one you had rich investors jumping out of windows and in the other you had them going to the government for bailouts.

We’ve gone from a nation of bakers, grocers, farmers, etc. to a nation of temp workers.

No politician pushes a law without a general clamor for such a law. And if he does, he’s up to no good. The one thing conservatives and liberals can probably agree upon is that we have enough laws. Laws should only be passed when politicians are responding to voters’ concerns.

Capitalism favors the rat that deserts a sinking ship over the captain who goes down with it.

Debt is good…for bankers, for the IMF, for employers who hold their workers by their economic short and curlies.

The two political parties are like Coke and Pepsi, and they are not against each other so much as they are against a plentiful supply of clean drinking water.

The media is socially liberal, economically conservative, and always pro-war.

The Luddites sought to destroy the machines the developed during the industrial revolution because they resulted in even greater misery for those who did the work, rather than take ownership of them. Today the Tea Party seeks to do the same thing with the government. Rather than take ownership of it, they seek to destroy it. It did not work in the time of the Luddites, nor will it work now.

Politics these days are all about looks, the right smile and the perfect hairstyle. Why it is unlikely today that anyone would vote for a candidate who had wooden teeth.

The invention of money was the creation of a system that decides who has enough food to throw away and who starves. And those with enough of it laugh and say the only alternative to the system we have is for all of us to starve. They see astutely enough that everyone can be guilty of being greedy, but then assume society should be based upon greed since there can be no other human motivation as powerful.

If auto companies are willing to install software to cheat emission standards, what makes you think they don’t spend money to promote junk science?

If you don’t think people should live off the work of others, you should support a 100% inheritance tax.

Politics that appeal to your emotions rather than your intellect are always dangerous. If you feel your pulse start to pound and the anger rise within you, step away.

We are all living in a third world nation now. No country is safe from having its natural resources stripped bare by foreign corporations and sold overseas.

Libertarianism: The mystical belief that corporations care about fairness and the free market.

If patriotism is a scoundrel’s last refuge, then the concept of freedom is his first sales pitch.

Our job creators need to be held accountable. If they are unwilling to create jobs unless the entire country bows down to them as though they were gods to be worshipped, perhaps it is time to take their job creating power away from them and place it into the hands of those who are less selfish and self-serving

How did immigrants assimilate into American culture in the past? It happened when they moved into a neighborhood and the neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves, bringing with them a dish to share. In this way bridges were crossed, and whatever cultural divides that existed were broken down by simple human kindness. We've lost that ability, lost the idea of community based on proximity, and that is a pity.

The problem with capitalism is the problem with anything else: the belief that if some is good then more is better.

Cognitive Dissonance

There are some thoughts that, if held together in the same skull, should simply cause one's brain to fizz over like they were baking soda and vinegar. Or explode, like combining dynamite and a flame. And yet some people are able to carry around within their minds these incompatible, deeply volatile opposites without causing apparent harm, to themselves at least:

 Because welfare is abused, we must make it harder to acquire

                                            Vs.

Because guns are abused, we must not make it harder to acquire them.

It’s not the government’s role to tell me how to live my life.

                                           Vs.

America should have a federal law that says everyone should speak English.

Belief that we are living in the end of times without proof.

                                           Vs.

The need for absolute proof before acting on global warming.

There have been some alleged voting regularities, therefore we should impose somewhat upon people’s right to vote by mandating voter ID.

                                          Vs.

There have been a lot of mass shootings lately, but you better not interfere with my sacred Second Amendment rights.

Politicians know nothing about business and should stop trying to regulate it.

                                          Vs.

Politicians know nothing about education but should hold schools to be accountable.

People who are given everything never learn to work for themselves.

                                          Vs.

We should do away with the inheritance tax.

We believe in American exceptionalism, that it is our nation’s role to lead the way.

                                         Vs.

Why should we be the ones to do something about climate change when China is polluting more than we are?

Climate scientists are being alarmists in order to make money.

                                        Vs.

Oil industry execs are only interested in the unbiased truth.

Wisconsin Republicans should change civil service laws to make it easier to fire people not doing their job.

                                       Vs.

Wisconsin Republicans should get rid of the option to recall the governor.

Slavery happened 150 years ago and blacks should get over it.
                                       Vs.
Don't take my rebel flag away from me!

P.S. If this list is skewed liberal, let it be known I intend a Part 2 of Cognitive Dissonance. 

Random Political Thoughts

On one of my other blogs, The Amazing Morse, I have been posting random thoughts, and they seem to go over well. So I thought I'd post some random thoughts on politics here, items I thought more appropriate for here than there:

The free market is indifferent to democracy just as it is indifferent to the issues of slavery and child labor. It is only in government that democracy exists.

Do not shop at a store where you would not like to work.

The capitalist model presents the choice between mainstream news which tells us nothing and the right wing press which tells us how bad the mainstream media is.

If political ads cause people to turn off their TVs, then they have accomplished something worthwhile.

Forget for a moment all other indicators, economic, etc. If we look at the recent trends (say, the last 20 years) we can clearly see a shift in power. Consistently shifting from the common man to the elite few. Our vote cannot be trusted to us. Our political candidate must be shielded from even the softest of questions from real live people. And if a hard question is dealt a politician, the most banal answers can be given by the politician without the media calling them on it.

Our foreign policy must be conducted in secret by agencies and people beyond the reach of voters or public opinion. In short, the citizenry has been removed from the political process and with it any power that the populace had over their government. And where can freedom exist where there is no leverage or power? In the economic sphere, where we can individually compete against each other, or against giants such as Microsoft, General Motors or McDonald Douglas. Our best course here it to bow before these giants, to serve them that they may show favor on us.

If unions had the power some suggest they have, there never would have been a NAFTA, GAT, or any other free trade agreement, at least not in the forms they were written. In the years since they were instituted, wages have stagnated, and union power has fallen precipitously. But of course unions do not have that kind of power, even with the Democratic Party, as they have been behind most of those trade agreements.

The genius of the right wing media is that they have inoculated their audience against phrases such as “drunk the kool-aid”, “sheeple” and “useful idiots”.

Every major religion understands the concepts of charity, compassion and helping one’s fellow man. Every religion except capitalism, of course, which states that not only is greed a virtue rather than a vice, but that it is the only motivating factor we should trust. And to its god, the market, it would offer the sacrifice of human life. To curry its favor and avoid its wrath, we would evict widows from their homes, send children into factories, our young soldiers to war.

Too often we take for granted our freedoms, forgetting those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for them. So let us today thank the children of Sandy Hook who paid the price for our right to bear arms.

The political debate is neatly divided into two camps, the liberals and conservatives, and any attempt to speak from a different perspective makes you appear to whoever is listening as belonging to the other camp.

I don’t care about your politics so much as your commitment to facts.

The free market is nothing more than the transference of the law of the jungle to the human sphere.

The answer to job creation is simple: open up our borders so the increase in workers lowers the cost of labor, making it more affordable to hire workers. If this is not the answer you want to hear, then maybe we should be asking a different question.

As in a communist system, where most who live under it are not philosophically true communists, so too in a capitalist system most of the citizens are not capitalists. Most merely wish to live their lives and pursue their professions, whether it be teacher, electrician, etc. Most care more about family and friends, religion or passions, such as film, music, cars, what have you.

Being liberal has always been the fashionable choice of those in the media, but when push comes to shove, they know who writes their checks. 

Divide And Conquer

Here’s something I wrote in May of ’95 that still seems relevant and if I may say so, prescient. It was written in reaction to ideas dominant in higher education at the time. Looking at it now, I see it is woefully incomplete in accounting for the racism that still exists, perhaps naively so. But it speaks from a point that cuts past the liberal/conservative dialog, which had never been helpful. What do you think? 

Divide And Conquer

According to current ways of looking at things, Oprah Winfrey is an oppressed individual. Apparently, the color of her skin (not to mention her gender) offsets the fact that she takes in a hundred million dollars a year. The unemployed Appalachian white male, however, is “empowered”, someone raking in the benefits of a prejudiced system. The incongruity of this juxtaposition goes to show the limits of the current prominent paradigm. Using nationality as a way of categorizing people is accepting the paradigm of the oppressor. Emphasizing racial themes increases racial tension, resulting in tearing apart a majority that should be working together.

A big part of the reason that prejudice exists is because of cultural and economic differences, especially in regard to the African-American. Statistics show that a larger percentage of African-American males are incarcerated than are represented in society. If we look at this statistic through a racial paradigm, we can choose only two options: one, that black males are more likely to commit crimes, or two, that the white-male dominated system is more likely to incarcerate black males. Either way we increase racial tension without relieving the problem. If we choose a different paradigm, however, we see race as an incidental issue. Poverty is a major determinant in crime. An inordinate amount of Blacks are poor. The causal relationship is obvious. While race still plays a part in this paradigm, we can put it into its historical perspective by stating that slavery and bigotry have caused the poverty which now represses the African-American. In this view, we see a greater commonality between the unemployed white Appalachian and the urban black, even though they themselves may not see it.

While it is easy to say that hard work can help the ghetto dweller or the unemployed Appalachian to succeed, the cold hard facts are that the great number of them do not. The occasional success story does not compensate for the countless lives which never had the opportunity to grow. This is not a racial issue. If we were to go into the slums today and make sure that an equal portion of whites lived with violence, poverty and hopelessness, it would not ease the suffering one iota of the people who would still live there. Poverty, not racism, is the issue. Racism is perpetuated by poverty rather than the other way around. If we truly wish to deal with and overcome racism, we must ensure that all people in this nation are given equal opportunity.

Categorizing people by their race or background is a legacy we have acquired from the likes of slave owners who wished to rationalize their inhuman treatment of fellow human beings. We cannot “fight discrimination with discrimination” as Stanley Fish says. Any power grab by a minority group is bound to trigger off a backlash of the majority. Those who erroneously believe in Fish’s assertion are giving fuel to the Rush Limbaughs and hate mongers. In fighting prejudice, it is crucial to avoid accepting the prejudiced categories that divide us.