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Monday, February 27, 2017

To Err Is Human, To Forgive Is Dangerous If They're Not Sorry

When I was somewhere between kindergarten and third grade, I vaguely remember some incident where the teacher made a kid apologize to me. She then turned to me and said "now what do you say?" When I didn't answer she said "you're supposed to say 'you're forgiven.'"

I looked at her and said "But I don't forgive him, because he's not sorry. He's just saying it because you made him." I'll never forget the look on the teacher's face. It was like somebody had clued her in to a part of the human psyche she'd either forgotten about or had never acknowledged. The script she was used to wasn't being followed. The motions she'd been conditioned to go through were being rejected. All of a sudden, she kind of stood there and questioned reality as she knew it.

This was my first clue that forgiveness is as much a part of the bullshit children get spoonfed by their adult caretakers as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It's an arbitrary social convention that everyone follows, but they have no clue why. Other than "it's rude if you don't." It's a rehearsed interaction much the same way that pleasantries and small-talk are. Go off-script? Everyone loses their minds.

As children, we're conditioned that "you're forgiven" is simply the right response to "I'm sorry." And you say you're sorry when you do something bad so that the other person says "you're forgiven" and it's all forgotten about.

It's a ridiculous kindergarten ritual that kids are taught, and after a while the words themselves cease to have any meaning beyond "this is what you say because it's what you've been taught to say." Sorta like those Berlitz phrasebooks. Only you're learning how to phone it in instead of how to hail a taxi in Spanish.

As a result, I've found people by and large view forgiveness as something they're entitled to just for saying they're sorry. Hell, we even call these rehearsed phrases "magic words." You speak them and they get you what you want. So all too often, people will treat them as such. They won't apologize out of genuine remorse, but only because they're expected to. And in return, they expect to be forgiven.

People in these situations don't deserve your forgiveness.

Because what forgiveness is, is granting absolution. Declaring whatever incident that happened "water under the bridge" and returning your relationship to the status quo. This works when someone is genuinely remorseful, because they're going to remember what they did to upset you and not do it again, because they care about not hurting you. The status quo actually means something to them.

But when the person doesn't have genuine remorse? When they're not sorry for what they did, just that they got caught and you're angry? Forgiveness is worse than wasted on these people. Forgiving someone who isn't really sorry rewards their behavior. It effectively tells them they can hurt you, but as long as they say the magic words, there will be no lasting consequences.

That? Is a very dangerous thing to teach someone.

And this doesn't even get into situations of abuse. Far too many therapists and counselors see forgiveness as a necessary step in the healing process, and impart upon their patients the idea that they will never truly heal until they forgive their abuser (whether they get an apology or not). The thing is, not everyone can do this. Even the kindest and most empathic person has limits. And trying to force a person who has already suffered rank abuse over their limit -- trying force them through cajoling and coercion to forgive someone they simply can't -- is going to do nothing but re-traumatize them. They're going to see themselves as a failure all over again.

You are not, under any circumstances, obligated to forgive. Just like the opposite of hatred isn't love, but indifference, the opposite of a grudge is not forgiveness; it's release. You can leave the anger and the hurt behind by simply getting to the point of not giving a shit anymore.

The decision to forgive is as personal as the decision to have sex. If you do decide to do it, make sure it's because you want to and not because you feel it's expected. Going through the motions is just as bad in both scenarios.

Monday, February 13, 2017

Don't Fear Trump; Fear His Allies

By now, three weeks into Trump's ridiculous shitshow of a presidency, I think there are two glaringly obvious things we need to digest as a country:

1) Resistance is working. The marches, the deluge of calls from constituents, it's working. Betsy DeVos was only confirmed by a tie-breaking vote from the Vice-President because two Republican Senators voted against her. Something that has literally never happened before in a cabinet confirmation.

2) Donald Trump is not who we should be looking at as the real danger. It's the people he's surrounded himself with.

Trump is reminiscent of Poo-Bah from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Pompous, narcissistic, strutting around like the peacock with the biggest feathers and bestowing important-sounding titles on himself to cover up his ineffectual bumbling. The only powers he really has are to sign things and appoint people, and most of those things he signs must be approved by Congress before they even see his desk. Executive orders are really the only place in which he has any teeth, and as we've seen, even those are subject to judicial review.

It all goes back to his actual official title: President of the United States. He presides over the process of governing, and even his say isn't final; laws he signs can be overturned by the Supreme Court if challenged far enough, and his veto can be overridden by Congress with enough votes. He's not a monarch, no matter how many golden toilets he owns.

And unlike his more shrewd predecessors, he's a complete outsider to the governmental process. He quite literally hasn't got the foggiest clue what he's doing. This is a guy who, despite claiming to be the world's greatest businessman, doesn't even read shit before he signs it (literally failing How to Do Business and Not Fuck Up Royally 101). He gets his advice and strategy directly from cable news, and when something doesn't go his way, he whines like a pre-teen douchebag in a Halo tournament on Twitter. At best, he's a useful idiot to the people with the potential to do the real damage.

Trump is that old codger in the nursing home who will sign anything you put in front of him, just because he likes seeing his signature on things. It makes him feel important. Except instead of birthday and Christmas checks to his grandchildren, it's laws and executive orders and military action approvals that affect millions.

It's hard to describe these kinds of people, who are such malignant narcissists and pure fucking evil on every level, but the only reason they haven't gone full comic book villain and subjugated the entire planet is because frankly, they're too fucking stupid to manage such a task. It's why I don't particularly like the comparisons to Hitler; Hitler was able to do the horrifying, world-changing things he did because he was the triple threat of narcissistic, ambitious, and intelligent. Trump is more like Mussolini. Brutal, charismatic, and an utter fucking moron.

The real dangers of his presidency are the people he's appointed to his cabinet, and especially the Congress that confirmed them.

The President was intended to be a check on Congress' power. They can propose and approve all the bills they like, but unless the President signs them or pockets them for ten days in an active session, they don't become law. Think of the President kind of like quality control and safety inspector at a factory, while Congress is the assembly line. The President's job is to approve the product for distribution, or send it back to the assembly line with a list of reasons why it's defective.

If the QA/safety inspector will rubber stamp anything without actually inspecting it? Then the factory can produce whatever it wants, no matter how defective or dangerous. Trump is the QA inspector who is too busy worrying about his side business to care what comes off the assembly line, and has delegated that task to his aides and cabinet. Which leaves them and Congress with an extraordinary amount of power.

That's the reason why, despite committing multiple impeachable offenses, nobody in Congress has actually made a move to draw up those articles; Trump, being both a narcissistic, attention-starved toddler as well as rock fucking stupid, is the perfect broken valve through which a Republican Congress can pass all the shitty bills it wants. Pence isn't nearly so pliable, having real experience in public office and thus knowing how to read things before he signs them. Congress won't impeach him unless he does something which makes even that kind of a payoff not worth their while anymore.

The people Trump has chosen for his cabinet are right out of the narcissist's playbook. People who flatter him and who think much like he does. He's used to surrounding himself with spineless yes-men who, like the residents of Peaksville, OH, will tell their child overlord whatever he wants to hear in order to keep their jobs. And he fancies the U.S. government to be merely an extension of his business empire. Ergo, he expects the people he appoints to do whatever he says (despite that the opposite is literally the function of the cabinet; above all else, they're supposed to warn the President when a bill on his desk is a bad idea).

These yes-men that Trump thinks he's got in his pocket? Include Steve Bannon, an avowed white supremacist who literally wants to destroy the government. Jeff Sessions, a guy deemed too racist to be a federal judge under one of the most racist Presidential administrations in recent memory (Reagan, 1986). Rex Tillerson, an oil tycoon who was awarded the Russian Order of Friendship and is a close buddy of Putin. These are the people who have Trump's ear. The people he trusts to put stuff in front of him to sign, like the old senile codger he's turning out to be.

And just like the guy in the nursing home, he's not willfully signing away power of attorney to his eldest child that just replaced all his heart medication with Tic-Tacs; he simply signed whatever he was told to sign. Trump is hardly the danger, here. The real danger is the people around him who know exactly how to play him to do their awful bidding.

Those are the people we need to vote the fuck out in 2018. Provided we still have a country by then.