Bullying – THE HUMAN CLIMATE

Think about it for a second. Vulnerability can mean being in contact with a sense of helplessness. Hopefully, this can lead to memories of despair that once upon a time may have felt lethal and endless, but now hopefully don’t have to remain so.

People who love Trump seem very set on not only worshipping him but on defending him and identifying with him. If Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious billionaire who is alleged to have pandered in sex trafficking with under age girls committed suicide as he did, and has been linked to Trump at least in the past, the Trump supporters’ script is already written. Trump is an innocent guy whom liberals love to hate and accuse. There is a conspiracy about, that aims only to smear him.

Even people who allege Christian values of decency and morality seem to skip the rules when it comes to their leader. Well, you know, everyone does stuff and, look; he never said he was perfect. If his treatment of women has been demeaning and degrading and compromising and ugly, well look again; he is human and Christianity is all about pardon.

I think some of us need to remember how vulnerable it can be to seek the truth. Optimally we start out believing in the perfection of our leaders, our parents, and our moral commandments. What starts out as a supreme set of rules, gets to be questioned. Whereas when we are young we need to idealize leaders so as to have stability, hopefully we grow to become more independent and more able to rely on our own judgments and the supports of others who can help us without smothering us or owning our intellect and our souls.

Some of us get stuck in arrested development. And it is not always the obviously weak and needy among us. Sometimes it’s the bully or the grandiose one or the one who seems to be able to fire anyone—someone like Jeffrey Epstein for example. The bully has been bullied in the past, but here I want to talk to the rest of us, those who get enmeshed in personality worship.

The personality worship we are witnessing in the time of Trump for many makes the truth irrelevant. It makes evidence a figment of the imagination of the other side. It makes knowing about anything that might puncture our worship of our higher authority, tantamount to feeling like everything is crumbling. In other words it is too scary.

How can we be brave if we can’t face the truth? How can we be brave if we can’t stand to admit that we are scared to face the truth, at the very least? After all we depend on a structure, a set of values, some things and people on whom we can rely. When things become chaotic we shudder. And when we learn that the people we believed in have lied to us all along, we can feel truly downtrodden. In other words, we can feel not only betrayed but also like fools. And we can feel confused as to where to turn.

Of course we can go from one leader to another, from one religion to another, from one cult to another. And if we should decide to really want the truth, we need to be supported by people who won’t deride us for having been naïve and wrong.

This is a big question we should be asking more often. Do we want the evidence, even if it implicates those we love or those we have believed in. Do we want to listen to our children who tell us priests have abused them, or other religious or scholastic authorities or sports coaches? Do we want to look at each other and put down our figurative arms and say we want to know the truth about all the things—the racism, the corruption, the inequalities, and the fact that people in power love to see us fighting with each other? Do we want to face that each and every one of us is prejudiced to some degree and that we will to some degree have to interrupt our certainty to weather the storms of what it can feel like to doubt—not only others but ourselves?

It’s not an easy choice because hate infuses us with an awful lot of adrenaline. Discovering the truth, taking off our masks and giving up the scripts already written eons ago, can be pretty thrilling as well. Just saying. And, just hoping.

#Trump

#Vulnerability

#Truth

Okay, so you get the gist. I loved “The Best of Enemies, which I saw today in a local theater outside of my usual purview.

Not only did I love it and everything about it, including acting, directing and music, but also I experienced it as profoundly moving.

I am white; let’s get that straight at the outset. So I suppose with the flutter that has existed about the allegedly self-congratulatory theme of “Green Book” (a point of view with which I totally disagree), this film is going to hit the charts as something thin on substance and fat on self-flattery.

I want to say right away that I’m sick of the film and political correctness police telling me or anyone else how to feel about a film. Not only do they say how to feel or how to think but they block your emotional arteries so you can’t simmer with the ideas and emotions triggered in the experience.

A charrette, I found out tonight, is defined as follows: a meeting in which all stakeholders in a project attempt to resolve conflicts and map solutions. It’s pretty radical, in that it was radical for then and it would be radical—if necessary—for now.

The film takes place in the early 70’s in North Carolina where communication between black people and white people is all but impossible. Sam Rockwell is the Ku Klux Clan leader in the town where some issues of race come to a head. I don’t want to spoil this for you so I’ll leave the rest to your movie going outing.

The unlikely meeting of minds and hearts that we see in the film, could even happen today, if we don’t stay manipulated by people in power who want to see us fighting all the time. See the movie: you will see this is possible. Corny and sappy and sentimental or not, it is true. We need to start to see that not only is our taste manipulated but also we are encouraged by media and politicians to stay on the media high that an addiction to fighting maintains. For the first time in many moons I felt (I really felt it) tonight that listening to the other sides—having to sit at dining tables with them, having to see them as human—might be transforming.

I admit it: I was immersed in the performance of Sam Rockwell. But I was equally enthralled by the performance of Teraji P Henson. If it makes me a racist to mention him first, what else is new? Of course I’m racist: man, I’m white in America, how else could it be?

I have my own affiliations with that about which I’m writing.. One involves having been intimidated and traumatized (yes, even moi) by a level brutality of verbal and emotional assault centering on insult and invalidation.

I am not in a freedom movement or claiming status as a victim. But I can afford, I’m coming to think, feeling assertive about my right to feel my own feelings and think my own thoughts.

One of the crucial lessons we need on bullying in general is: Even if the person intimidating you or insulting the s—t out of you, yells louder or even sounds smarter, it doesn’t mean he/she/they are right.

We live in a land that is so divided. And beyond that there is really more pressure than we may realize to agree with the liberal or the conservative or the black or the white caucus. Sometimes we lose ourselves; we lose our voices and we lose our right to vote, not only for an elected official, but also for our taste in a film and the thoughts that can come from that. There is healing to be had here.

See the movie, and let me know what you think and how you feel about it. And try, as hard as you can, not to let the voices all around you dictate to you what the experience should be.

#thebestofenemies

#moviecritics

#bullying

Tag: Bullying

Are Trump Supporters Too Vulnerable for the Truth?