"Dad, don't tell them anything about me anymore, even if I'm dying"

[BusynMember]

It isn't only that we are fun to hurt, Serenity. It is that it is riveting, it is addictive, it is the purpose at the heart of the thing, for them to hurt us, in particular. Or, to hurt whoever their identified victim is, in particular. To the point that your sister convinced someone else to post here as herself.

Oh, I love this. It's so true. I don't know...she either convinced somebody else or it was her. Either way, it's no fun for her since I won't play anymore. I have not been to any site but this one since my New Years Resolution. I think it drives her nuts when I don't read what she puts online and that's part of her game...to try to hurt me. She can't if I won't let her. It's all up to me.

 

[BusynMember]

The banality of evil.

I don't like the word "evil." It is so all-encompassing.

I prefer bad.

At any rate, none of us deserve to be treated badly and none of us should listen to people's words if those words are an attempt to make us feel small. It doesn't matter who they are. We are in charge of who communicates with us. It is our choice.

ignore, ignore, ignore.Every time I follow this to the letter, I get better. EVERY TIME. Try it.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

When you get right down to it, we are the ones who gave them whatever power they held over us. Once we see the pointlessness of those kinds of relationship...I don't know. Speaking of my own sister and even, of my mom, they ~ the whole thing matters less.

It isn't that I am angry. Well you know Serenity, it is like you posted to me the other day. A feeling of surprise that what I seem to feel is mostly apathy.

Very good word.

Apathy.

Quiet.

Looking forward from something that happened once, a long time ago, for all of my life that suddenly has no bearing on my life.

I am glad I wanted to have the dinner. But that is for me.

Cedar

 

[BusynMember]

On another note, bullies need an audience. If we won't watch them or let them part the curtains, that spoils their fun.And it IS fun for bullies to bully. DON'T LET THEM.

The social media has made it easy to bully without face time, even if the bully says "I am shunning you" In whatever words they want to use, such as "no contact which equals a shun." Don't go to their FB pages. Yes, it's easy, even if they block you. I know. When I was still peaking, it wasn't hard to see the blocked FBs, but for what purpose? Do NOT read or go to any internet sites they use. Don't look for them ANYWHERE and run if you find them because THEY won't leave. They want to hoover us back in, even if only to read the mean things they write about us to anonymous forums. DO NOT READ WHAT THEY SAY. They are counting on us to read what they say and be hurt again. Their purpose in life is to hurt.

There is a site I used long ago and for a long time and she found it and posts there now. I decided I won't go there anymore or look there. I never go to the Borderline (BPD) site she used to post on, maybe she was banned and needed a new place, but I refuse to read anything written by her. It is my choice to disengage.

It is your choice too.

We don't have to know what the bullies are doing or saying. To do so, is a WIN for them and a LOSS for us.

I want to win for the rest of my life. I lost enough. I will not engage. Ever.

 

[Copabanana]

It is that it is riveting, it is addictive, it is the purpose at the heart of the thing, for them to hurt us, in particular.

Because they need us in our place in order for them to feel OK about themselves. They become anxious when we do not know our place and role and function. Our function: prey. Our place: outside. Our role: Anything they want us to do.

If we stray, their worlds are upset. They need to get us back in our proper place. In their own minds. At their behest.

Why destroy the reputation of the Greek Orthodox priest to people who never knew him, who would never know him? And yet, the lady driver too was targeted, used, ridiculed...but again, what is the win?

Look at it in light of what I wrote above. We are a role to them. Their personalities are such that they need to feel as if they have this control in their lives. Anybody can fulfill our role (although we are the primary actors and the most satisfying targets.)

1. Outside. I type of shunning. Rejection. Marginalization.
2. They can do anything they want to us.
3. Under their control to define.
4, Demeaned.

Fill in the blank, Cedar: Priest, lady driver, you, me, Serenity. It is all the same thing.

COPA

 

[BusynMember]

When you get right down to it, we are the ones who gave them whatever power they held over us. Once we see the pointlessness of those kinds of relationship...I don't know. Speaking of my own sister and even, of my mom, they ~ the whole thing matters less.

It isn't that I am angry. Well you know Serenity, it is like you posted to me the other day. A feeling of surprise that what I seem to feel is mostly apathy.

Hurray!!!!

Apathy doesn't hurt. And, Cedar, the surprise should be gone by now. We've trashed it all out and we know what they want from us. They want to hurt us. If we ignore them, they can't.


I believe in ignore. I would not have shunned on my own, but since they want to shun me? I can wipe them off my life's board with a rag. *Poof* I know nothing about them. I really don't know what they do these days. And I think Dad now understands that they can't know what I do. And that's the way it should be when somebody is being mean to you. Don't enable them to do what they do....bully. Ignore, ignore, ignore...yes, even that tempting social media. If we feed into their tricks, we enable them, the same as enabling a drug addict. They are addicted to us and causing us pain.

 

[Copabanana]

How awful for you.

And for your real father, too.

He was himself powerless to protect you.

Cedar, I think when you think about my father, you are projecting your image of your own father, or your wishes about him. For what he might have been, in an ideal sense.

I am willfully not going there, with my own father, because I fear if I did my whole life would be over. That I would never, ever recover from grief.

I idealized my father, too. He was the one who would come back and protect me. Take me away.

One of the tragedies of my early life is that when he came back I saw I had invented him. He was nothing like I knew he would be. The whole was a fantasy. He degraded me. He was sadistic. He was really as degraded a person as you can imagine.

He could really have cared less. My father was not somebody who thought about my welfare. My well-being. M is. M is my real father. He is my hero. He stepped into the role of my father and he is completing it for me. How I love him for this.

I forget what I intended to say here so I will say something else. While my father was still married to my mother he took me on dates with other women.

The best thing about my Dad is that he was handsome. And charming. And dashing. He was the kind of man that cut a figure. Is that the saying? Both of my parents were physically attractive. They were charming. They were really very much alike. Except that my mother was stronger. A survivor.

COPA

 

[BusynMember]

While my father was still married to my mother he took me on dates with other women.

Wow. Just...wow.

I'm so sorry.

My father was not there as much as he should have been, but I have never really been that angry at him. I knew he loved me and I saw Mother's abuse of him (and sometimes he abused her, but she usually started it) and I understood why he wasn't at home much. I wasn't home much either once I could escape. I get it. We were the scapegoats. My father did take me to his store a lot, which I enjoyed. He had a pharmacy. He drove me places with my best friend before I could drive. He did not have a golden child, a lost child or a scape goat.
I did not idolize him. Like everyone, I saw his faults, as well as everyone else's including my own. But I loved him. And when my parents were fighting when I was a kid, secretly, in my head, I was cheering, "Go, Dad!!! Go, go, go!" (This is the truth).

Copa, again I am sorry your father was arrogant enough to think you could handle seeing him cheating. Ugh. We are all so lucky we did not catch our FOO's sick diseases.

 

[Copabanana]

Copa, again I am sorry your father was arrogant enough to think you could handle seeing him cheating. Ugh. We are all so lucky we did not catch our FOO's sick diseases.

Imagine how confused I was.

Perhaps they were separated. Because there were brief periods of separation. My mother sometimes talked about, in the years before she died, her abortion. She went to Oregon where abortions were then legal, accompanied by my grandmother. She had been pregnant while they were separated.

Imagine that. I am not commenting here on abortion. But that was a child of a marriage. That had become inconvenient. So it was gone. A child who would have been in age between my sister and I. They were to reconcile.

But I could never have understood why my father was with other women. If the date in question, At age 3, maybe. Because I was 4 when my sister was born.

That I remember is itself indicative of how traumatic and confusing it was. I can never know if this scene I remember, in particular, I remember being at a picnic, on a blanket, at a park, on SF Bay. Maybe a place called Marina Green.

My Dad never understood boundaries. Remember the "Copa has no boundaries," comment? I wonder why.

COPA

 

[BusynMember]

Perhaps they were separated.

So what?
You don't take a child on a date (shudder).

 

[Copabanana]

Hannah Arendt is who coined the term "banality of evil" in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. These are quotes from a wikipedia article.

Arendt insists that moral choice remains even under totalitarianism, and that this choice has political consequences even when the chooser is politically powerless:

"Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere....

Arendt mentions, as a case in point, Denmark:

One is tempted to recommend the story as required reading in political science for all students who wish to learn something about the enormous power potential inherent in non-violent action and in resistance to an opponent possessing vastly superior means of violence.

It was not just that the people of Denmark refused to assist in implementing the Final Solution, as the peoples of so many other conquered nations had been persuaded to do (or had been eager to do) — but also, that when the Reich cracked down and decided to do the job itself it found that its own personnel in Denmark had been infected by this and were unable to overcome their human aversion with the appropriate ruthlessness, as their peers in more cooperative areas had."

I have underlined this remarkable thing. That not only did Denmark as a collectivity oppose the mandate of the Nazis to evil, that their people refused...rendered the Nazi's who had come to Denmark to impose the ruthless Nazi regime...unable to overcome their own basic humanity, which is an aversion to ruthlessness.

Was Nietsche Correct, that loves comes first? Did Denmark prove it? A naturalistic experiment?

The Banality of Evil I think comes from the sense that Eichmann was exceedingly normal. In all respects, unremarkable. Examined by 6 psychologists or psychiatrists in Israel he was seen to be average and without psychopathology by all. He justified everything he did as going along with the norms of the group he was in.

As did our sisters.

Are we Denmark? Is that our commonality?

COPA

 

[Copabanana]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews

This is a link to a wikipedia article about Denmark's occupation by the Nazis and their stance towards their Jewish population and their persecution. It is fascinating.

I will cite a few remarkable things.

The Danish Underground acted to spirit almost all of their country's Jews out of the country into Switzerland, which was neutral. Almost 10,000 people.

When the less than 1000 Jews that remained were put in concentration camps, the Danish government intervened to negotiate their release by the German government.

Highly placed German Nazi's in Denmark knew that they could not go to that place where they went in other nations they occupied...because they sensed that Denmark whether it's people, or leaders or both...would revolt and oppose them. They could not and did not test that...they did not go there...in Denmark. The Germans in Denmark backed down.

Wow. That is moral authority!

COPA

 

[BusynMember]

The Banality of Evil

I believe the Holocaust and Hitler were true evil.

That's why I don't like using that term for others who are not able to be that evil, even if maybe they could be had they the power. I think doing so desensitizes us to people like Hitler, who can be described as nothing other than evil...ALL BAD.

 

[BusynMember]

My Dad never understood boundaries. Remember the "Copa has no boundaries," comment? I wonder why.

right there with ya, Copa.

Our family was not taught boundaries. My brother listened to my phone conversations and read my diary, for example. I took my sister's camera when I visited a college campus, although my sister didn't want me to take it. Then I broke it. Nobody ever got into trouble for crossing boundaries. Or for anything. Mother yelled like a banshee, but never followed through on discipline, and she was the parent in charge, right or wrong. We lived in an anarchy.

Oh, yeah. When I got my period, which embarassed me, my mother was on the phone to my grandmother and father to tell them in a loud voice that I could hear. She also regularly told me stuff about others in the family before her shun. My grandmother did too. Her attitude was, "There are no secrets in a family." The way the gossip flew, there were no boundaries in MY family.

No boundaries, chaos, too much information, etc. in my lovely FOO.

 

[New Leaf]

Thanks for the share, Copa, I never knew this. I really like Denmark.

Wow. That is moral authority!

I wonder, too, about people who had the moral standards to resist Naziism, even if it meant being sent to the camps, or death.

leafy

 

[Copabanana]

I believe the Holocaust and Hitler were true evil.

Nobody who is a moral and thinking person could dispute this.

The argument of the book as I understand it is that evil can present itself in an innocuous, nondescript way--like some conformist official who is going along with the status quo, following orders or rules. Some nobody. An evil person can be somebody weak...or average...who instead of speaking up, and saying NO...can do unspeakable evil.

To say somebody banal...did evil, did bad...does not minimize evil. In fact it makes it even scarier, more ominous. Because this means that the evil doer can be in our family, co-workers, neighbors, ourselves. It means we have personal responsibility always to be vigilant.

I did an evil thing once. I went along with it. I will post about it later. I was in high school. I do not think permanent harm came to the person, thank goodness. But I remembered my whole life and the memory made me stronger so that I would never, again do anything like it.

COPA

 

[Copabanana]

That's why I don't like using that term for others who are not able to be that evil, even if maybe they could be had they the power. I think doing so desensitizes us to people like Hitler, who can be described as nothing other than evil

Other thinking people believe this, too.

You see, I think I believe differently. In my work, not just in prisons, but in other bureaucracies, even schools, I saw a great number of bad things. You do not have to kill somebody outright to do great evil. You can kill their souls, their opportunities, their hopes, their dignity, their sense of safety. What may seem like unimportant acts, ruin lives outright.

Should we not name as evil these acts (which are really moral choices) that cause such irreparable harm? Is not doing so overlooking them, failing to call out their perpetrators?

In the lifespans of my people, I will confine that to my grandparents through me, my people who I knew and lived with--there have been many genocides. The destruction of the Jewish communities of Europe may have been the largest, and most visible here in the west but it was one of many.

I was a very shallow young woman. I remember I attended a large conference in the late 70's during the dictatorships in Latin America. At that time what was happening was little known. I was so focused upon myself and my petty little wants, it may have moved me some, but not much. Sometimes, I cannot believe I turned into a reasonably substantial person.

You may think I am being hard on myself. I am not. Just telling the truth.

COPA

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

The banality of evil rings true for me.

It is a slippery thing, an easy thing, to slide a little in one direction or the other and then, justify it. The next time, that pattern of justification allows us to slide a little further in a direction we know we don't want to go but somehow, there we are. It is harder to pull ourselves back. We find ourselves taking positions or engaging in activities we are not proud of or happy about or that we don't find meaningful anymore because to do them, or to hold those positions, is the "right" thing.

And we can lose ourselves that way, too.

Or it can go the other way. We can become rigidly self-righteous because we fear the little slip, and find that our lives have become narrow, rigid, judgmental creations that are nothing like we intended them to be.

We slide into abusive relationships that way, too.

It isn't like we set out for that to happen.

One day we wake up, and there we are.

***

Whatever our intentions in the beginning, things are always in flux in everything we do. It is difficult in a thousand ways every day to respond well, and to know how to make that distinction between what is actually right and what is where selling out begins. That is why they say pride is the hardest thing. Pride, or the need of self-esteem, make it so hard to admit to ourselves that we were wrong, that we need to change. We have posted before about things like racism and exclusion and ridicule (and slavery and cruelty in all its forms) and how each of those evil things, so clearly wrong in their fruition, begin so subtly that we might find ourselves laughing at the hurtful joke, or allowing the commonly used term to be spoken without protesting it. Eventually, we slip into walking past the beggar, past the animal mistreated, with averted eyes. We say: Here is Social Services number.

I have said those words to my own children. What they mean is: Go away. I don't want to know. I don't know how to help. But the other side of it is that if we do help, it turns into the ugliness of enabling. If we do help, it turns our children into people who know only that if the story is bad enough, and if they are blameless enough, we will pay.

How could this have happened.

There is no clear answer.

We make a choice.

Then, we justify having made it.

Every day, each of us makes thousands of seemingly insignificant choices that lead toward either a slippery place or a rigid one. The most difficult things to maintain I think are openness and flexibility; are to give up being "right" or being "kind" or whatever it is we chose as our moral compass without just giving up on ourselves altogether. Think how hard it is for all of us to see what is happening with our kids and not slide into enabling or into judgment. And then, wherever we started, into a kind of condemnation we do not even know is there.

I do that. Slip into condemning my own children to justify my discomfort. Or condemning myself, which doesn't help anything either. I am doing it now, with family of origin issues. The choice is clearly them, or me. I can believe in that dinner imagery so firmly that I excuse every wrongness they indulge in thereby encouraging more of the same bad behaviors on their part. (Which is what I did do.) And they disrespected me, hurt my D H, and then...hurt my children with their dirty, nasty little way they see everything and everyone.

And I did not stop them.

The banality of evil.

No one means to do wrong things...but then how is it my mother did what she did?

I don't know.

Here is an example: I wanted so much to have been a great parent. At first, I was certain I was at fault when the kids began acting out. Somehow, over the years that followed, I began taking a weird kind of identity from long-suffering martyrdom. In my secret heart, I began making ten thousand reasons why I had been a great parent after all because just look how kind I am, today.

And that was wrong.

But I slid into it so easily.

And it wasn't really wrong, but it was very wrong.

In reality, a great parent is a human person who empathizes and respects and believes we can do it. And who takes care of themselves so we don't have to.

And whose eyes light up when they see you.

***

So, then, here we are trying to figure out how to reclaim ourselves (to come out of denial about our own parents) without condemning either them or ourselves.

Or our sibs, if they have been victims or victimized by the negative, hurtful things that seem to happen routinely in our families of origin.

Routinely.

Little choices that add up into shunning. Something not evil at first, but grown into a very evil thing, justified in so many ways. Or, a mother like my own mother, eye-rolling and behind-the-back talking about everyone and making everything just a little worse instead of just a little better and maybe, not even aware of it.

Except that she was aware of it.

That is what I think about when I think about the banality of evil. Somehow it happens that our best intentions lead places we could not have foreseen. So much of the time, like it happened with me and the way I was seeing everything to justify myself somehow where what happened with my kids is concerned, I was ~ I don't know. I stopped holding faith with them when I should never have been holding faith with them in the first place.

Wrong is wrong.

I should have said so.

Maybe this wouldn't have happened.

But I was more concerned about not turning into my mother, about being kind, about believing we could change, could become anything we believed we could.

That was my evil, closed reflection world. I got to be the martyred kind person victim. How is that helpful. It isn't. Because of my upbringing, I could not see what was what and say so.

Okay. So, I am circling again.

It scares me that we fall into evil things without recognizing them as such until the thing is a shunning, or a concentration camp, or racism or ageism or its opposite.

The banality of evil.

Cedar

I actually meant to address the banality of evil in the sense of the mindset of power-over and how we see that in our own families and what to do about it or how at least to see it, which is a beginning.

I was distracted by my own stuff instead, but that is okay.

The win in power over is a ridiculous thing and yet, everyone wants power, everyone seems to want to know who is at the top of the hierarchy of power. to the point that we have fancy things for those who can afford it and special clothing which indicates a caste system though we refuse to acknowledge it and etc.

Ha! I am still not getting to the point I thought I was making.

Rats.