#- havoc (whether it be personal or environmental) and the other fixing it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mystixxspirit · 5 years ago

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The level of fear, uncertainty, and anger we are currently facing is worse than the majority of us have experienced in our lifetimes, we are facing a global crisis not only physically, but also mentally, emotionally & spiritually. COVID-19 is wreaking havoc on every aspect of our existence and with every life that is claims, another dangling thread of hope diminishes entirely. The collective is rapidly descending into chaos, with an array of absurd behaviors that on first glance, would, of course, make us assume the world is ending. Stockpiling toilet rolls, blasting Sally from next door all over social media because she's been out 3 times this week and never comes back with any shopping, being zonked on a screen 20 hours a day because "there's nothing better to do", making sure there is always have a shopping bag in your pocket when you go out for your daily exercise in fear of being questioned.

FEAR, one of the largest psychological factors we face in these unprecedented times, something so powerful, that when faced and embraced for what it is, can contribute unfathomably towards a heavenly shift in our own inner world & the world surrounding us. Now, let's quickly clear up what is meant here by FEAR; False Evidence Appearing Real, so for example; amongst many reasons, some people are pushed to panic buy because in some minds projection of the future essentials are going to 'run out', the virus will be so lethal we won't be able to keep shops operating, or simply put, things will never get better. Let's be brutally realistic, the probability of those things actually happening is incredibly slim.

The world is not ending, however, the threats we are facing are still very real, dangerous and well yes, they are extremely frightening. However, our downfall as a society will be our inability to distinguish against rational fright; a reaction to the chaos we are faced with and; an illusion presenting itself as a threat. I'm not saying this pandemic is an illusion and we do not need to take precaution to protect those at risk, neither am I trying to downplay the severity of the situation, I'm merely trying to bring attention to the invisible FEAR machine that many of us so easily fall victim of and how it causes us unnessecary problems and keeps us enslaved in a repetitive cycle.

Humanity has a choice, we can paralyze ourselves in the endless stream of what ifs, or we can ground ourselves in the present moment and seize the moment for what it really is; a well needed global break. A period to put life on hold, to reflect, be still & look inwards, an opportunity to connect with ourselves and our own personal wisdom.

This is not as easily said than done for a lot of people who are suffering and truth be told, we have ALL lost something due to this disaster, been affected by it in some way, and we are allowed to grieve. We are allowed to feel confused, sad, isolated, lonely, broken, lost, angry, scared, worried. But we must not allow ourselves to be consumed by these emotions, let them run our state of being. Instead, we must acknowledge their root cause, the anxieties and underlying beliefs attached to them and know that this too, shall pass. After all, our lives are merely a fragment of time, experienced on a rock hurtling through space amidst vast nothingness.

Everything exists within a state of duality, negative can not exist without positive, even though there doesn't seem like a lot of positive going around currently, there is, so much potential for good to shine. The world is healing. The planet itself is breathing properly again for the first time in any of our lifetimes. Billions of usually very busy individuals globally are faced with a rare opportunity to actually rest and heal themselves, to reflect inwards and actually spend quality time with themselves.

Many of us have been blessed with a well-needed break. It's up to those who aren't the wonderful keyworkers keeping us all together, to honor the people who are under an insane amount of pressure right now, by making the most out of this in whatever way they can. Whether this is as simple as just taking the time to count your blessings, appreciate who you are or spend 5 minutes looking inwards, we have so much time on our hands right now to do us. Whatever that may be, whether you're creative and have some projects you've always wanted to start but never had the time to get round to it, or maybe you had a faint idea for a business or endeavor you'd like to start you could finally start making plans for, or even if you could really do with a total break from life and decide that this time is specifically for that. It's up to no one else but you how you spend this time, not your boss, not your TV or social media feed and most definitely not a parasitic illusion presenting itself as part of you.

When you think about it, would it really be so bad if things didn't go exactly back to how they were before? We weren't really living our best lives, we have been destroying the planet for material gain, slaving away at poorly paid, uninspired jobs, whilst corrupt governments justify yet another poor decision that has resulted in the death of thousands. Billions, of us galivant excessively around the planet, consume processed food & factory-farmed animals, purchase £50 products made by children in dangerous factories for pennies and partake in countless more environmentally damaging 'luxuries', entirely oblivious to the true extent of damage these activities are having on our own wellbeing and the giant rock we call home; Mother Gaia.

We as a species are being presented with an opportunity to go inwards, to explore our minds and the fabric of our very being, and inwards to society, uncovering and bringing light to the very problems that have contributed towards the crisis we are currently facing. Because let's face it, our planet needed this pause more than anything. We are in the midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction and it's undeniable that the damage we are continuously causing and making very little attempt to prevent, is irreversible. If we really care about all life on this planet, then something has got to change, and it already has. Can't you feel the peace in the air as the crisp, clean air sends tiny shivers of hope through your nostrils? Howabout the beauty of a TRULY clear blue sky without the scattering of chemtrails? Or the view of the big cities without the overhang of thick, deathly smog?!?!

Our external world is shifting. We are the key to grounding and stabilizing the Earth and empowering her, and all those that want the best for her and ALL of her inhabitants, in unconditional love and integrity. We owe it to existence itself, to be our most honest, loving selves, to embrace our inner truths at all times. And right now, we all share a worldwide inner truth that is screaming in desperation for our honor, the need to rejuvenate and nourish our home, if we don't, when do overcome COVID_19, how long will it be until something else, potentially something even worse, plagues our planet?

In times of chaos, we are all forced to go through a big change in how we perceive the world and ourselves. When we're faced with an issue larger than ourselves, it's easy to crack open, but sometimes a beautiful thing can happen, we can blossom open and allow all the wonder and light from the depths of our core to flourish, thrive and grow using the uncertainty as a lever for spiritual healing & growth. We have no choice but to look within and what better time than now? Imagine how much of a better place the world would be if we all emerged from this with a firmer understanding of ourselves, the errors of our past and what we could do collectively to fix whatever is broken. A great awakening. We may not be able to change the tragedy of the past, but we sure as hell can visualize, spread the word of and fight for a better future.

Life as we've known it is over. But this doesn't have to be a bad thing. I, amongst so many others, do genuinely believe that with the power of love, empowerment of peace and devotion to individuality, we are capable of creating a shift in our collective consciousness, bringing light into the lives of those that need it most and uniting us in ways we could have never previously even imagined.

My heartfelt condolences and deepest sympathy is with everyone that has lost a loved one or has felt the effects of the virus. Love & Light to all,FAB xx

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eallisnwndrlnd · 5 years ago

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Our water, the EPA, the Dirty Water Rule, and why I care

Rarely do I dedicate hours of my personal time to research and delve into lengthy essay writings.I hadn’t done this much research since my life-draining thesis which ended up as thick as an encyclopedia. After speed reading through several studies and articles as well as the countless documentaries and books I’ve read through the years. This issue has become a growing concern. As I, a U.S. citizen, currently live in a country that just recently experienced a volcanic eruption that left thousands of people left without access to water, them being left to use waterways to drink and maintain their daily lives, or relying on bottled up versions of it provided by its government and donated by their neighboring provinces and NGOs, the water scarcity issue hits close to home. And as I watch, listen, and read in horror on what my home country is planning to do with the Clean Water Act, I cannot help but wonder what these deregulation's would mean to our water in the States. With a growing number of counties and cities in the U.S. becoming more reliant to bottled water due to contamination found in their tap water, I know it is only a matter of time before clean water will be well out of not only my reach but my family, friends and many others. So here it is...my essay...

Water…is a natural resource made up of H2O, that of which we and all living things rely on to sustain life.

We drink it, bathe in it, grow with it, clean with it, cook with it, swim in it, play in it, and work with it. So much of our life consists of water. 60% of it makes up a human body. We are literally surrounded with water.

71% of Earth is covered in it. 96.5% of that is made up of salt water. 2.5% is trapped in glaciers and ice. The rest can be found in vapor in the air, groundwater, aquifers, and waterways such as rivers and lakes. That’s less than 1% of the entire Earth.

Water…is a vital component to existence that many take for granted.

You would think with such scarcity of water available to us to use, we’d go out of our way to protect this precious lifeblood. Yet many of us treat it as if there is an infinite source we can rely on as we flush gallons of water down the drain without so much as a bat of an eyelash. Many of us were made to think that there would always be an abundance of water and always clean. We put our faith into our gods and government to have our backs.

As humans and companies continue to drain the last of our groundwater (which creates unstable surfaces) and aquifers, Earth is warming up due to climate changes (whether humans have played a part in these changes or not doesn’t change the fact that severe climate situations continually wreak havoc around the world) This can affect the quality and quantity of what is left in those water sources.

If access to drinkable water wasn’t an issue then why are so many companies and governments investing billions of dollars into innovating methods that can desalinate salt water, filter polluted water or extract water from shit? Now that sounds absolutely refreshing…

Water…is a human right.

You would think the government, that is the body of people entrusted to protect our interests, would work even harder to ensure we have access to clean water. Remember, they work for us…the people. The legislation and protections they put forth and enforce are in place to ensure that they uphold their oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution to the best of their ability.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is a phrase in the constitution that describes what our unalienable rights are.

Without access to clean water, there is no life.

Without access to free clean water, there is no liberty.

Without access to clean water, there is little to no chance in the pursuit of happiness.

But water in our country and for that matter the rest of the world, is not treated as such.

Water…is always at risk and protections are needed to mitigate it.

Without protections and laws in place to curtail companies from polluting our waters and to ensure that its protected not only in a local level but in a national level as well, what incentives do those that choose to make shortcuts in business practices that may harm our water?

Only a handful of major companies own more than 70% of the water in the world. That means that our access to water is at the hands of corporations.

In the U.S., most of our water is serviced through public water companies while several privatized water companies in some parts of the U.S. All the water we rely on is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency aka the EPA.

The EPA was enacted December 2, 1970 which was initially proposed by Richard Nixon. It is a regulatory body whose sole mission is to protect human and environmental health. They do this by enforcing regulatory laws that are in place to ensure that our air, land and water remain protected. They hold private entities that break those laws by knowingly polluting our environment. Pollution, whether in air, land, or water, can greatly impact not only our livelihood but our mortality rates. When our environment is polluted we become more vulnerable to health issues. Toxic remnants of a company’s irresponsible and unconscionable lack of ethics can reach our water, our food, and have detrimental effects to the air we breathe. We rely on the EPA to police the companies that would rather risk our health and environment over their bottom-line.

The case of United States vs. Reserve Mining is an early testament to the importance of the EPA. Reserve Mining was found guilty of dumping toxic waste into a neighboring lake in Minnesota which found its way into the drinking water of local citizens. They were held accountable for the damage they did to the people of Minnesota and their affected environment. EPA gained the ability to enact regulations that helped forced mining companies to have measures in place to make sure that their waste didn’t contaminate local water. The case which was initially filed by the EPA in 1972 has been mentioned as the reason the Clean Water Act of 1972 was enacted.

The Clean Water Act was created in 1972 and replaced the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1965. It’s primary mission was to restore and maintain the integrity of our country’s water by eliminating discharge of pollutants in the water and achieving water quality levels that are safe for fishing and swimming. These protections would be at risk with the new dirty water rule being placed by the current administration.

The water contamination that left thousands of people in Flint, Michigan without access to clean water and the cause for several deaths and others getting sick is a more recent testament of what could happen when the EPA fails to do their job. Several complaints and concerns were given to the regional offices of the EPA of which were greatly ignored. Officials in Flint ignored the warnings from countless of people including one of the major water supply companies that looked into Flint for a possible contract. Unfortunately the latter kept their concerns from the public and the officials chose to carry on with their plan to switch from the public water service to the local river in order to cut costs. Unknowingly, the citizens of Flint were left to deal with the consequences of their local governments unethical practices; a consequence that wouldn’t have happened if EPA had done its job correctly. Until now, thousands of residents are still without accessible water and those that have access to water that is said to be safe after the city fixed the issue, are wary of using it for more than flushing their toilet. Who can blame them for not trusting the city officials when the sting of betrayal is still so fresh in their minds? Despite the issues of water contamination, the citizens of Flint pay a hefty amount for water they can’t even use all the while Nestle is allowed to pump at a water source nearby for only $200 per year. Nestle makes billions in profit to sell water in a plastic bottle that came from a water source that the people in that town can’t even access. (Not to mention that in order to make those plastic bottles, tons of water is being used as well as being a major source of plastic pollution found in our water) The city eventually gave free bottles of water to the people of Flint which was supplied by Nestle due to a wave of national backlash pointed in their direction. However, Nestle eventually stopped the supply. People in other cities became concerned about the quality of their tap water and research found that much of our water supply is already tainted with forever chemicals that scientists say can have dire repercussions to our health.

Water…is priceless.

Companies and governments however manage to put a hefty price on water creating liquid gold.

Just how much money would you be willing to fork over to get even one gallon of water?

It is not a matter of if such an issue will occur to rest of the worlds’ population it is a matter of when. Nary will a skeptic be left to ignore the problem. The skeptics with the financial ability to pay won’t concern themselves while the skeptics who don’t will be finding themselves in similar situations as the people of Flint, Australia, and a growing number of third world countries.

What is it like to have a country that doesn’t own most of its water rights? Just look at all the third world countries that had been forced to release their rights due to economic constraints or bullying by companies. Countries like Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, Nepal, and Congo have a growing population that have little to no access to drinking water. Many are left to rely on purchasing bottled water. The poorer populations are left with hardly any other alternative but to use water sourced from their polluted waterways which can lead to higher mortality rates. Many are forced to drink water where they bathe, launder their clothes, clean their food, wash their dishes, and dump waste.

Water...is a commodity that is becoming increasingly scarce and exploited by the wealthy and the powerful.

Australia, a country that has been dealing with increasing waves of drought and being ravaged by catastrophic fires, has a significant portion of their accessible water being owned by foreign entities. Entities such as Olam, an agricultural company, had recently sold a portion of their water rights to a Canadian investment manager. As fires ate away homes, businesses, and animal habitats and claim several peoples’ lives, the government decided to sell billions of liters to a Chinese company…that bottles water and in turn sells it for profit. Firemen and the citizens of Australia were left to battle these fires with little water while their country’s leader was sitting pretty on vacation in another country.

We pay for water…in more ways than one. All the while powerful companies are profiteering by either owning the water rights or given the right by governments to drain our water sources. There is a growing concern over the increasing number of private companies holding the rights to water. While these companies make billions for themselves as well as their shareholders, that wealth trickles down. They trickle down to lobbyists and government officials. The latter in return create or dismantle regulations and protections that protect those companies’ bottom lines.

As greed and corruption grow up the corporate and political chains unheeded, the citizens of these countries will be left with nothing. Until more people unite to push back against these lawless environmental policies, we will continue to have restricted access to clean water and be at the mercy of the government that puts the importance of money over their citizens and the environment.

Government of the people, by the people, and for the people seems to have mostly perished from the Earth…unless of course we replace the word “people” with “companies”.

“For many of us, clean water is so plentiful and readily available that we rarely, if ever, pause to consider what life would be like without it.” - Marcus Samuelsson

#water #Environment #clean water #pollution #cleanwateract #humanrights #regulations #environmental protection agency #EPA #dirtywaterrule #bottled water

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chebleedsink · 6 years ago

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Narcissus’ Shadow

Do you ever find yourself covering for someone just because you feel bad for them, just quietly keeping to the shadowlands that they create for you? Maybe because they’re not all bad all the time, and in fact they can wonderful when they want to be? Because generally speaking, they treat most everyone (aside from yourself) really well. Maybe because you know their damage and toxic behaviors started in childhood, where they couldn’t choose to walk away from it? Or maybe because you know how alone and awful they feel on the inside all the time? Maybe because you’re empathetic enough that you not only can imagine, but can physically, mentally, or emotionally feel what it’s like to be them?

I know I do. It’s become second nature to me. I tend to side with the villains and “bad guys” in movies often too, for the same reasons. Really horrible people that do really horrible things, usually weren’t born that way, and they often had really horrible things happen to them first. Reminding myself that they are the hero in their own story isn’t a far stretch at all. I am even pretty certain that if I was ever held hostage, there would be a real possibility that I would develop Stolkholm syndrome if I saw the slightest trace of humanity left in my captor. I always think, “if only someone would love them unconditionally and hold some space for them, just give them the opportunity to change, they might not be villains anymore.” I’m sure the odds would be in favor of that being true some of the time, but some people are so caught up in their roles they play, that they can’t even see themselves for their behavior. Some people can see it, but can’t or won’t change it. Many of them just blame outside causes, while refusing to take any kind of responsibility for fixing things. They don’t want to be fixed. It’s not their problem.

I’m painfully aware that conditions like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, (and less commonly Psychopathy, and Sociopathy), at any point of their wide spectrums, wreak havoc in peoples lives, affecting not just the person suffering with them, but often everyone that comes in contact with them. Alongside generalized anxiety and depressive disorders, these extremely destructive personality disorders like NPD and BPD are taking the spotlight. Dare I say that our society currently supports and encourages the traits, behaviors, characteristics, and tendencies that are indicators of these disorders? Some people have figured out how to put these behaviors to good use, and they use them to unapologetically advocate for animal welfare, or starving children, environmental issues or other human right’s issues. Unfortunately though, that is probably the exception to the rule, and even when directing their attention at these just causes, they are still trampling the people that get in their way underfoot without a second thought.

So many people are either suffering from these disorders directly or indirectly, and so much mental and emotional damage is caused because of them. Someone with several of these traits wouldn’t even have to be considered disordered or even on the spectrum, (and they certainly don’t need to have been clinically diagnosed), in order to hurt the people around them. They are just as toxic in their own way. To know that highly empathetic people have turned into these people due to emotional numbing after feeling too many extreme emotions, as well as knowing people who were previously abused by this same type of person also become these people, is truly heart-breaking. It’s such a cruel cycle to see.

I know all of this, I know mental illness is not the mentally ill’s fault, I know it’s not fair to blame their damage on themselves, but I also know that many of these same people have been given opportunities to better themselves and they often choose not to. Again, with these types of disorders, those who are inflicted with them often can’t or won’t acknowledge that they need help, nor will they acknowledge the damage they cause. They very rarely see therapists for these particular issues, because to them, they aren’t their issues. Some of them can’t even feel bad about the things they do (due to a lack of empathy), even though they may have learned to act like they do. Some of them see reality completely backwards, where they honestly believe that everything they do to others, is actually what’s being done to them. Some of them are so good at fooling even themselves, and they have adapted so well to hiding, that they believe they are the empaths being abused in their various relationships. Empaths feel other peoples’ emotions, whereas narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths fake other peoples’ emotions. Sometimes it’s near impossible to tell the difference.

Aside from complete avoidance, how do you even begin to deal with these types of people in a healthy or productive way? Even worse, some of those people are just dipping a toe in and out of the spectrums of those disorders, and you can still see some hope for them. Hope that the switch won’t flip all the way, that they won’t be completely lost to it. Hope that they’ll come back around, or that meds and therapy could help. That hope is miserable. It destroys more people than the disorders themselves ever could. But for some of us, if there’s hope, we’ll still put ourselves in front of the train in the hope that we can help, in the hope that we can all be saved. Too often though, we are just hit by the train, and surviving and recovering from that train-wreck is a long and painful journey. Some of us never recover.

Even after spending the last 5 years cutting these types of people out of my life, there are some I can’t escape. It’s just not an option. So, to maintain the “peace”, I find myself still covering for them. I find myself treading water in the wake of their explosive fits and moods, just concentrating on the damage control to follow and on not drowning. And I am so tired of it, I hate it, I am done with it. It doesn't fix anything, and I'm pretty sure it always just perpetuates more problems than it solves, yet I still do it all the time.

Why? Why continue covering up their bad behavior behind the scenes? Why bite my tongue? Because I don't want to upset anyone, and they're already having a hard time, and if I don't have anything nice to say..., and it wouldn't make a difference anyway (-in fact it just causes more problems), and we have mutual friends, and they monitor my Facebook posts and have actually told me not to air my dirty laundry on social media (even though they do so regularly), besides, they’re not really that bad all the time, the list goes on.

I was so angry and upset the other night and I wanted nothing more than to vent on fb, mostly because writing is how I work through things, and because there are always a few people online to commiserate with who have gone through similar experiences, but once again, I didn't, because of all of the above reasons.

The next morning I thought I'd have calmed down a bit, but I hadn't. My brain was literally screaming at me to stop covering for him. Because it's not fair. And I know that. And I've literally put up with it for a decade. That's a long time to put myself on the quiet chair for someone else's sake. Two days later, and my brain won’t let it go.

I have spent years trying to be a better person, always improving myself, working through my baggage so I don’t have to keep carrying it around, generally just trying to be a decent human being really. My brain is demanding that I break this pattern of sweeping other people’s trash under my rug. And I really want to, but I still feel like I shouldn’t. I’ve been well-trained.

Honestly, I just wish I didn't always feel so bad for them, like I'd be kicking a downed horse if I ever called them out. But what do you do when the horse is always down? And when they’re actually up, between minute moments of calmness, they're extremely reactive and aggressively defensive, they’re kicking and biting you or things around you, they’re shitting everywhere, they’re loud, they’re stomping mud through the house, breaking things, leaving the barn door open, always threatening to run away, and you're afraid that anything you say to them, any way you say it, whether he's calm or otherwise, might set him off or upset him even more causing an even worse tantrum. You’re stuck in close proximity, but could you just avoid the horse? Maybe that way you'd feel less tempted to kick it? Oh, but wait... avoiding the horse just upsets the horse too?

Even worse, what do you do when those people have spent so much time convincing other people that they aren't like that at all? When they've convinced you that you're the only reason they behave like that? When they've actually convinced you that you're the one behaving that way, not them? When they claim to be the emotionally fragile one that you keep attacking?

Gaslighting is no joke, and even if you know it's happening, it's so easy to get sucked back into. It's like quicksand. The harder you fight against it, the more you panic when it's being flung at you, the deeper it pulls you in. I've learned the best reaction is to not react, and to stay calm, but that is not easy to do when your brain is screaming "Oh my gods! He's doing it again!!! Panic!!! Fight or Run!!!!.....Wait, maybe it is me and I am really the abusive crazy one!?!? No!!! Fight Back!!! Explain to him how he's twisting everything around!!!! Maybe it is my fault, I never should have said anything…Did I really do those things?.. But that’s what I was just saying…. Maybe I just don’t remember…" Before you know it, it's sucked you back under, because there's no point in arguing with someone who knows exactly how to gaslight you. You will never win that fight.

Fatigue is setting in. I’m exhausted with this person, with these people. I am tired of watching them say one thing, while they are actually doing the total opposite. I'm so tired of watching them play the victim and the pity me cards on social media, when behind the scenes it's so obvious that even though they are mostly responsible for their own suffering, they have zero self-accountability. I'm tired of double standards, especially the one where they expect to be thanked and appreciated for every single thing they do, every time they do it, even though they don't do the same, and in fact they rarely even notice (and certainly don't acknowledge) even half of the things that someone else does.

I am beyond tired of these people bragging about their greatness, and how much they do for other people, when it's all just for show and personal gain under the guise of philanthropy. I'm tired of them complaining about how hard they have it when they have been given so many handouts in life, especially when they've literally shoved other people out of the way to get where they are. I’m tired of their sense of entitlement that they claim to not have.

I am tired of the type of people who constantly make other people feel like an inconvenience, especially when it's their turn to repay a favor or a debt, or to hold up their end of a bargain or partnership. Especially, when they willingly made a deal or agreed to something (which they most likely never expected to be held accountable for.) I’m tired of people who talk over or belittle other people as an attempt to publicly shame or dominate them. I’m tired of them always stepping into the spotlight when it’s someone else’s turn.

I'm tired of people who try to hold others hostage with power-plays, and by manipulating emotions. I'm tired of damaged people getting away with damaging other people just because they're damaged. I'm tired of inconsiderate people. I'm tired of hypocrites. I'm tired of constantly volatile, hyper-defensive people who don't take responsibility for anything. I'm tired of people who try to shift the blame from themselves to everyone or anyone else they possibly can.

I'm tired of cleaning up other people's messes, literally and metaphorically, of all types, shapes and sizes. Even more than the actual "cleaning" part, I'm tired of being expected to do the job. I’m just as tired of expecting myself to do the job. I’m tired of people doing a half-assed job because the “job” isn’t their choice of what they want to do, and I’m tired of people putting in the least amount of effort possible. I’m tired of people who have no clue how to be a team-player.

I'm tired of people who give or do things for others as a way to put people in debt to them, or to be able to take credit for their successes later on. I am tired of "those" people who say, "but you don't see things from my side", or "you never listen to me". You know, the ones that when they say that, it's such a pile of crap and it's painfully obvious that they only see their own side of anything. The same people may be able to repeat back exactly what you said, but they didn't "hear" a word of it. I'm tired of talking to and fighting with brick walls.

I'm really, really tired of the people who use "I'm sorry" angrily, as a way to excuse their behavior, shift the blame, to clear their own conscience and to justify them doing the same thing over again for an unlimited amount of times. I'm tired of two-faced people. And I am so tired of people who claim to be the world's victim, when they're really the ones victimizing people. I'm tired of the people who accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves are doing.

I'm tired of keeping it to myself for someone else's sake. I'm tired of not bitching about it. I'm tired of keeping other people's ugly sides hidden, and I'm tired of keeping their images polished for some nonsensical reason.

You want to act high and mighty and tell me not to do something you just did (the 10x's worse, extreme version of) the day before?

Fuck you.

You want to tell me your shitty behavior is my fault?

Fuck you.

You want to act like you're so misunderstood, down-trodden, wounded and abused by me, when I was the one that excused and put up with your toxicity, abuse, and neglect for years.

Fuck you.

You want to try to poke me where it hurts, salt the wounds repeatedly, then try to cover it back up with sugar, just because you can?

Fuck you.

I'm tired. And I'm done. Just because someone does good things too, does not mean that you should put up with their shit. Just because you love someone as a person, doesn’t mean you have to let them hurt you. Just because you still feel some sort of hope for someone’s well-being, doesn’t make it your job to protect or help save them. Being a victim, being under too much stress, being mentally unwell is not a justified reason to pass the abuse. When it comes to physical abuse, these things are much more obvious, but emotional and mental abuse are equally damaging, you just can’t see the marks left on the outside.

I cannot wait until this page in my life turns to a fresh leaf, where I can just breathe again. Where I have space and where I can put some distance between myself and the things that hurt me the most. I know growth is painful, but I’m ready to take my hand off of the remnants of this fire. Although I often hate myself for the decisions that led to my situation, I count my blessings that I was at least able to remove myself from the pits of the original blaze, even if I did I let it burn me for way too long. I was left with so many scars, but I turned those scars into red-flags and memorials for life-lessons learned. I don’t ever want to forget those warning signs.

I currently have an amazing, loving, kind, considerate and self-aware partner in my life, the kind of person that I started thinking didn’t really exist. They’re not perfect, (no one is), but they don’t pretend to be, and they hold themselves accountable, and they do the work. Not only have they set a new standard in my life, but they have given me a whole new type of hope to focus on; the hope that I will continue to rise above my ingrained patterns of constantly choosing toxic people to surround myself with, and that I can make better choices, without feeling guilty about not sacrificing myself to save someone else.

My brain is still grumbling that I’m still covering. That I didn’t even mention who I was talking about or the details of the last argument, or the things he said, or the toxic things he does on a daily basis, or the way he really acts when no one else is around. Perhaps I’ll save that for another post. I feel that the vagueness of this post may just be more useful for anyone reading that may have needed to read this today.

If you’ve read this far, I’m assuming you probably can relate. You’ve probably felt these stingers once, or twice, perhaps more times than you’d like to count. You might be trapped at the moment, without a clear path to escape, but when the time comes, as soon as the opportunity arises, don’t think twice about getting out. Don’t feel bad. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t feel like you’ve failed. Don’t convince yourself that maybe you should just try one more time, because you probably shouldn’t. Don’t cover for them if you don’t have to, or if it’s safe not to. You owe it to yourself.

Don’t believe them when they tell you it’s all your fault, and that if you would just behave differently things would be better. Don’t believe them when they say they’ll change. These types of people rarely change without meds and therapy, and if you already feel tired, or done, or you’ve been covering longer than you’d like to admit, chances are the jokes on you. Don’t believe them when they say it’s all in your head. Don’t believe anything they tell you to try to convince you that there isn’t anything wrong with them, or if they argue there is something wrong with them that you just need to accept because it’s not going to change. If they repeat your argument back to you as their own response, if you hear your own words or emotions being turned around and parroted back, or being used completely out of context, run my friend, run and don’t look back.

Should we still hold space for these people? Afterall, they are just human beings, right? They are just as deserving of love and acceptance as anyone else, even if they are toxic, even if they can’t love or accept us. I think we should hold space, and we should still love them unconditionally as human beings, however, we should hold their space as far away from ourselves as possible, and we should love them from great distances. My heart still bleeds for them, I can’t imagine what an awful existence many of them live, and I still wish I could help, but I’m so much wiser now. I know better. And every day, I get a little braver. One day, I’ll stop covering.

#npdsurvivor #personality disorder #gaslighting #stop covering #npd #toxic people #blog #empath #toxic relationships #bpd #emotional abuse #covert #cognitive distortions #mental health #narcissistic #narcissist

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cameronsaunders95 · 4 years ago

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sinrau · 5 years ago

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A new book by one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s—when the Nazis took power in Germany.

In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019—an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority—is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies.

Neuborne doesn’t make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU’s national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.

“Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?” he writes. “Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.”

A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.

“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches—spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric—as a candidate and in office—mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.”

Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne’s analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not “equating” the men—as “it trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them to Trump’s often pathetic foibles.”

Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances—Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College—can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.

Here’s how Neuborne introduces this section. Many recent presidents have been awful, “But then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals—individual dignity and fundamental equality—upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes—internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance]—become hugely important because Donald Trump’s political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It’s a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again.

“Give Trump credit,” he continues. “He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We’re used to thinking of Hitler’s Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn’t take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump’s bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler’s satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here.”

20 Common Themes, Rhetorical Tactics and Dangerous Policies

Here are 20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump.

1. Neither was elected by a majority. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, receiving votes by 25.3 percent of all eligible American voters. “That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33,” Neuborne writes. “Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters.” He continues, “Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one—not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag—mounted a serious effort to stop him.”

2. Both found direct communication channels to their base. By 1936’s Olympics, Nazi narratives dominated German cultural and political life. “How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?” Neuborne asks. He addresses Hitler’s extreme rhetoric soon enough, but notes that Hitler found a direct communication pathway—the Nazi Party gave out radios with only one channel, tuned to Hitler’s voice, bypassing Germany’s news media. Trump has an online equivalent.

“Donald Trump’s tweets, often delivered between midnight and dawn, are the twenty-first century’s technological embodiment of Hitler’s free plastic radios,” Neuborne says. “Trump’s Twitter account, like Hitler’s radios, enables a charismatic leader to establish and maintain a personal, unfiltered line of communication with an adoring political base of about 30–40 percent of the population, many (but not all) of whom are only too willing, even anxious, to swallow Trump’s witches’ brew of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never ending-search for scapegoats.”

3. Both blame others and divide on racial lines. As Neuborne notes, “Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.” That is comparable to “Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico,” he says. Again and again, Trump uses “racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.”

4. Both relentlessly demonize opponents. “Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum,” Neuborne notes. “Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being ‘infested’ with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to ‘shithole countries,’ degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls ‘the deep state’ and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.”

5. They unceasingly attack objective truth. “Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” he continues. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet—‘fake news’—cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news, “especially his possible links to the Kremlin.”

6. They relentlessly attack mainstream media. Trump’s assaults on the media echo Hitler’s, Neuborne says, noting that he “repeatedly attacks the ‘failing New York Times,’ leads crowds in chanting ‘CNN sucks,’ [and] is personally hostile to most reporters.” He cites the White House’s refusal to fly the flag at half-mast after the murder of five journalists in Annapolis in June 2018, Trump’s efforts to punish CNN by blocking a merger of its corporate parent, and trying to revoke federal Postal Service contracts held by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

7. Their attacks on truth include science. Neuborne notes, “Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who question Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false.”

8. Their lies blur reality—and supporters spread them. “Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can only succeed in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth,” Neuborne says. “Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch–owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.”

9. Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status. “Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer,” Neuborne writes. “The powerful personal bonds nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning are also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.”

10. They embrace extreme nationalism. “Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant German past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation,” Neuborne says. “Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to restore German greatness.”

11. Both made closing borders a centerpiece. “Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration,” Neuborne continues. “Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.”

12. They embraced mass detention and deportations. “Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation… echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity,” he writes, also noting that Trump has “stooped to tearing children from their parents [as Nazis in World War II would do] to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life.”

13. Both used borders to protect selected industries. “Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump aggressively uses our nation’s political and economic power to favor selected American corporate interests at the expense of foreign competitors and the environment, even at the price of international conflict, massive inefficiency, and irreversible pollution [climate change].”

14. They cemented their rule by enriching elites. “Hitler’s version of fascism shifted immense power—both political and financial—to the leaders of German industry. In fact, Hitler governed Germany largely through corporate executives,” he continues. “Trump has also presided over a massive empowerment—and enrichment—of corporate America. Under Trump, large corporations exercise immense political power while receiving huge economic windfalls and freedom from regulations designed to protect consumers and the labor force.

“Hitler despised the German labor movement, eventually destroying it and imprisoning its leaders. Trump also detests strong unions, seeking to undermine any effort to interfere with the prerogatives of management.”

15. Both rejected international norms. “Hitler’s foreign policy rejected international cooperation in favor of military and economic coercion, culminating in the annexation of the Sudetenland, the phony Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the horrors of global war,” Neuborne notes. “Like Hitler, Trump is deeply hostile to multinational cooperation, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the nuclear agreement with Iran, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria, and even going so far as to question the value of NATO, our post-World War II military alliance with European democracies against Soviet expansionism.”

16. They attack domestic democratic processes. “Hitler attacked the legitimacy of democracy itself, purging the voting rolls, challenging the integrity of the electoral process, and questioning the ability of democratic government to solve Germany’s problems,” Neuborne notes. “Trump has also attacked the democratic process, declining to agree to be bound by the outcome of the 2016 elections when he thought he might lose, supporting the massive purge of the voting rolls allegedly designed to avoid (nonexistent) fraud, championing measures that make it harder to vote, tolerating—if not fomenting—massive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, encouraging mob violence at rallies, darkly hinting at violence if Democrats hold power, and constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections unless he wins.”

17. Both attack the judiciary and rule of law. “Hitler politicized and eventually destroyed the vaunted German justice system. Trump also seeks to turn the American justice system into his personal playground,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump threatens the judicially enforced rule of law, bitterly attacking American judges who rule against him, slyly praising Andrew Jackson for defying the Supreme Court, and abusing the pardon power by pardoning an Arizona sheriff found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying federal court orders to cease violating the Constitution.”

18. Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths. “Like Hitler, Trump glorifies the military, staffing his administration with layers of retired generals (who eventually were fired or resigned), relaxing control over the use of lethal force by the military and the police, and demanding a massive increase in military spending,” Neuborne writes. Just as Hitler “imposed an oath of personal loyalty on all German judges” and demanded courts defer to him, “Trump’s already gotten enough deference from five Republican [Supreme Court] justices to uphold a largely Muslim travel ban that is the epitome of racial and religious bigotry.”

Trump has also demanded loyalty oaths. “He fired James Comey, a Republican appointed in 2013 as FBI director by President Obama, for refusing to swear an oath of personal loyalty to the president; excoriated and then sacked Jeff Sessions, his handpicked attorney general, for failing to suppress the criminal investigation into… Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in influencing the 2016 elections; repeatedly threatened to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel carrying out the investigation; and called again and again for the jailing of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, leading crowds in chants of ‘lock her up.’” A new chant, “send her back,” has since emerged at Trump rallies directed at non-white Democratic congresswomen.

19. They proclaim unchecked power. “Like Hitler, Trump has intensified a disturbing trend that predated his administration of governing unilaterally, largely through executive orders or proclamations,” Neuborne says, citing the Muslim travel ban, trade tariffs, unraveling of health and environmental safety nets, ban on transgender military service, and efforts to end President Obama’s protection for Dreamers. “Like Hitler, Trump claims the power to overrule Congress and govern all by himself. In 1933, Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire to declare a national emergency and seize the power to govern unilaterally. The German judiciary did nothing to stop him. German democracy never recovered.”

“When Congress refused to give Trump funds for his border wall even after he threw a tantrum and shut down the government, Trump, like Hitler, declared a phony national emergency and claimed the power to ignore Congress,” Neuborne continues. “Don’t count on the Supreme Court to stop him. Five justices gave the game away on the President’s unilateral travel ban. They just might do the same thing on the border wall.” It did in late July, ruling that Trump could divert congressionally appropriated funds from the Pentagon budget—undermining constitutional separation of powers.

20. Both relegate women to subordinate roles. “Finally,” writes Neuborne, “Hitler propounded a misogynistic, stereotypical view of women, valuing them exclusively as wives and mothers while excluding them from full participation in German political and economic life. Trump may be the most openly misogynist figure ever to hold high public office in the United States, crassly treating women as sexual objects, using nondisclosure agreements and violating campaign finance laws to shield his sexual misbehavior from public knowledge, attacking women who come forward to accuse men of abusive behavior, undermining reproductive freedom, and opposing efforts by women to achieve economic equality.”

Whither Constitutional Checks and Balances?

Most of Neuborne’s book is not centered on Trump’s fealty to Hitler’s methods and early policies. He notes, as many commentators have, that Trump is following the well-known contours of authoritarian populists and dictators: “there’s always a charismatic leader, a disaffected mass, an adroit use of communications media, economic insecurity, racial or religious fault lines, xenophobia, a turn to violence, and a search for scapegoats.”

The bigger problem, and the subject of most of the book, is that the federal architecture intended to be a check and balance against tyrants, is not poised to act. Congressional representation is fundamentally anti-democratic. In the Senate, politicians representing 18 percent of the national population—epicenters of Trump’s base—can cast 51 percent of the chamber’s votes. A Republican majority from rural states, representing barely 40 percent of the population, controls the chamber. It repeatedly thwarts legislation reflecting multicultural America’s values—and creates a brick wall for impeachment.

The House of Representatives is not much better. Until 2018, this decade’s GOP-majority House, a product of 2011’s extreme Republican gerrymanders, was also unrepresentative of the nation’s demographics. That bias still exists in the Electoral College, as the size of a state’s congressional delegation equals its allocation of votes. That formula is fair as far as House members go, but allocating votes based on two senators per state hurts urban America. Consider that California’s population is 65 times larger than Wyoming��s.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s majority remains in the hands of justices appointed by Republican presidents—and favors that party’s agenda. Most Americans are unaware that the court’s partisan majority has only changed twice since the Civil War—in 1937, when a Democratic-appointed majority took over, and in 1972, when a Republican-appointed majority took over. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s final nominee thwarted a twice-a-century change. Today’s hijacked Supreme Court majority has only just begun deferring to Trump’s agenda.

Neuborne wants to be optimistic that a wave of state-based resistance, call it progressive federalism, could blunt Trump’s power grabs and help the country return to a system embracing, rather than demonizing, individual dignity and fundamental equality. But he predicts that many Americans who supported Trump in 2016 (largely, he suggests, because their plights have been overlooked for many years by federal power centers and by America’s capitalist hubs) won’t desert Trump—not while he’s in power.

“When tyrants like Hitler are ultimately overthrown, their mass support vanishes retroactively—everyone turns out to have been in the resistance—but the mass support was undeniably there,” he writes. “There will, of course, be American quislings who will enthusiastically support an American tyrant. There always are—everywhere.”

Ultimately, Neuborne doesn’t expect there will be a “constitutional mechanic in the sky ready to swoop down and save American democracy from Donald Trump at the head of a populist mob.” Whatever Trump thinks he is or isn’t doing, his rhetorical and strategic role model—the early Hitler—is what makes Trump and today’s GOP so dangerous.

“Even if all that Trump is doing is marching to that populist drum, he is unleashing forces that imperil the fragile fabric of a multicultural democracy,” Neuborne writes. “But I think there’s more. The parallels—especially the links between Lügenpresse and ‘fake news,’ and promises to restore German greatness and ‘Make America Great Again’—are just too close to be coincidental. I’m pretty sure that Trump’s bedside study of Hitler’s speeches—especially the use of personal invective, white racism, and xenophobia—has shaped the way Trump seeks to gain political power in our time. I don’t for a moment believe that Trump admires what Hitler eventually did with his power [genocide], but he damn well admires—and is successfully copying—the way that Hitler got it.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler’s Early Rhetoric and Policies #web #website #copied #to read# #highlight #link #news #read

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hviral · 5 years ago

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20 ways Trump is copying Hitler’s early rhetoric and policies

In “When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic,” Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019 — an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority — is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies.

“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches — spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric — as a candidate and in office — mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.”

Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne’s analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not “equating” the men — as “it trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them to Trump’s often pathetic foibles.”

Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances — Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College — can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.

Here’s how Neuborne introduces this section. Many recent presidents have been awful, “But then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals — individual dignity and fundamental equality — upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes — internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance] — become hugely important because Donald Trump’s political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It’s a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again.

20 common themes, rhetorical tactics and dangerous policies

Here are 20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump.

.1 Neither was elected by a majority. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, receiving votes by 25.3 percent of all eligible American voters. “That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33,” Neuborne writes. “Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters.” He continues, “Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one — not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag — mounted a serious effort to stop him.”

.2 Both found direct communication channels to their base. By 1936’s Olympics, Nazi narratives dominated German cultural and political life. “How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?” Neuborne asks. He addresses Hitler’s extreme rhetoric soon enough, but notes that Hitler found a direct communication pathway — the Nazi Party gave out radios with only one channel, tuned to Hitler’s voice, bypassing Germany’s news media. Trump has an online equivalent.

.3 Both blame others and divide on racial lines. As Neuborne notes, “Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.” That is comparable to “Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico,” he says. Again and again, Trump uses “racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.”

.4 Both relentlessly demonize opponents. “Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum,” Neuborne notes. “Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being ‘infested’ with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to ‘shithole countries,’ degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls ‘the deep state’ and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.”

.5 They unceasingly attack objective truth. “Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” he continues. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet — ‘fake news’ — cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news, “especially his possible links to the Kremlin.”

.6 They relentlessly attack mainstream media. Trump’s assaults on the media echo Hitler’s, Neuborne says, noting that he “repeatedly attacks the ‘failing New York Times,’ leads crowds in chanting ‘CNN sucks,’ [and] is personally hostile to most reporters.” He cites the White House’s refusal to fly the flag at half-mast after the murder of five journalists in Annapolis in June 2018, Trump’s efforts to punish CNN by blocking a merger of its corporate parent, and trying to revoke federal Postal Service contracts held by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

.7 Their attacks on truth include science. Neuborne notes, “Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who question Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false.”

.8 Their lies blur reality — and supporters spread them. “Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can only succeed in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth,” Neuborne says. “Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch–owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.”

.9 Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status. “Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer,” Neuborne writes. “The powerful personal bonds nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning are also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.”

.10 They embrace extreme nationalism. “Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant German past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation,” Neuborne says. “Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to restore German greatness.”

.11 Both made closing borders a centerpiece. “Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration,” Neuborne continues. “Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.”

.12 They embraced mass detention and deportations. “Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation… echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity,” he writes, also noting that Trump has “stooped to tearing children from their parents [as Nazis in World War II would do] to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life.”

.13 Both used borders to protect selected industries. “Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump aggressively uses our nation’s political and economic power to favor selected American corporate interests at the expense of foreign competitors and the environment, even at the price of international conflict, massive inefficiency, and irreversible pollution [climate change].”

.14 They cemented their rule by enriching elites. “Hitler’s version of fascism shifted immense power — both political and financial — to the leaders of German industry. In fact, Hitler governed Germany largely through corporate executives,” he continues. “Trump has also presided over a massive empowerment — and enrichment — of corporate America. Under Trump, large corporations exercise immense political power while receiving huge economic windfalls and freedom from regulations designed to protect consumers and the labor force.

.15 Both rejected international norms. “Hitler’s foreign policy rejected international cooperation in favor of military and economic coercion, culminating in the annexation of the Sudetenland, the phony Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the horrors of global war,” Neuborne notes. “Like Hitler, Trump is deeply hostile to multinational cooperation, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the nuclear agreement with Iran, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria, and even going so far as to question the value of NATO, our post-World War II military alliance with European democracies against Soviet expansionism.”

.16 They attack domestic democratic processes. “Hitler attacked the legitimacy of democracy itself, purging the voting rolls, challenging the integrity of the electoral process, and questioning the ability of democratic government to solve Germany’s problems,” Neuborne notes. “Trump has also attacked the democratic process, declining to agree to be bound by the outcome of the 2016 elections when he thought he might lose, supporting the massive purge of the voting rolls allegedly designed to avoid (nonexistent) fraud, championing measures that make it harder to vote, tolerating — if not fomenting — massive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, encouraging mob violence at rallies, darkly hinting at violence if Democrats hold power, and constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections unless he wins.”

.17 Both attack the judiciary and rule of law. “Hitler politicized and eventually destroyed the vaunted German justice system. Trump also seeks to turn the American justice system into his personal playground,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump threatens the judicially enforced rule of law, bitterly attacking American judges who rule against him, slyly praising Andrew Jackson for defying the Supreme Court, and abusing the pardon power by pardoning an Arizona sheriff found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying federal court orders to cease violating the Constitution.”

.18 Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths. “Like Hitler, Trump glorifies the military, staffing his administration with layers of retired generals (who eventually were fired or resigned), relaxing control over the use of lethal force by the military and the police, and demanding a massive increase in military spending,” Neuborne writes. Just as Hitler “imposed an oath of personal loyalty on all German judges” and demanded courts defer to him, “Trump’s already gotten enough deference from five Republican [Supreme Court] justices to uphold a largely Muslim travel ban that is the epitome of racial and religious bigotry.”

.19 They proclaim unchecked power. “Like Hitler, Trump has intensified a disturbing trend that predated his administration of governing unilaterally, largely through executive orders or proclamations,” Neuborne says, citing the Muslim travel ban, trade tariffs, unraveling of health and environmental safety nets, ban on transgender military service, and efforts to end President Obama’s protection for Dreamers. “Like Hitler, Trump claims the power to overrule Congress and govern all by himself. In 1933, Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire to declare a national emergency and seize the power to govern unilaterally. The German judiciary did nothing to stop him. German democracy never recovered.”

.20 Both relegate women to subordinate roles. “Finally,” writes Neuborne, “Hitler propounded a misogynistic, stereotypical view of women, valuing them exclusively as wives and mothers while excluding them from full participation in German political and economic life. Trump may be the most openly misogynist figure ever to hold high public office in the United States, crassly treating women as sexual objects, using nondisclosure agreements and violating campaign finance laws to shield his sexual misbehavior from public knowledge, attacking women who come forward to accuse men of abusive behavior, undermining reproductive freedom, and opposing efforts by women to achieve economic equality.”

Whither constitutional checks and balances?

The bigger problem, and the subject of most of the book, is that the federal architecture intended to be a check and balance against tyrants, is not poised to act. Congressional representation is fundamentally anti-democratic. In the Senate, politicians representing 18 percent of the national population — epicenters of Trump’s base — can cast 51 percent of the chamber’s votes. A Republican majority from rural states, representing barely 40 percent of the population, controls the chamber. It repeatedly thwarts legislation reflecting multicultural America’s values — and creates a brick wall for impeachment.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s majority remains in the hands of justices appointed by Republican presidents — and favors that party’s agenda. Most Americans are unaware that the court’s partisan majority has only changed twice since the Civil War — in 1937, when a Democratic-appointed majority took over, and in 1972, when a Republican-appointed majority took over. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s final nominee thwarted a twice-a-century change. Today’s hijacked Supreme Court majority has only just begun deferring to Trump’s agenda.

“When tyrants like Hitler are ultimately overthrown, their mass support vanishes retroactively — everyone turns out to have been in the resistance — but the mass support was undeniably there,” he writes. “There will, of course, be American quislings who will enthusiastically support an American tyrant. There always are — everywhere.”

Ultimately, Neuborne doesn’t expect there will be a “constitutional mechanic in the sky ready to swoop down and save American democracy from Donald Trump at the head of a populist mob.” Whatever Trump thinks he is or isn’t doing, his rhetorical and strategic role model — the early Hitler — is what makes Trump and today’s GOP so dangerous.

“Even if all that Trump is doing is marching to that populist drum, he is unleashing forces that imperil the fragile fabric of a multicultural democracy,” Neuborne writes. “But I think there’s more. The parallels — especially the links between Lügenpresse and ‘fake news,’ and promises to restore German greatness and ‘Make America Great Again’ — are just too close to be coincidental. I’m pretty sure that Trump’s bedside study of Hitler’s speeches — especially the use of personal invective, white racism, and xenophobia — has shaped the way Trump seeks to gain political power in our time. I don’t for a moment believe that Trump admires what Hitler eventually did with his power [genocide], but he damn well admires — and is successfully copying — the way that Hitler got it.”

The post 20 ways Trump is copying Hitler’s early rhetoric and policies appeared first on HviRAL.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler’s Early Rhetoric and Policies

The author, Burt Neuborne, is one of America’s top civil liberties lawyers, and questions whether federal government can contain Trump and GOP power grabs.

Steven Rosenfeld | Published Friday, August 09, 2019 | Common Dreams | Posted August 9, 2019 |

20 Common Themes, Rhetorical Tactics and Dangerous Policies

Here are 20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump.

Whither Constitutional Checks and Balances?

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yes-dal456 · 8 years ago

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11 Habits Of Mentally Strong People

We all reach critical points in our lives where our mental strength is tested. It might be a difficult friend or colleague, a dead-end job, or a struggling relationship.

Whatever the challenge, you have to be strong, see things through a new lens, and take decisive action if you want to move through it successfully.

It sounds easy. We all want good friends, good jobs, and good relationships.

But it isn’t.

It’s hard to be mentally strong, especially when you feel stuck. The ability to break the mold and take a bold new direction requires that extra grit, daring, and spunk that only the mentally strongest people have.

It’s fascinating how mentally strong people set themselves apart from the crowd. Where others see impenetrable barriers, they see challenges to overcome.

When Thomas Edison’s factory burned to the ground in 1914, destroying one-of-a-kind prototypes and causing $23 million in damage, Edison’s response was simple:

Thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start fresh again.

Edison’s reaction is the epitome of mental strength—seeing opportunity and taking action when things look bleak.

There are habits you can develop to improve your mental strength. In fact, the hallmarks of mentally strong people are actually strategies that you can begin using today.

1. They’re emotionally intelligent. Emotional intelligence is the cornerstone of mental strength. You cannot be mentally strong without the ability to fully understand and tolerate strong negative emotions and do something productive with them. Moments that test your mental strength are ultimately testing your emotional intelligence (EQ).

Unlike your IQ, which is fixed, your EQ is a flexible skill that you can improve with understanding and effort. It’s no wonder that 90% of top performers have high EQs and people with high EQs earn $28,000 more annually (on average) than their low-EQ counterparts. Unfortunately EQ skills are in short supply. TalentSmart has tested more than a million people, and we’ve found that just 36% of these are able to accurately identify their emotions as they happen.

2. They’re confident. Mentally strong people subscribe to Ford’s notion that your mentality has a powerful effect on your ability to succeed. This notion isn’t just a motivational tool—it’s a fact. A recent study at the University of Melbourne showed that confident people went on to earn higher wages and get promoted more quickly than others did.

Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—you’re right. – Henry Ford

True confidence—as opposed to the false confidence people project to mask their insecurities—has a look all its own. Mentally strong people have an upper hand over the doubtful and the skittish because their confidence inspires others and helps them to make things happen.

3. They say no. Research conducted at UC Berkeley showed that the more difficulty you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Mentally strong people know that saying no is healthy, and they have the self-esteem and foresight to make their nos clear.

When it’s time to say no, mentally strong people avoid phrases such as “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” They say no with confidence because they know that saying no to a new commitment honors their existing commitments and gives them the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.

The mentally strong also know how to exert self-control by saying no to themselves. They delay gratification and avoid impulsive action that causes harm.

4. They neutralize difficult people. Dealing with difficult people is frustrating and exhausting for most. Mentally strong people control their interactions with toxic people by keeping their feelings in check. When they need to confront a toxic person, they approach the situation rationally. They identify their emotions and don’t allow anger or frustration to fuel the chaos. They also consider the difficult person’s standpoint and are able to find common ground and solutions to problems. Even when things completely derail, mentally strong people are able to take the toxic person with a grain of salt to avoid letting him or her bring them down.

5. They embrace change. Mentally strong people are flexible and are constantly adapting. They know that fear of change is paralyzing and a major threat to their success and happiness. They look for change that is lurking just around the corner, and they form a plan of action should these changes occur.

Only when you embrace change can you find the good in it. You need to have an open mind and open arms if you’re going to recognize, and capitalize on, the opportunities that change creates.

6. They embrace failure. Mentally strong people embrace failure because they know that the road to success is paved with it. No one ever experienced true success without first embracing failure. By revealing when you’re on the wrong path, your mistakes pave the way for you to succeed. The biggest breakthroughs typically come when you’re feeling the most frustrated and the most stuck. It’s this frustration that forces you to think differently, to look outside the box, and to see the solution that you’ve been missing.

7. Yet, they don't dwell on mistakes. Mentally strong people know that where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on the problems that you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions and stress, which hinders performance. When you focus on actions to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy, which produces positive emotions and improves performance. Mentally strong people distance themselves from their mistakes, but they do so without forgetting them. By keeping their mistakes at a safe distance, yet still handy enough to refer to, they are able to adapt and adjust for future success.

8. They don't compare themselves to others. Mentally strong people don’t pass judgment on other people because they know that everyone has something to offer, and they don’t need to take other people down a notch in order to feel good about themselves. Comparing yourself to other people is limiting. Jealousy and resentment suck the life right out of you; they’re massive energy-stealers. Mentally strong people don’t waste time or energy sizing people up and worrying about whether or not they measure up. Instead of wasting your energy on jealousy, funnel that energy into appreciation. When you celebrate the success of other people, you both benefit.

9. They exercise. A study conducted at the Eastern Ontario Research Institute found that people who exercised twice a week for 10 weeks felt more socially, intellectually, and athletically competent. They also rated their body image and self-esteem higher. Best of all, rather than the physical changes in their bodies being responsible for the uptick in confidence, which is key to mental strength, it was the immediate, endorphin-fueled positivity from exercise that made all the difference.

10. They get enough sleep. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of sleep to increasing your mental strength. When you sleep, your brain removes toxic proteins, which are by-products of neural activity when you're awake. Unfortunately, your brain can remove them adequately only while you're asleep, so when you don't get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, wreaking havoc by impairing your ability to think—something no amount of caffeine can fix.

Mentally tough people know that their self-control, focus, and memory are all reduced when they don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep, so they make quality sleep a top priority.

11. They’re relentlessly positive. Keep your eyes on the news for any length of time, and you’ll see that it’s just one endless cycle of war, violent attacks, fragile economies, failing companies, and environmental disasters. It’s easy to think the world is headed downhill fast. And who knows? Maybe it is. But mentally strong people don’t worry about that because they don’t get caught up in things they can’t control. Instead of trying to start a revolution overnight, they focus their energy on directing the two things that are completely within their power—their attention and their effort.

Bringing It All Together

Mental strength is not an innate quality bestowed upon a select few. It can be achieved and enjoyed.

Please share your thoughts in the comments section, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

Want to learn more? Check out my book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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pat78701 · 8 years ago