Predation is Weakness

Every accusation is a confession

Empathy is only a weakness to those who target it for exploitation. They certainly know the value when targeting advertising and political campaigns.

“Won’t you think of the children….”

[We’ll feed them as soon as the film crew arrives]

Children are not born hateful bigots, or narcissists. Too many have had the misfortune to be delivered into their first cult (family) and indoctrinated that way. They spread their seed as virulently as their poison. Their greed and insatiable need prioritized over all else.

We are all products of our environment, experiences, and choices. It forms our biases, and our reality. That’s just life.

We have all been through some shit, whatever that looked like.

Things that happen to us personally feel the worst. That’s kind of normal. It’s normal to feel differently about a personal tragedy than an external one.

It is not normal to imagine yourself suffering more than someone actually enduring the thing.

On the basis of nothing, I’m going to say that’s either performative, a poor boundary of “self”, or poor control over emotions.

Before anyone jumps all over my ass, I understand trauma is stored in the body. The fat lady sang, but the shit is long from over. Samesies.

It’s not normal to have no empathy at all. That was a common feature of nazis, as it turned out.

Who with their empathy intact could do that shit?

The point is how you approach it.

We have emotions. They shouldn’t have us.

We can’t control what happens to us, only our response to it.

We are responsible for regulating ourselves, because no one else can. We’ve all managed to go to work instead of running bare-ass naked through the house screaming, “NOOOOOO!” at least once, right? If we could evolve that far from our terrible twos, perhaps we can strive to push a little further.

My humble recommendation? Find a way to process or channel this stuff so it doesn’t derail you.

[whatever works for you, explore until you have some sort of toolkit going on]

I used to think of generational abuse along the lines of:

Parent hits kid, who becomes a parent who hits his kid.

But that’s not how it always plays out.

Nothing different is modeled so it was normalized.

Is that how empathy dies? It just hope, extinguished?

Why does nobody step in on behalf of the children?

Honorable mention to the incoming public impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences, which was already staggering, but will certainly bury us after the current regime.

Some who are abused become the protectors, not the predators.

And the grand prize for escaping that is: you have been well-trained for predators!

[probably]

Abuse was also normalized for them, but they didn’t use it as justification to hurt those they love. Why? Were they lucky enough to have someone kind in their lives? Just more resilient?

Or did they spend a lot of time on their own, doing things for themselves, and find an outlet such as reading, music, or making art.

[probably]

The dominant, predatory type (alpha, strong, whatever) resent people who retained what everyone started with:

Empathy: Gone!

Kindness: Ditto!

Acceptance: Nope!

Inclusion: Fuck no!

Curiosity: [blank stares]

They have given in to their darker egoistic tendencies and now we have to pay for it. They feel comfortable with antisocial traits like cheating, lying, stealing, and using others. So of course, everyone else must too.

But we don’t.

Even after trying to very hard to divide us on the basis of manufactured bullshit while they rob us blind with smiles on their faces…

We still choose love.

In whatever back-asswards, topsy turvy, through the looking glass-esque timeline we are in, words don’t always mean what they seem.

They are the weak.

We are the strong.

And accountability is trending now.