Most Americans believe that we have a two party political system, or more exactly that our political system is effectively dominated by two parties. We perceive these two parties to be so powerful and dominant that all other parties are considered no threat and a total waste of time. At least this is what we are told over and again.
We buy into the belief that the struggle between the Democrats and the Republicans somehow accurately represents a majority view. We are all either donkeys or elephants, left or right, locked in eternal battle and filled with mutual contempt and loathing. Voting for any third party would be wasting your vote due to the volume of people supporting the two dominant parties.
Perhaps if we had representational government, meaning that we could have several parties that depending on the percentage of the total vote they received, each party would receive seats in the Congress, then there would be no such thing as a wasted vote in America. Every vote would mean something and could not be cast in vain. Obviously this would serve the public better because everyone would have a chance at influencing lawmakers and furthering their own agendas and that would be a lot more fair than the way we do it now.
Our current system is one of exclusion, of monopolizing political power, access and influence. It excludes all other interests from getting a shot at any of it. This is a winner take all system which means that only the winner wins. It follows then that everyone else must lose.
In our winner take all system only some people get to be happy and will have their way but the fact is, the winners don't usually represent the majority of the population. That would make them a minority, a controlling minority. Often an extremist controlling minority for that matter, which routinely makes the majority of the country miserable watching the crazed extremist minority running roughshod over a system that took a lot of years and hard work to build a few good things into.
Doing things this way doesn't make any sense at all if indeed we are a self-ruling people living in freedom and equality with a fair shot for everyone at participating in creating the country we all have to live in.
In fact, this is a terrible system for everyone, except for the winners. It's not a fair system either but it doesn't claim to be. It doesn't even pretend to be fair. This is a system designed to enable a small group of people in power to claim unbelievable rights of control over all of the money and all of the power and all of the people in whatever way they see fit. Is that the definition of living in a free country? Not. It sounds a lot more like living in a monarchy or a dictatorship.
By the way, where are the rewards for the voters who get their parties put into power? I mean, what's in this system for us? What do we get out of it? We get all involved in the competition and we come unglued with joy when our party wins the election, but what do we get for it? What is the reward? What are we so excited about when our party wins?
When the Republicans are in office we do not see a nation where all of the Republican voters are suddenly living in mansions and becoming entrepreneur tycoons slashing employee wages and benefits to bare bones and making it big in the stock market while all of the Democrats are slogging through minimum wage, depressing lives. When the Democrats take over the White House we don't see a nation where all of the Democrats are living high on the hog, where all the homeless have homes and the poor are up on their feet, whilst the Republicans are forced to live in bean eating poverty and must hand over their paychecks to the poor to support them and send them all through college. We don't see any party changes changing our country or our lives. We don't see any differences at all in the lives of Joe and Jane Average American that are in any way dependent on or connected to their political party allegiances or who wins any election.
This does not make sense. In a two party dominated system, when one or the other party takes power then that party's constituents should all benefit, shouldn't they? If your party wins power there should be rewards in it for you, right? If the Republican party represents the Republican voters we should be seeing consistent periods in recent history where our Republican friends are enjoying tremendous gains and wealth and benefits due to their party being in power; and we should see the trend reverse when the Democrats are in power and all our Democrat friends should be living better and enjoying life more than their Republican counterparts. But that doesn't happen.
The voters don't benefit from having their party win an election and take power. Nobody out here wins anything. The voters don't get anything for their trouble regardless of who takes the Oval office. EXCEPT, for a small group of people who do nothing but consistently win and win and win after every election, no matter who comes to power, and they keep winning year after year, all year long.
There is only one sector of society that consistently, noticeably, blatantly enjoys tremendous benefits and direct tangible rewards in our system of politics. This same group of people wins all of the major benefits from every election regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans take office. This group never loses. It never gives up an inch of ground, in fact it gains ground every year, and not by inches but by miles.
Conversely the opposite applies to everyone else. Everyone else besides these people loses serious ground year after year. They are losing their wealth, their property, their rights, their access to prosperity, their freedom, their health, their free choice and hope for the future to name just a few things and unfortunately, as these serious losses continue to mount, the people find that their voices will not be heard in the halls of government. Their own elected representatives do nothing at all to stop these losses, no matter how much their electorate is losing, how dire the straights are becoming, how much value the dollar has lost, how high prices are becoming, how many jobs are exiting the country, how out of reach the cost of higher education is, and many more serious and even life threatening problems the average working, voting American is struggling with in growing severity.
Hmmm. What should we make of this? What does it mean? What does it tell us about our supposed two party dominated political system?
The first thing it should tell us is that there are no tangible rewards that come from voting our particular parties into power. There certainly are abundant rewards to be had, but they don't come out here to us. The rewards go where they always go. They're generously handed over in breath taking chunks to the same cast of characters plus the person elected to office who also gets a very nice share and an unbeatable benefits package. We don't get dick.
It looks to me like when we're voting, what we're voting for is who gets to win the jackpot. We don't get to win it. And we don't get to take any share of it when our guy wins. It's a very generous no-strings-attached gift from us to them. How very kind and generous of us! It is so kind to be so very generous and so unselfish to some of the wealthiest people in the world who don't need that jackpot anywhere near as much as we do. Gosh we're swell.
But wait a minute. If it's only the same people again and again who profit the most from any of our elections, if it's only this one bunch who profits more each year, if nobody else but them is consistently enjoying the abundant share of rewards that they do, then who is really in power?
Common sense dictates that any group in power will act in its own self interests, right? Whoever's in power has the sole right to make, amend, and eliminate laws and they really look forward to doing those things and do them to benefit themselves, right? That is the prize. Do they not take it? Of course they take it. They take it and they don't care at all about who gets cheated or screwed as they help themselves to their winnings. The losers don't count. Losers don't have any say over any of it. The losers are shut out and nobody cares. We know better than to believe or expect egalitarianism from people with power. There's no record or evidence of such egalitarian behavior in my own personal living memory. If it's happened in the past it was before I was on this earth so for all intents and purposes I can only speak to the fact that I've never seen any such thing and would possibly keel over from shock if I ever did see something like that coming out of the hallowed halls of our dear elected Congress.
Therefore, whoever has the power will use it to make themselves happy. Well, if the only people who are always happy are not people we elect and are never us, that does not make sense. When parties change and new administrations come in then all bets should be off, right? A new set of winners should be getting the rewards, right? Not the same set of winners that got the rewards last time and the time before that and the time before that when the Democrats were in power and also the time before that when the Republicans were in power etc. etc. etc. . Who gets the rewards should change if the actual power changes, shouldn't it?
But it doesn't change. It never changes. And we never get any rewards for our voting, we get handed the bill, no matter whose party won the jackpot, er, the election. It is illogical then to say that power ever changes after any election because clearly it does not.
Take a really good look at what having power means. Whoever is in power has mind boggling access to mind boggling wealth and capabilities. They have things that nobody else in the whole wide world can touch. They have legal authorization to take everyone's money, property, rights and even the lives of everyone in the country, including all the people who did not vote for them, to use as they see fit, to achieve their own ends, in their own preferred manner, to satisfy only themselves, without regard to the dissatisfaction it creates for a great many people who aren't them. They'll have no legal obligation to account for how it's spent and they don't have to apologize to anyone who doesn't like what they do with that money or that power. They can't be arrested. They have the most skilled professionals in the world at their finger tips. They can do anything they want. And what they want is to take all the money they can get their hands on and to use that money and all of that power and the whole of all of the possibilities of that amazing grand prize and they will use it to benefit themselves and they'll have a hell of a good time doing it. The winner take all system is set up to work that way. This is the "all" that winners take.
Because that is so profoundly retarded and unfair and stupid and a total rip off then it also stands to reason that the reason we don't have a better system is because they don't want us to have one. It's the last thing those who benefit from this system would ever want. They would never agree to it. A real system, a fair one, would put a serious damper on the ability of that single group of people being able to benefit themselves time and time again at the expense of everyone else. They don't have any intention of allowing a fair system to be put in place.
This system serves those who benefit the most from it and it doesn't serve anyone else. It serves precisely the very people who right now, today, are the consistent hands-down big-time winners of all of the best of the best prizes that can be won in our winner take all political system. Winner take all is just what they have in mind. They want to take it all. They're pretty much taking it all right now.
We don't have a fair system. Our system is not what it looks like on the outside. We are not a part of it because if we were we wouldn't have this system, we'd have a fair one that we could all benefit from. We would have no luck at all in trying to install a fair system now, because the one that's here now has been permanently super glued into place. It is also protected by legions of heavily armed men. Any attempt to remove this system to replace it with one that makes sense can and likely will result in your ass getting assassinated or ending up in a prison cell with some huge creepy guy that thinks you have pretty lips. Neither man nor beast nor even God Almighty's commandments or even His Personal Opinion can do a thing to budge this crap system out of place and replace it with one that actually works for us instead of ripping us off and making fools out of us.
The bottom line is that we don't have a two party system. We don't even really have a one party system in the true sense. But we do have a permanent one party system in the hidden sense. The Parasite Party. It wears the Democrats and the Republicans like gloves, one on each hand, and it puts on puppet shows just like the Punch and Judy shows of yesterday. It may look like two separate entities pounding the stuffing out of each other on that stage, but it's merely the two gloved hands of a single entity behind the curtain. The Parasite Party IS the Republicans and it IS the Democrats. No such actual parties exist beyond being the puppet clad hands of the Parasites who have been feeding off us to the point that we're nearly dead and gone.
Why aren't they stopped? Who's going to stop them? They are the permanent power class. The authorities report to them. The authorities do what they tell them to do. And they tell them to leave them alone while they suck the life blood out of this country in any way they please. We don't get any. It's all theirs.
The Parasites have seen to it that no other interests but their own are allowed to access the halls of deciding where to flow the vast amounts of money, privilege, favors, special rules, special access, abundance and prosperity, preferential treatment and getting away with it and all that jazz and then some. By simply shutting out everyone else in practice while propagating the theory of all being welcome to participate, and by pretending that it matters if we vote a Republican or a Democrat into office, they are able to happily gorge themselves on all our prosperity, only cutting loose juicy chunks to get the new faces in office to continue doing things their way. Should any new faces refuse, they get rid of the faces and the bodies attached to them. They're not shy about it. They're not letting anyone take away their jackpot. They want it forever.
The Parasites have obviously and inarguably managed to make our system their own personal private parasite smorgasbord. You and I don't get anything but crumbs. That's the truth and the facts and you have only to check who's been consistently prospering at record breaking levels and who's been eating their dust to prove what I'm saying is true. We do not have a two party system, we don't even have a one party system. We have a no party system. We have a parasite infestation sucking everything of value and every possible reward out of our country, out of our bodies and out of our lives. To protect themselves when eventually discovered and exposed, they have a powerful form of insurance. They've entrenched themselves so deeply into every aspect of our lives, feeding off us and sucking the flesh from our unborn children's bones, that their fat bloated bodies are the only thing filling the whole they've chewed into us. Suddenly extricating them from our political system could literally kill us. WHAT sneaky bastards they are. The parasites are in like flint and you and I can't do a thing about it. They will leave when they're done feeding off us, which will be when we're dead because they've sucked the last drop of money and power and health and wealth and prosperity and hope and independence and freedom and dignity out of us. And by the looks of it, that really can't be much longer.
When the government tells you to get out there and vote, from now on, understand that if they want you to vote you don't want to vote. If that's what they want it's because it's good for them and bad for you. If we don't vote we don't give anyone our jackpot. It all begins to make sense, doesn't it?
We buy into the belief that the struggle between the Democrats and the Republicans somehow accurately represents a majority view. We are all either donkeys or elephants, left or right, locked in eternal battle and filled with mutual contempt and loathing. Voting for any third party would be wasting your vote due to the volume of people supporting the two dominant parties.
Perhaps if we had representational government, meaning that we could have several parties that depending on the percentage of the total vote they received, each party would receive seats in the Congress, then there would be no such thing as a wasted vote in America. Every vote would mean something and could not be cast in vain. Obviously this would serve the public better because everyone would have a chance at influencing lawmakers and furthering their own agendas and that would be a lot more fair than the way we do it now.
Our current system is one of exclusion, of monopolizing political power, access and influence. It excludes all other interests from getting a shot at any of it. This is a winner take all system which means that only the winner wins. It follows then that everyone else must lose.
In our winner take all system only some people get to be happy and will have their way but the fact is, the winners don't usually represent the majority of the population. That would make them a minority, a controlling minority. Often an extremist controlling minority for that matter, which routinely makes the majority of the country miserable watching the crazed extremist minority running roughshod over a system that took a lot of years and hard work to build a few good things into.
Doing things this way doesn't make any sense at all if indeed we are a self-ruling people living in freedom and equality with a fair shot for everyone at participating in creating the country we all have to live in.
In fact, this is a terrible system for everyone, except for the winners. It's not a fair system either but it doesn't claim to be. It doesn't even pretend to be fair. This is a system designed to enable a small group of people in power to claim unbelievable rights of control over all of the money and all of the power and all of the people in whatever way they see fit. Is that the definition of living in a free country? Not. It sounds a lot more like living in a monarchy or a dictatorship.
By the way, where are the rewards for the voters who get their parties put into power? I mean, what's in this system for us? What do we get out of it? We get all involved in the competition and we come unglued with joy when our party wins the election, but what do we get for it? What is the reward? What are we so excited about when our party wins?
When the Republicans are in office we do not see a nation where all of the Republican voters are suddenly living in mansions and becoming entrepreneur tycoons slashing employee wages and benefits to bare bones and making it big in the stock market while all of the Democrats are slogging through minimum wage, depressing lives. When the Democrats take over the White House we don't see a nation where all of the Democrats are living high on the hog, where all the homeless have homes and the poor are up on their feet, whilst the Republicans are forced to live in bean eating poverty and must hand over their paychecks to the poor to support them and send them all through college. We don't see any party changes changing our country or our lives. We don't see any differences at all in the lives of Joe and Jane Average American that are in any way dependent on or connected to their political party allegiances or who wins any election.
This does not make sense. In a two party dominated system, when one or the other party takes power then that party's constituents should all benefit, shouldn't they? If your party wins power there should be rewards in it for you, right? If the Republican party represents the Republican voters we should be seeing consistent periods in recent history where our Republican friends are enjoying tremendous gains and wealth and benefits due to their party being in power; and we should see the trend reverse when the Democrats are in power and all our Democrat friends should be living better and enjoying life more than their Republican counterparts. But that doesn't happen.
The voters don't benefit from having their party win an election and take power. Nobody out here wins anything. The voters don't get anything for their trouble regardless of who takes the Oval office. EXCEPT, for a small group of people who do nothing but consistently win and win and win after every election, no matter who comes to power, and they keep winning year after year, all year long.
There is only one sector of society that consistently, noticeably, blatantly enjoys tremendous benefits and direct tangible rewards in our system of politics. This same group of people wins all of the major benefits from every election regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans take office. This group never loses. It never gives up an inch of ground, in fact it gains ground every year, and not by inches but by miles.
Conversely the opposite applies to everyone else. Everyone else besides these people loses serious ground year after year. They are losing their wealth, their property, their rights, their access to prosperity, their freedom, their health, their free choice and hope for the future to name just a few things and unfortunately, as these serious losses continue to mount, the people find that their voices will not be heard in the halls of government. Their own elected representatives do nothing at all to stop these losses, no matter how much their electorate is losing, how dire the straights are becoming, how much value the dollar has lost, how high prices are becoming, how many jobs are exiting the country, how out of reach the cost of higher education is, and many more serious and even life threatening problems the average working, voting American is struggling with in growing severity.
Hmmm. What should we make of this? What does it mean? What does it tell us about our supposed two party dominated political system?
The first thing it should tell us is that there are no tangible rewards that come from voting our particular parties into power. There certainly are abundant rewards to be had, but they don't come out here to us. The rewards go where they always go. They're generously handed over in breath taking chunks to the same cast of characters plus the person elected to office who also gets a very nice share and an unbeatable benefits package. We don't get dick.
It looks to me like when we're voting, what we're voting for is who gets to win the jackpot. We don't get to win it. And we don't get to take any share of it when our guy wins. It's a very generous no-strings-attached gift from us to them. How very kind and generous of us! It is so kind to be so very generous and so unselfish to some of the wealthiest people in the world who don't need that jackpot anywhere near as much as we do. Gosh we're swell.
But wait a minute. If it's only the same people again and again who profit the most from any of our elections, if it's only this one bunch who profits more each year, if nobody else but them is consistently enjoying the abundant share of rewards that they do, then who is really in power?
Common sense dictates that any group in power will act in its own self interests, right? Whoever's in power has the sole right to make, amend, and eliminate laws and they really look forward to doing those things and do them to benefit themselves, right? That is the prize. Do they not take it? Of course they take it. They take it and they don't care at all about who gets cheated or screwed as they help themselves to their winnings. The losers don't count. Losers don't have any say over any of it. The losers are shut out and nobody cares. We know better than to believe or expect egalitarianism from people with power. There's no record or evidence of such egalitarian behavior in my own personal living memory. If it's happened in the past it was before I was on this earth so for all intents and purposes I can only speak to the fact that I've never seen any such thing and would possibly keel over from shock if I ever did see something like that coming out of the hallowed halls of our dear elected Congress.
Therefore, whoever has the power will use it to make themselves happy. Well, if the only people who are always happy are not people we elect and are never us, that does not make sense. When parties change and new administrations come in then all bets should be off, right? A new set of winners should be getting the rewards, right? Not the same set of winners that got the rewards last time and the time before that and the time before that when the Democrats were in power and also the time before that when the Republicans were in power etc. etc. etc. . Who gets the rewards should change if the actual power changes, shouldn't it?
But it doesn't change. It never changes. And we never get any rewards for our voting, we get handed the bill, no matter whose party won the jackpot, er, the election. It is illogical then to say that power ever changes after any election because clearly it does not.
Take a really good look at what having power means. Whoever is in power has mind boggling access to mind boggling wealth and capabilities. They have things that nobody else in the whole wide world can touch. They have legal authorization to take everyone's money, property, rights and even the lives of everyone in the country, including all the people who did not vote for them, to use as they see fit, to achieve their own ends, in their own preferred manner, to satisfy only themselves, without regard to the dissatisfaction it creates for a great many people who aren't them. They'll have no legal obligation to account for how it's spent and they don't have to apologize to anyone who doesn't like what they do with that money or that power. They can't be arrested. They have the most skilled professionals in the world at their finger tips. They can do anything they want. And what they want is to take all the money they can get their hands on and to use that money and all of that power and the whole of all of the possibilities of that amazing grand prize and they will use it to benefit themselves and they'll have a hell of a good time doing it. The winner take all system is set up to work that way. This is the "all" that winners take.
Because that is so profoundly retarded and unfair and stupid and a total rip off then it also stands to reason that the reason we don't have a better system is because they don't want us to have one. It's the last thing those who benefit from this system would ever want. They would never agree to it. A real system, a fair one, would put a serious damper on the ability of that single group of people being able to benefit themselves time and time again at the expense of everyone else. They don't have any intention of allowing a fair system to be put in place.
This system serves those who benefit the most from it and it doesn't serve anyone else. It serves precisely the very people who right now, today, are the consistent hands-down big-time winners of all of the best of the best prizes that can be won in our winner take all political system. Winner take all is just what they have in mind. They want to take it all. They're pretty much taking it all right now.
We don't have a fair system. Our system is not what it looks like on the outside. We are not a part of it because if we were we wouldn't have this system, we'd have a fair one that we could all benefit from. We would have no luck at all in trying to install a fair system now, because the one that's here now has been permanently super glued into place. It is also protected by legions of heavily armed men. Any attempt to remove this system to replace it with one that makes sense can and likely will result in your ass getting assassinated or ending up in a prison cell with some huge creepy guy that thinks you have pretty lips. Neither man nor beast nor even God Almighty's commandments or even His Personal Opinion can do a thing to budge this crap system out of place and replace it with one that actually works for us instead of ripping us off and making fools out of us.
The bottom line is that we don't have a two party system. We don't even really have a one party system in the true sense. But we do have a permanent one party system in the hidden sense. The Parasite Party. It wears the Democrats and the Republicans like gloves, one on each hand, and it puts on puppet shows just like the Punch and Judy shows of yesterday. It may look like two separate entities pounding the stuffing out of each other on that stage, but it's merely the two gloved hands of a single entity behind the curtain. The Parasite Party IS the Republicans and it IS the Democrats. No such actual parties exist beyond being the puppet clad hands of the Parasites who have been feeding off us to the point that we're nearly dead and gone.
Why aren't they stopped? Who's going to stop them? They are the permanent power class. The authorities report to them. The authorities do what they tell them to do. And they tell them to leave them alone while they suck the life blood out of this country in any way they please. We don't get any. It's all theirs.
The Parasites have seen to it that no other interests but their own are allowed to access the halls of deciding where to flow the vast amounts of money, privilege, favors, special rules, special access, abundance and prosperity, preferential treatment and getting away with it and all that jazz and then some. By simply shutting out everyone else in practice while propagating the theory of all being welcome to participate, and by pretending that it matters if we vote a Republican or a Democrat into office, they are able to happily gorge themselves on all our prosperity, only cutting loose juicy chunks to get the new faces in office to continue doing things their way. Should any new faces refuse, they get rid of the faces and the bodies attached to them. They're not shy about it. They're not letting anyone take away their jackpot. They want it forever.
The Parasites have obviously and inarguably managed to make our system their own personal private parasite smorgasbord. You and I don't get anything but crumbs. That's the truth and the facts and you have only to check who's been consistently prospering at record breaking levels and who's been eating their dust to prove what I'm saying is true. We do not have a two party system, we don't even have a one party system. We have a no party system. We have a parasite infestation sucking everything of value and every possible reward out of our country, out of our bodies and out of our lives. To protect themselves when eventually discovered and exposed, they have a powerful form of insurance. They've entrenched themselves so deeply into every aspect of our lives, feeding off us and sucking the flesh from our unborn children's bones, that their fat bloated bodies are the only thing filling the whole they've chewed into us. Suddenly extricating them from our political system could literally kill us. WHAT sneaky bastards they are. The parasites are in like flint and you and I can't do a thing about it. They will leave when they're done feeding off us, which will be when we're dead because they've sucked the last drop of money and power and health and wealth and prosperity and hope and independence and freedom and dignity out of us. And by the looks of it, that really can't be much longer.
When the government tells you to get out there and vote, from now on, understand that if they want you to vote you don't want to vote. If that's what they want it's because it's good for them and bad for you. If we don't vote we don't give anyone our jackpot. It all begins to make sense, doesn't it?
Posts
Your blogs do what LSD did to me in the seventies. Takes me places where I see it as it maybe.
ReplyDeleteThey are so well written.
I'd like to have your permission to post them onto my Multiply blog: http://delborgreebies.multiply.com/
Delbor Greebies
Gee Delbor, thanks. I'm proud to be your local legal high. With the state of things it may not be legal much longer. Thanks for asking about reposting, and yes, take whatever you like. I appreciate your wonderful comment.
ReplyDeleteAng
You've hit the mark again as usual, Angie. During the run-up to elections I always wondered why, as I drove past somebody's shithole of a shack, they had a big
ReplyDeleteAmerican flag waving out in front that obviously cost more than half their house and a lawn full of campaign posters. As you so effectively point out, "What's in it for them?" Obviously nothing material. But lately the sad truth of the matter may have occurred to me. Could it be because they’re trying to feel like they’re on the winning side, hence they too are WINNERS. Finally, they can watch the outcome of the "election" and hopefully say to themselves: "Today I'm a winner. Today my opinion counts!" It may not count again for another four years, but today the guy whose name is on their lawn poster was "elected", so they won; their opinion matters. It’s heartbreaking how so many of our once proud people have been reduced to this. The only way the charade could ever end is if we the people saw through it and united to take it back. But all we can seem to agree upon is to disagree. And that’s the plan—that’s their strength. Keep up the fine work, Ang.
Jerry,
ReplyDeleteThat's a perfect example of not getting anything back. It's like dog training where we're out here competing for a moment of personal satisfaction. If your guy wins you feel validated, or you feel right, but whatever you feel, you still got nothing for your trouble. You are right, it is so pathetic that we're so used to being treated like superfluous undeserving nobodys that we have to settle for a cheap thrill like feeling that your opinion mattered for a day. We've been thoroughly domesticated. Sigh. Thanks for the great comment.
Ang
while i agree with a lot of what you're saying here, i can't help but feel personally offended as an individual who has suffered from 3 parasites and their repercussions over the course of the last few years. i know you are trying to make a statement with your terminology, but i wonder if there isn't something a tiny bit less offensive that you could use instead? bugs? roaches? unwelcome?
ReplyDeleteMonster Habit,
ReplyDeleteYou know, just one month before Sept. 11 happened my mother died of cancer. It was very sudden and tragic. She had a particularly vicious and deadly kind of cancer that is incurable. The diagnosis itself is a death sentence, and death happens in a matter of months, usually between 4 and 7 and that's exactly what happened. She was gone in six. I was devastated. We were very close; and like anyone's Mom, she is irreplaceable. It hit me hard to say the least.
For the first five years it brought up tremendous sadness for me whenever one of my dearest friends, or even just a neighbor, would tell me about just getting off the phone with their mom, or that they'd just spent time with their mom, or their mom was coming
over to visit. I remember a couple of times, once when my best friend was glowing after being able to spend some quality mother/daughter time with her mom on Mother's Day; and another time when another friend was complaining about her mom being, you know, like moms are, and it just hit me so hard. How lucky they were to still have their mothers, to still be able to pick up the phone and hear her voice, to have her wise guidance and special friendship.
Talking about your mom is the most natural thing in the world. They weren't being evil when they did it. They weren't purposely trying to hurt me. They didn't understand my pain and hurting because they still had their moms. They couldn't know how it made me feel every time they brought the subject up. Far from being unhappy about that, I was glad they didn't understand. I was and still am very glad they haven't had to go through what I went through.
That said, it never occurred to me ever, not once, to ask my dearest friends not to talk about their mothers with me. I wouldn't dream of asking any of them to censor
themselves, to not express themselves fully with me. I wouldn't dream of asking someone to minimize themselves so I could feel better, because that's just not fair. Making everyone else walk on egg shells around me would be detrimental to just being normal again. And even if they did censor themselves willingly, it
wouldn't have done a thing to make it hurt less for me. My pain and suffering had nothing to do with them. Them still having moms was not an insult to me. I had endured something miserable and painful, and that was my burden to carry, not theirs.
So I do understand what it's like to be reminded of something painful, but I won't censor myself for you or anyone else because that just doesn't make sense. I am who I am and I will say what I want to say because if I can't, then what's the point? This piece was specifically about parasites. That was the title. It can't be switched out for "bug" or any other word. That said, if I thought for one minute that me changing myself would ease your pain, I'd do it. But I know it wouldn't change a thing for you. This is your private burden to carry Monster Habit, and you'll get through it faster and better if you own it instead of trying to make someone else suffer because you had to suffer. Think about it. Why would you ask that of anyone?
Ang