Mike 03
Mike 03's JournalI'm so sorry.
Putting down a beloved animal is one of the worst experiences in life.
I'm always hesitant to recommend books on such a personal subject as loss of an animal, but I used to have about ten of them and I got rid of all of them except for "Pet Loss: A Spiritual Guide" by Eleanor Harris. Some of those books are terrible. But that book hit the spot. But it's very subjective trying to figure out what is a good book for someone else. I even got some comfort from a children's book about losing an animal.
A newer book about grief in general might be good too. I think we've learned a lot about grief over the past few years. I remember a time where people didn't take grief over losing a beloved animal seriously.
One thing you read over and over again is that there is no such thing as a "wrong" response to losing someone, and to be easy on yourself and not judge what you are feeling.
Just googling "When grief manifests as anger" turns up a lot of interesting looking articles. Just be careful because there is some incredible crap on the internet too.
What Is Anger? A Common Manifestation of Grief
https://thegrieftoolbox.com/article/what-anger-common-manifestation-grief
Echoes of Stalin, another dictator who paid attention to who was clapping
Here is how the Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the surreal scene in his great book, The Gulag Archipelago:
“The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly…Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.”
At last, after eleven minutes of non-stop clapping, the director of a paper factory finally decided enough was enough. He stopped clapping and sat down—a miracle!
“To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” Solzhenitsyn says.
That same night, the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years. Authorities came up with some official reason for his sentence, but during his interrogation, he was told: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”
https://www.disappearingman.com/communism/men-wouldnt-stop-clapping/
If anybody is unfamiliar with the Auden/Thucydides reference...
(I had to look it up)
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave ...
In stanza 4, we are back in New York, where “blind skyscrapers” reach into the “neutral air.” One sense of “neutral” may be political: the United States is neutral in the war, hence at peace, but also complicit because we do nothing to stop Hitler. Auden is a citizen of a combatant nation who is guiltily safe in neutral Manhattan. Neutrality had been a characteristic failure of the “low dishonest decade” that Auden invoked in the first stanza. The Western democracies chose to be neutral in the Spanish Civil War, which made them complicit to fascist rule. Most of New York’s “blind skyscrapers” house private enterprises, ostensibly free and private, but Auden compares them to the grandiose structures of Berlin and Moscow. New York’s buildings, too, “use / their full height to proclaim / The strength of Collective Man.” The ideology that drives them is presumably “imperialism,” a mirror for the ideologies of Europe.
An essay here:
https://peterlevine.ws/?p=9468
Who said, "The road to fascism is lined with people telling you that you're
overreacting"?
It's always "farfetched" until afterwards, when people start telling you it was "obvious all along."
This is a seriously important article
It would be not simply a major departure but a deeply dangerous one were Trump to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election. It would be a brutal renunciation of American democracy. It would create not simply a fissure but a chasm in the nation’s politics and government, telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency. It would be an act of disloyalty unsurpassed in American history except by the southern secession in 1860-61, the ultimate example of Americans refusing to respect the outcome of a presidential election.
This lines up eerily with what Thomas Friedman has been saying, that our nation hasn't been in such peril since the days of the Civil War.
Thank you for posting.
This seems like quite an important poll that should put to rest the
oft-repeated talking point that "Half the country thinks Trump won", which doesn't really make sense anyway when you think about it and break it down into percentages.
Less than half the people who voted in this election voted for Trump. That still leaves a large number of people who didn't vote in the election, and not every person who voted for Trump believes he won the election. Just the extremely stupid and brainwashed ones.
Thank you. I'm so sick of the GSA-Delay apologists.
Leon Panetta called it bullshit last night. Something tells me he is in a position to know.
It's the *attempt* to retain power that worries me.
We're beyond "plausible" and "implausible."
I'm done being told there's nothing to see here.
And that theory that the GOP is playing along to allow Trump "time to deal with his grief"...
is fuckinig horsehit.
What Bill Barr did last night wasn't part of a scheme to "give Trump space." What a crock of shit!
+1
Some really smart people agree with us. Like Leon Panetta, General McCaffrey, Steve Schmidt and others.
Esper yesterday: "God help us." Esper ran the Pentagon!
Have you watched the documentary #UNFIT yet? Another dozen people in that movie agree, including two experts on fascism (including Ruth Ben-Ghiat).
Last night, Thomas Friedman also said this is as close to peril as we've been since the Civil War.
I don't make many posts about it, but I am not in the "Shut Up, everything's going to work out just great, you're a fool for not sleeping well" camp.
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Gender: MaleHometown: Modesto California
Home country: United States
Current location: Arizona
Member since: Mon Oct 27, 2008, 06:14 PM
Number of posts: 16,616
