A little ugly reality slipped into my Grandma rose-colored glasses fantasy world today.
The committee in DC commenced that will FINALLY unpack the events of January 6 and hold all of the terrorists accountable.
The House select committee formed to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol convened its first hearing on Tuesday, hosting a panel of four police officers who defended the building against a mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump. (NBC news)
Are you watching?
From Capitol police Officer Dunn: “If a hitman is hired, and he kills somebody, the hitman goes to the jail. But not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired him does. There was an attack carried out on January 6 and a hit man sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”
We all know to whom he’s referring, right?
The officers’ testimony and first-hand emotional accounts of January 6 are even more horrific than what we witnessed live.
It was an attempted coup. It was an insurrection. There is every reason to believe that orange POS committed treason.
And from Representative Liz Cheney: “The fact that so many members of our leadership … that they’ve gone from recognizing what happened on the 6th to protesting in front of the Justice Dept. on behalf of those who were part of the insurrection is something I can’t explain. I think it’s a disgrace.”
What makes me really sick is the knowledge that some of my neighbors and community supported that violence and perhaps were even present in DC that day.
This is what McConnell said on January 6. Where is that coward today?
“They were provoked by the president (Donald J. Trump) and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of the first branch of the federal government,” -Mitch McConnell (statement following the 1/6 insurrection)
They are truly devoid of a soul, disgusting, and morally bankrupt.
And while I’m on a rant and because she’s from my area…Ashli Babbitt was a traitor and a terrorist, and anyone who sides with her is also a traitor and a terrorist.
The nightmare of the last four years is almost over!
While the election hasn’t been officially called for Joe Biden as of 6:00 a.m. today, November 6, 2020, I have faith that it’s just a matter of time. The terrible black cloud we’ve been living under here in the United States for the last four years is dissipating, and there’s now HOPE on the horizon.
Democracy has been saved.
After we celebrate, we need to fix the Supreme Court and restore women’s right to choose what happens to our own bodies and hurry to repair the damage to our wildlife and our climate and our pristine wilderness. Get rid of the Electoral College!
Maybe the worst part of the last four years is the knowledge that there is still so much systemic racism here. It’s like a certain segment of society can’t get over the fact that the Civil War is over. Equal means EQUAL, no matter the color of our skin or religion, or whom you choose to love. It’s obvious there needs to be a lot more education. Racism and fascism shouldn’t be tolerated.
I’m here in California and we voted overwhelmingly for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but I want to take the time to express my appreciation to Georgia’s Stacey Abrams for tirelessly working to uphold honor and decency and integrity and to fight the good fight for all of us.
My parting words for that failed reality show sociopath… “YOU’RE FIRED!”
Here’s a few words from the late great John Lewis that seem especially appropriate right about now:
“About fifteen of us children were outside my aunt Seneva’s house, playing in her dirt yard. The sky began clouding over, the wind started picking up, lightning flashed far off in the distance, and suddenly I wasn’t thinking about playing anymore; I was terrified…Aunt Seneva was the only adult around, and as the sky blackened and the wind grew stronger, she herded us all inside.Her house was not the biggest place around, and it seemed even smaller with so many children squeezed inside. Small and surprisingly quiet. All of the shouting and laughter that had been going on earlier, outside, had stopped. The wind was howling now, and the house was starting to shake. We were scared. Even Aunt Seneva was scared.And then it got worse. Now the house was beginning to sway. The wood plank flooring beneath us began to bend. And then, a corner of the room started lifting up.I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. None of us could. This storm was actually pulling the house toward the sky. With us inside it.That was when Aunt Seneva told us to clasp hands. Line up and hold hands, she said, and we did as we were told. Then she had us walk as a group toward the corner of the room that was rising. From the kitchen to the front of the house we walked, the wind screaming outside, sheets of rain beating on the tin roof. Then we walked back in the other direction, as another end of the house began to lift.And so it went, back and forth, fifteen children walking with the wind, holding that trembling house down with the weight of our small bodies.More than half a century has passed since that day, and it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart.It seemed that way in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement, when America itself felt as if it might burst at the seams—so much tension, so many storms. But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed, they came together and they did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was the weakest.And then another corner would lift, and we would go there.And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand.But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again.And we did.And we still do, all of us. You and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind. . . . “
I originally posted this in 2017 but it seems relevant now more than ever, especially in the aftermath of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s untimely death and what that means to the Supreme Court and our messed up country, so I freshened it up a bit for 2020. When I first posted this, I also posted on another site and received some angry comments so I guess it touched a few nerves, fired up some triggers; oh well. Don’t shoot the messenger.
I had never heard the word– Wetiko— until a couple years ago and now it’s cropping up everywhere since it’s on my radar.
The term Wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which, to quote Forbes, refers to “an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts.”[ii] Wetikos are the human instruments for the transpersonal ‘spirit of evil’ to terrorize the world.
There seems to be a collective query rising up from the huddled masses of humanity who search for answers to everything from Trump to climate change, deadly natural disasters to senseless murders, and a pervasive lack of empathy and compassion.
Is there an epidemic of broken, undeveloped frontal lobes, of dysfunctional, maladjusted, deteriorating, and infected amygdalas?
Narcissism and Cluster B psychopathy run rampant in our culture, feeding on those who still have that innate ability to feel empathy and compassion, who possess a real soul and a kind spirit.
Those dark and toxic parasitic Wetiko entities are cannibalistic, predatory, soul-LESS, selfish, and hostile: a cancer of the soul; a shapeshifter.
How sad.
“Just as viruses or malware infect a computer and program it to self-destruct, Wetiko programs the human biocomputer to think and behave in self-destructive ways.
Covertly operating through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, Wetiko renders people oblivious to their own madness, compelling them to act against their own best interests.
People under its thrall can, like someone in the throes of an addiction or in a state of trauma, unwittingly create the very problem they are trying to resolve, clinging desperately to the thing that is torturing and destroying them.
People taken over by Wetiko are suffering from an autoimmune disease of the psyche. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism perversely attacks the very life it is trying to protect. In trying to live, it destroys life, ultimately destroying even itself. In the same way, once Wetiko has insinuated itself into a living entity, it acts like a perverted antibody, treating the wholesome parts of the system as cancerous tumors to be exterminated.
From Psychology Today
This problem is being collectively acted out on the world stage. Humans are destroying the biosphere of the planet upon which we all depend for our survival.
Wetiko is at the bottom of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking on this biosphere. One example is the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, the lungs of the planet. Another example is the terminator seeds that are genetically engineered not to reproduce a second generation, forcing farmers to buy new seeds and making life impossible for many poor farmers. If the planet were seen as an organism, and people seen as cells in this organism, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic and had turned on the healthy cells, destroying the very organism of which they themselves were a part.
Our species appears to be enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale. Paul Levy “Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil” Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 146-151.
Also from Paul Levy…Wetiko disease is an expression of the convincing illusion of the separate self gone wild. Bewitched by the intrinsic projective tendencies of their own mind, full-blown Wetikos are unconsciously doing the very thing they are reacting to while simultaneously accusing other people of doing it.
Projecting the shadow onto others, they will accuse others of projecting the shadow onto them. To use an extreme, but prototypical example, it is like someone screaming that you’re killing them as they kill you.
If their insanity is reflected back to them, they think it is the mirror that is insane. Suffering from a form of psychic blindness that believes itself to be sightedness, full-blown Wetikos project out their own unconscious blindness and imagine that others, instead of themselves, are the ones who are not seeing.
Governed by the insane, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia, those taken over by the disease fear that if they don’t attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves.
In their convoluted, upside-down, flawless illogic, Wetikos’ act to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are other than themselves, thinking that they themselves have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting.
Photo by Miguel u00c1. Padriu00f1u00e1n on Pexels.com
In Wetiko disease, the psyche takes the ‘terror’ that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, unwittingly becomes taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world.
We have then become the thing we most feared, ‘creatures of the European nightmare world,’ as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large.
Because full-blown Wetikos are soul murderers who continually recreate the ongoing process of killing their own soul, they are reflexively compelled to do this to others; for what the soul does to itself, it can’t help but do to others.
In a perverse inversion of the golden rule, instead of treating others how they would like to be treated, Wetikos do unto others what was done unto them. The Wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless, vampiric lineage of abuse.
Full-blown Wetikos induce and dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have split off from and denied, and are thus not able to consciously experience – the part of themselves that has been abused and vampirized. In playing this out, Wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness to others in a perverse form of trying to deal with their own suffering.
Paradoxically, Wetikos both try to destroy others’ light, as it reminds them of what they’ve killed in themselves, while simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves.
The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will kill us.”
“An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind”. – Ghandi
Native American author and philosopher Jack Forbes further adds:
“This disease, this Wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s psyche from the beginning of time.
Like a fractal, Wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously — intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (between ourselves), as well as collectively (as a species). “Cannibalism,” in Forbes’s words, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”
I don’t read much science fiction…I’m a chicklit girl, but my research about Wetiko led me to this article about the (deceased) sci-fi author, Phillip K. Dick (you might know him as the author of Bladerunner.)
On a recent flight back home, I was sitting in my usual choice of an aisle seat mostly because I don’t like to crawl over strange legs when I need to use the restroom.
An older (older than me) woman crawled over me to take the window seat.
A young man was escorted to his seat directly across from me by a flight attendant who commented on his height and asked him how old he was as he was flying as an unaccompanied minor.
He was nine-years-old and about six feet tall.
Just a little boy in a man sized body.
I could feel his embarrassment as he was singled out for his height and I’m sure has had to endure a zillion comments about it.
He was very quiet, but seemed a little scared, so I chatted with him a bit, and he was very sweet. His dad was picking him up and he would be starting school in San Diego. He began to open up and just as I suspected, he was a little boy who didn’t really know how to deal with the fact that he looked like he was in high school.
The older woman next to me said, in a very heavy southern accent, “I should get his autograph now, he’s going to be famous.”
I didn’t respond to her right away because I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt or maybe I had misinterpreted what she was alluding to, but she repeated herself loud enough for the young man to hear, and I felt that I needed to do something.
I said, “What are you saying? That because he’s tall, his only life path is basketball?”
She looked at me and said, “Well, he’s tall…” and then her voice and thought faded.
I replied loud enough for anyone to hear, “Maybe he’s going to be a doctor. Or a professor. Or an artist or a writer. Just because someone has a physical trait doesn’t mean it’s a life sentence. He can and should do whatever touches his heart.”
The woman had so much ingrained covert racism built into her that she didn’t really know what to say, but a few minutes later she told me that she thought about it and agreed with me, so then we had a pleasant rest of the flight.
Did I change her?
Probably not, but the grateful smile I received from a nine-year-old made my day.
(And did I really need to mention that he was a six foot tall African American nine-year-old child or did you figure that out for yourselves?)
And then I saw this photo of Trump serving fast food to the Clemson team.
More covert or not so covert racism. Love Reggie Bush’s tweet.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all, @ClemsonFB you guys deserve better you are world champs and this is the honor you receive from our nations leader!? This is disrespectful on so many levels, just a huge slap in the face after that kind of performance! SMH! pic.twitter.com/rEprhVZf6n
At the time, my reasons for not standing were different than the initial reasons why football players knelt during the national anthem, but these silent protests have become the subject of national attention — this time, because Trump has launched a days-long tirade at players who have joined the movement.
A year ago, it was Colin Kaepernick’s act of kneeling to protest police treatment of African Americans that captured the most attention, in 2017, it appears to be Trump’s unconventional response to the act.
It’s all about freedom: of speech and of thought.
My story:
It was in the early 1990s. I’m not a huge fan of baseball, but somebody had given me a couple of tickets to a Padres game and I thought it would be something my then thirteen-year-old son would enjoy.
After all this time, I can’t remember what team we were playing, but since my son was an avid collector of baseball cards and knew everyone’s stats by heart, it was a big deal to him.
I’m an intermittent rebel. Most of the time I comply with socially accepted behavior norms but sometimes I don’t, and there is really no rhyme or reason why I’ll do something one minute and turn into Pussy Riot the next.
Mercurial is a good word to describe me.
Or batshit crazy. Your choice. Whatever.
On this particular day, I was feeling especially contemplative and introspective. Or pissy, or just contrary, or all of the above…
When it was time for the national anthem and everyone was asked to stand, I stayed seated. My newly teenaged-don’t-make-waves-and-certainly-for-heaven’s-sake-don’t-call-attention-to-the-fact-that-he’s-out-in-public-with-his MOM son stood when everyone else did and then sat back down.
He was confused.
He asked me why I was sitting. I replied that I didn’t like to be told what to do, that I was neither a sheep nor a lemming, that my love or respect for our country had nothing to do with standing simply because everyone seemed to expect it, and putting my hand over my heart was rather offensive to me and reminded me of similar blind devotion to Hitler.
As far back as elementary school, I decided not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because I felt it personally offensive in ways I couldn’t comprehend nor verbalize at the time, but I had a strong feeling that it wasn’t something I wanted to do. Of course I got in trouble, sent to the principal’s office and all that; parents called, and my lawyer dad told the administration that it was my RIGHT and my decision whether I chose to participate in that activity and he supported me. I appreciate that he advocated for my free will even at that age.
The almost but not yet completely drunk people sitting behind us started yelling at me to stand up. That created enough ruckus so that others started paying attention to the situation. The crowd turned ugly. Everyone was yelling at us to stand and accusing me of being a bad mother. Someone threw popcorn.
I told my son that this was a perfect example of what I was explaining to him, that if he felt like he needed to go along with the peer pressure crowd mentality — that was his individual decision, but he should ask himself if he was standing because he wanted to honor his country or because he was being bullied into it?
What was his motivation? What was his intention?
He told me I was a troublemaker and I embarassed him.
With love, I told him I was sorry that I made him feel badly, but that I really wanted him to grow up to be someone that thought for himself and made his own life decisions based on his inner voice of that was right and wrong for HIM.
Did my NOT standing make me LESS of an patriotic American? IT DID NOT. I am not a fan of public displays of rote allegiance.
As soon as as the game started, everyone forgot about it and that’s how it ended, but for a brief moment, I thought things were going to escalate into some sort of overt hostility.
Intermittent or not, I am a proud social protester: when I fought to add wolves to the Endangered Species List, fought against abhorrent puppy mills, and when I stood proudly with my sisters and brothers to protest in support of women’s rights last January.
I’m proud that I stand up (or sit down) for what I believe in.
Not standing for the national anthem is a legal form of peaceful protest, which is a First Amendment right.
There is a method to my seeming madness…it’s a foundation of my belief system of mindful parenting
Mindful parenting means taking responsibility for as well as being present with our own feelings and actions to model this thoughtful insightfulness to our children. This creates a level of self-discovery and self-awareness and self-control over our moment-to-moment reactions. Instead of a negative, punitive connotation, discipline does not only refer to the guiding or teaching of a child, but begins with self and builds individuation.
Although this was my parenting philosophy that I pretty much put into practice instinctually with my son 36 years ago, you can now read about one progressive and loving approach here: Resources for Infant Educarers® (RIE®) https://www.rie.org/
To put it simply, I wanted my son to think for himself, to question authority, to use his brains and his heart to navigate through life, and I’m glad to see that he and DIL are raising my grandson with that same sort of loving mindfulness.
And finally…
This is how President Obama reacted (via Huffington Post):
Almost exactly a year ago, Obama offered a nuanced insight into Kaepernick’s protests.
“Well, as I’ve said before, I believe that us honoring our flag and our anthem is part of what binds us together as a nation,” Obama said during a CNN town hall in September 2016. “But I also always try to remind folks that part of what makes this country special is that we respect people’s rights to have a different opinion. We fight sometimes so that people can do things that we disagree with … As long as they’re doing it within the law, then we can voice our opinion objecting to it, but it’s also their right.”
″I think that it’s also important for us to recognize that sometimes out of these controversies, we start getting into a conversation, and I want everybody to listen to each other,” Obama continued. “I want Mr. Kaepernick and others who are on a knee, I want them to listen to the pain that that may cause somebody who, for example, had a spouse or a child who was killed in combat, and why it hurts them to see somebody not standing. But I also want people to think about the pain that he may be expressing about somebody who’s lost a loved one that they think was unfairly shot.”
I had never heard the word —Wetiko-– until a couple weeks ago and now it’s cropping up everywhere since it’s on my radar.
From my Google search:
The term Wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which, to quote Forbes, refers to “an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts.”[ii] Wetikos are the human instruments for the transpersonal ‘spirit of evil’ to terrorize the world.
There seems to be a collective query rising up from the huddled masses of humanity who search for answers to everything from Trump to climate change, deadly natural disasters to senseless murders, and a pervasive lack of empathy and compassion.
Is there an epidemic of broken, undeveloped frontal lobes, of dysfunctional, maladjusted, deteriorating, and infected amygdalas?
Narcissism and Cluster B psychopathy run rampant in our culture, feeding on those who still have that innate ability to feel empathy and compassion, who possess a real soul and a kind spirit.
Those dark and toxic parasitic Wetiko entities are cannibalistic, predatory, soul-LESS, selfish, and hostile: a cancer of the soul; a shapeshifter.
How sad.
“Just as viruses or malware infect a computer and program it to self-destruct, Wetiko programs the human biocomputer to think and behave in self-destructive ways. Covertly operating through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, Wetiko renders people oblivious to their own madness, compelling them to act against their own best interests. People under its thrall can, like someone in the throes of an addiction or in a state of trauma, unwittingly create the very problem they are trying to resolve, clinging desperately to the thing that is torturing and destroying them.
People taken over by Wetiko are suffering from an autoimmune disease of the psyche. In autoimmune deficiency syndrome, the immune system of the organism perversely attacks the very life it is trying to protect. In trying to live, it destroys life, ultimately destroying even itself. In the same way, once Wetiko has insinuated itself into a living entity, it acts like a perverted antibody, treating the wholesome parts of the system as cancerous tumors to be exterminated.
This problem is being collectively acted out on the world stage. Humans are destroying the biosphere of the planet upon which we all depend for our survival. Wetiko is at the bottom of the seemingly never-ending destruction we are wreaking on this biosphere. One example is the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest, the lungs of the planet. Another example is the terminator seeds that are genetically engineered not to reproduce a second generation, forcing farmers to buy new seeds and making life impossible for many poor farmers. If the planet were seen as an organism, and people seen as cells in this organism, it would be as if these cells had become cancerous or parasitic and had turned on the healthy cells, destroying the very organism of which they themselves were a part. Our species appears to be enacting a mass ritual suicide on a global scale. “Paul Levy “Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil” Quest 102.4 (Fall 2014): pg. 146-151.
Also from Paul Levy…Wetiko disease is an expression of the convincing illusion of the separate self gone wild. Bewitched by the intrinsic projective tendencies of their own mind, full-blown Wetikos are unconsciously doing the very thing they are reacting to while simultaneously accusing other people of doing it.
Projecting the shadow onto others, they will accuse others of projecting the shadow onto them. To use an extreme, but prototypical example, it is like someone screaming that you’re killing them as they kill you.
If their insanity is reflected back to them, they think it is the mirror that is insane. Suffering from a form of psychic blindness that believes itself to be sightedness, full-blown Wetikos project out their own unconscious blindness and imagine that others, instead of themselves, are the ones who are not seeing.
Governed by the insane, self-perpetuating logic of fear and paranoia, those taken over by the disease fear that if they don’t attack and rule over others, they are in danger of being attacked and ruled over themselves.
In their convoluted, upside-down, flawless illogic, Wetikos’ act to their own projections in the world as if they objectively exist and are other than themselves, thinking that they themselves have nothing to do with creating that to which they are reacting.
In Wetiko disease, the psyche takes the ‘terror’ that haunts it from within, and in its attempt to master it, unwittingly becomes taken over by it, thus becoming an instrument of terror in the world. We have then become the thing we most feared, ‘creatures of the European nightmare world,’ as we psychologically terrorize ourselves, as well as terrorizing the world at large.
Because full-blown Wetikos are soul murderers who continually recreate the ongoing process of killing their own soul, they are reflexively compelled to do this to others; for what the soul does to itself, it can’t help but do to others.
In a perverse inversion of the golden rule, instead of treating others how they would like to be treated, Wetikos do unto others what was done unto them. The Wetiko is simply a living link in a timeless, vampiric lineage of abuse.
Full-blown Wetikos induce and dream up others to experience what it is like to be the part of themselves which they have split off from and denied, and are thus not able to consciously experience – the part of themselves that has been abused and vampirized. In playing this out, Wetikos are transmitting and transferring their own depraved state of inner deadness to others in a perverse form of trying to deal with their own suffering.
Paradoxically, Wetikos both try to destroy others’ light, as it reminds them of what they’ve killed in themselves, while simultaneously trying to appropriate the light for themselves.
The disease itself is now demanding that we pay attention to it, or it will kill us.”
“An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.” ~ Ghandi
Native American philosopher Jack Forbes further adds:
“This disease, this Wetiko (cannibal) psychosis, is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” We, as a species, are in the midst of a massive psychic epidemic, a virulent collective psychosis that has been brewing in the cauldron of humanity’s psyche from the beginning of time.
Like a fractal, Wetiko operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously — intra-personally (within individuals), inter-personally (between ourselves), as well as collectively (as a species). “Cannibalism,” in Forbes’s words, “is the consuming of another’s life for one’s own private purpose or profit.”
Those afflicted with Wetiko, like a cannibal, consume the life-force of others — human and nonhuman — for private purpose or profit, and do so without giving back something from their own lives.”
I don’t read much science fiction…I’m a chicklit girl, but my research about Wetiko led me to this article about the (deceased) sci-fi author, Phillip K. Dick (you might know him from the Bladerunner.)
Enchanted Seashells by Princess Rosebud 