Trump is Stirring Up a Whole Lot of Trauma in my Friends and Family

Listening to Professional Idiot the auto-biography of Steve-O. It’s heartwarming in some twisted way despite what awful things he’s done. He owns up to it and that deserves some respect.
I also listened to The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama a day or two ago and finished How to Boost Your Physical and Mental Energy. I’ve realized I can’t keep up on listing them all here. I go through so darn many self help and other non-fiction books. I’m enjoying this Steve-O biography enough that I think I should branch out and do some biographies. Most of them do have some form of self-help included in them.
I’m up to 321 titles that I’ve purchased on Audible. I’m thinking I’ve paid about 12 or 15 a piece so overall I’ve spent like over 4 grand on audible books. Well worth the investment.

My dad and I hiked to Lizard and Lily lakes at the Alger exit on Saturday. He was saying we’d need to take it easy, obviously because he’s in his 80’s and broke his neck bicycling in 2023 and the doctors tell him it’s never going to heal, but then we got up to Lily lake and he wanted to keep going up to the butte. Thankfully he did not try to go all the way out to the edge. It was slippery out there as it was below freezing.
We kept seeing this weird fungus stuff, that turned out to be called something like Hair Ice Fungus, guess it’s this weird rare thing that only happens when rotting wood is wet but not frozen, you’ve got the right kind of fungus growing in the log, it’s just below 32 degrees outside and with just the right humidity. The fungus pulls the water out of the log and it freezes into strands of hair.
At the end of it, we’d walked almost 25,000 steps and almost 9 miles. Most of the people I know couldn’t handle half that hike and my dad can do it in his eighties with a broken neck. So great to see him doing things and really going after life even now when so many people I know have just kind of given up on doing anything and just sit and stare like zombies at the TV.

Went to Boundary Bay for dinner tonight. Had some healthy stuff like coleslaw and beans and hummus plate. Fantastic.

Played a game of Mansions of Madness the other day, the one with the university with the strange green mist. Took all day with three friends. I don’t seem to do board games very often but when I do these marathon long sessions, especially with a game that has a story like that and is cooperative with everyone working together against the game instead of against each other, it can be pretty enjoyable.

Seems like a lot of pain around right now. My stepmom posted a thing to facebook basically declaring her and my dad are not supporting Trump and had a list of the horrible things he’s trying to do and my mom saw it and didn’t really understand it but wanted to do the same thing, but it’s like, she is scared. She has so many strong opinions but is scared of people coming after her for anything she might say politically on facebook or wherever. She’s so scared that the Trump supporters will come and do something to her simply for expressing her opinion on facebook, and I think her feelings represents millions of others in America right now. And it seems unthinkable that her own sisters voted for her to feel this way. They openly support this terror-induced prison for their own sister. All my life my aunts have been promoting violence in our discussions. Children need to be spanked rather than nurtured and understood. Countries must be invaded, not negotiated with. Criminals must be brutally punished rather than rehabilitated. So now, my aunts have clearly declared that my mom and me are the enemy and my mom’s spent her whole life listening to them supporting violence as a solution to all the other issues out there, that she’s internalized it and it’s worn her down into this scared person whose lost all hope for her country and is too terrified to stand up and say so.
I think this is happening all over the country to millions of us.
It’s like, the things Trump has done and what he represents is so horrifying that how the hell do we even talk about it? I just keep thinking about how he was accused of raping a 13 year old girl then threatening to murder her family to keep her quiet. And no one seems to care. He’s committed the largest act of treason ever by trying to overturn an election and now letting violent criminals go.
And I guess he shit on some preacher who asked him to have mercy and then his supporters started sending her death threats. Like, what kind of people do that, send death threats to a preacher who asks for mercy?
And under this lie of safety and law and order. We all know that’s a bold faced lie because we all feel far less safe now than we ever did under Biden. The things that are happening are an absolute disgrace, and all of the reasonable people out there can see that, but they’re too terrified to say it because the Trump supporters love violence so much and have made it abundantly clear they’ll use it to get their way.
But it’s like, at the same time, we’re family. We’re all Americans.
I just can’t wrap my brain around how my aunts could vote for their own sister to go through this kind of pain and suffering and they don’t even try to offer an explanation or show any sort of compassion. They just go on screaming about how they hate liberals.
Trump is bringing up a lot of trauma for a lot of people. Everyone I talk to is going through some kind of trauma over Trump.
Now Elon declaring himself a Nazi basically. Gosh darn that Why I Love Elon Musk article I wrote back in the day sure didn’t age well.

But I wanted to also bring up that I need to take responsibility for this shit in my family. In that Your Next Five Moves book it talks about taking responsibility for your own part in the way others have harmed you and that is certainly true here.
Trump has brought back all these memories of my cousin Brad assaulting me when we were kids, his hand clamped around my throat as I gasped for breath, sobbing and begging him for mercy. His face beet red with rage, his saliva splattering across my face as he screamed, his other hand gripping a hammer that he held over my head, ready to bash my brains in. He slammed my head against the wall over and over until I thought I was going to pass out, then made me admit to hitting his bicycle, which I had not done, then gave me a big speech about how he was going to be a cop one day and if I ever talked about this he’d use his police resources to have me killed.
And that’s how Trump kept that girl from following through on her rape accusation: he threatened to murder.
That’s how they keep us quiet, with direct or subtle threats of murder.
And then years later I attempted to come out as a police brutality survivor after I watched a cop beat a guy to death, and both my aunts just screamed at me instead of listening. I asked them both individually if the police murdered me to keep me silent, would they still see the police as heroes and they both said yes absolutely.
But at the end of the day, it was my fault I was traumatized by all this. I know that’s victim-blaming and I wouldn’t say that to anyone but myself. But I was the one with the crazy low self-esteem who was terrified to do the right thing and to tell the truth about what had happened with Brad. If I had just told the truth back in the day when we were kids, Brad could have gotten help, I could have gotten help and both our lives could have been better. Instead I was a coward and kept it bottled up. That’s not Brad’s fault. That’s mine.
And Dee and Marolyn saying they’d celebrate my murderers as heroes–well, why the fuck did I continue going over to Dee’s house after that and giving both of them hugs and for 20 some years carried this grudge against them but pretended everything was fine and that we were still family?
It was low self esteem, low self confidence. That’s on me.
I should have in the early 2000’s, just respectfully said where I was coming from. I’m a police brutality survivor suffering from PTSD and for my own mental health I simply cannot be around people who openly tell me that they support my murder. I needed to have enough self respect to say “sorry, I don’t find this treatment acceptable and so therefore I’m going to remove myself from this situation.”
Instead I was a coward who couldn’t talk about his feelings. Despite having a website where I promised to do just that.
So now I get that I’m the asshole here. I’m the one who’s throwing out all this personal family drama instead dealing with the source of the problem.
But it’s like, sometimes you’ve got to be the asshole in order to get the truth out. Maybe that’s part of what I respect about Steve-O, I mean he was a drug addicted dangerous asshole but at least he spoke the truth.
And I don’t want anyone fired or cancelled or otherwise punished. That’s what got us all into this in the first place. My aunts and cousin and all the other Trump supporters out there are all human beings and fellow Americans. And I have this feeling that what’s happening in my family is being mirrored in families all over the united states right now. And it sucks.
But we’re all in this together ultimately and condemning the Trump supporters and declaring them as enemies is only digging us deeper into these problems. We need to find peaceful solutions that moves us toward forgiveness.
We need to start talking and telling our stories.

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