Gutter-Snipe

lazerprincess

this is a collection of her photos, drawings and her suicide note, 

Really?  Really??  After two major and LARGE attacks on Jewish cemeteries and the FIVE waves of bomb threats on JCCs and Jewish organizations?  How can a man with a Jewish daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren; a man who claims to love Israel; and a man who claims that he loves the Jewish people even CONSIDER cutting any budgets on antisemitism?

When applied to a family, the gaslight treatment is a special form of dysfunction. It happens when you, a child, receive messages or encounter experiences within the family which are deeply contradictory. Messages which are opposing and conflicting; experiences which can’t both be true. When you can’t make sense of something, it’s natural to apply the only possible answer:

“Something is wrong with me.”

Today, scores of children are growing up under a gaslight of their own. And scores of adults are living their lives baffled by what went on in their families, having grown up thinking that they, not their families, are crazy.

I have seen gaslighting cause personality disorders, depression, anxiety, and a host of other lifelong struggles. Receiving contradictory messages that don’t make sense can shake the very ground that a child walks on.

The Four Types of Child Gaslighting:

1. The Double-Bind Parent: This type was first identified by Gregory Bateson in 1956.  The double-bind mother has been linked by research to the development of schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder. This type of parent goes back and forth unpredictably between enveloping (perhaps smothering) the child with love and coldly rejecting him.

The Message: You are nothing. You are everything. Nothing is real. You are not real.

The Gaslight Effect: As an adult, you don’t trust yourself, your validity as a human being, your feelings, or your perceptions. Nothing seems real. You stand on shaky ground. You have great difficulty trusting that anyone means what they say. It’s extremely hard to rely on yourself or anyone else.

2. The Unpredictable, Contradictory Parent: Here, your parent might react to the same situation drastically differently at different times or on different days, based on factors that are not visible to you. For example a parent who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs one day and not the next; a parent who is manic at times, and depressed other times, or a parent who is extremely emotionally unstable. Whatever the reason for the parent’s opposing behaviors, you, the innocent child, know only that your parent flies into a rage one moment and is calm and seems normal the next.

The Message: You are on shaky ground. Anything can happen at any time. No one makes sense.

The Gaslight Effect: You don’t trust your own ability to read or understand people; you have difficulty managing and understanding your own emotions, and those of others. You struggle to trust anyone, including yourself.

3. The Appearance-Conscious Family: In these families, style always trumps substance. All must look good, or maybe even perfect, especially when it’s not. There’s little room for the mistakes, pain, or natural human shortcomings of the family members. The emphasis is on presenting the image of the ideal family. Here, you experience a family which appears perfect from the outside, but which is quite imperfect, or even severely dysfunctional, on the inside. This can stem from Achievement / Perfection focused parents (as described in Running on Empty), or from narcissistic parents.

The Message: You must be perfect. Natural human flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses must be hidden and ignored. You are not allowed to be a regular human being.

The Gaslight Effect: You feel deeply ashamed of yourself and your basic humanness. You ignore your own feelings and your own pain because you don’t believe it’s real, or that it matters. You tend to see and focus on only the positive things in your life, which fit into a particular template. You are extremely hard on yourself for making mistakes, or you put them out of your mind and simply pretend they didn’t happen. You may be missing out on the most important parts of life which make it worthwhile: the messy, real world of intimacy, relationships and emotion.

4. The Emotionally Neglectful Family (CEN): In this family, your physical needs may be met just fine. But your emotional needs are ignored. No one notices what the children are feeling. The language of emotion is not used in the home. “Don’t cry,” “Suck it up,” “Don’t be so sensitive,” are frequently uttered by the CEN parent. The most basic, primary part of what makes you you (your emotional self) is treated as a burden or non-existent.

The Message: Your feelings and needs are bad and a burden to others. Keep them hidden. Don’t rely on others, and don’t need anything. You don’t matter.

The Gaslight Effect: You have been trained to deny the most deeply personal, biological part of who you are, your emotions, and you have dutifully pushed them out of sight and out of mind. Now, you live your life with a deeply ingrained feeling that you are missing something that other people have. You feel empty or numb at times. You don’t trust yourself or your judgments because you lack your emotions to guide you. Your connections to others are one-way or lack emotional depth. Even if you are surrounded by people, deep down you feel alone. None of it makes any sense to you.

Were you born under the gaslight? If so, you are not alone. You are not invalid or crazy or wrong. it’s vital to realize that you have been, by definition, deeply invalidated. But “invalidated” and “invalid” are not the same. “Invalidated” is an action, and “invalid” is a state of mind. You can’t change what your parents did and didn’t do, but you can change your state of mind.

Stop with the ass-kissing. Gather some conviction and take a stand. He doesn’t deserve your respect. Fascist sexual predators do not deserve your respect.

To condense a semester-long law school course into a blog post: Congress delegates significant quasi-legislative power to administrative agencies, e.g. the EPA. These agencies have a great deal of power to shape your everyday life, but our system of civics education is so abysmal that, chances are, you have no idea what kind of power you hold to shape their decisions.

Administrative agencies have to navigate a maze of laws and procedures in order for the rules they make to be effective and binding. These laws and procedures mean that there plenty of ways the agencies can mess up, and when they do, opponents of a rule can bring legal challenges and invalidate it. (This is frustrating for agencies, but delightfully fun for antagonistic nerds like me.)

When an agency wants to create an informal rule, it has to go through a process called “notice and comment.” Basically, the agency announces a proposed rule and permits the public to submit comments on it. The public includes you. 

When the comment period is over, the agency has to take the comments into account and justify its ultimate decision on the proposed rule in light of the comments. If you submit substantive, meaningful comments that challenge the policy or evidence behind a rule, and the agency fails to acknowledge them and explain its reasoning for its final decision, the rule can be challenged and invalidated.

So how do you comment on proposed rules? This lovely little site called regulations.gov. Really, it’s that easy! You can search for topics that interest you and submit your comments online. And you can do it anonymously! 

So please, check the website frequently and comment when it matters to you, so that your voice can be heard and Trump’s agencies have to acknowledge your perspective. If they fail to take your comments into consideration and disregard the American people, they’ll have to answer for it in court.

Protestors rarely ever cause blockage to emergency vehicles and telling people to protest in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone is ridiculous.

And I can say with 100% certainty… We NEVER kept the emergency vehicles from passing through. Fire truck? We’d move out the way and form a safety corridor for them to speed through, then tighten ranks again. Ambulance? We’d move the fuck out of the way as fast as possible. The last thing we ever wanted was to have a death on our conscience. We were protesting unfair laws, not out for blood (unlike what the government liked to imply though -_____-).

You know who DID block the way to emergency vehicles though?

The riot police. Whenever they injured people when they fired flashbang grenades right in the crowds and the exploded and sent shrapnel into people’s legs or faces, when they fired rubber bullets at face level against safety regulations, when they repeatedly rammed a downed, restrained protester with their batons and boots until teeth and blood covered the floor, they also systemically blocked ANY ambulances and first responders trying to get to the injured, or leave with a person in critical state to get to the hospital. They formed tight ranks and raised their plexiglass shields and stared them down, backed them off, trapped them with the protesters. Hell, they even arrested some of the first responders attending to the injured when they mass arrested the people they trapped with their own militaristic ranks.