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Thus revealed, the creature buried its nose in the tire-tilled soil...

November 30, 2005

Sad.

"When dealing with other people, one should temper everything one says and does so as not to risk making them even the slightest bit angry -- because if one does, those others may be moved to retaliate by contacting the authorities and tell unbelievably vicious lies in order to ruin one's life and damage one's reputation beyond repair."

This is not a belief that anyone should hold, nor should an individual's experiences consistently force this thought into one's consciousness. Yet because I have been blamed for every instance in which I have been made to suffer these attacks, it is a code by which I am obviously expected to live.

And the very same people who condemn me criticize me for being "antisocial" -- as if, knowing what I know and having experienced what I have experienced -- entering into healthy relationships with other people is even a remote possibility.

-posted by Wes | 2:49 am | Comments (6)

6 Comments »

NJWT says:

December 2, 2005 at 8:43 am

Hey, is that an actual quote? Who said it?

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Wes says:

December 2, 2005 at 9:08 am

It's not an actual quote as far as I know (or at least I'm pretty sure no one wrote it before I did, though one could probably find some analogous advice in the teachings of, say, Confucius), but people seem to expect me to follow that line of thinking in that they insist that it's my fault that others treat me so shamefully.

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NJWT says:

December 2, 2005 at 1:19 pm

Wes,
It's even worse than that.
People don't leave you alone when they ascertain that you're not a threat. It's when they realize you're harmless that they pick on you.
A sad fact of life.
You get attacked because you're not a threat, and then you get blamed because you're not a threat and it's easier to blame you than to blame the agressor.
F'd up world.
But not everyone is like that, and it is possible to filter out who you'll associate with

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Naomi says:

December 2, 2005 at 3:48 pm

Here I thought I was the only one....

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Omni says:

December 5, 2005 at 7:44 pm

One of the grim truths of human nature is that there's a blame the victim mentality, which says that the victim MUST have been doing something awful to the attackers to cause the attacks on them... although by that logic, the attackers must themselves have done something horrible earlier on to deserve the theoretical attacks on THEM by the victim that allegedly preceded THEIR attacks, but no one ever thinks it out that far.

People don't want to accept that some folks are evil, and being evil will initiate attacks on others just for the fun of it... but WE know differently, right?

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Wes says:

December 5, 2005 at 8:01 pm

Funny, Omni -- the argument you mention there is pretty similar to the argument that my undergraduate dean used against me on two separate occasions: once to say that I must have done something abominable in order for my roommate to have moved out; again to posit that I must have done something truly horrible (e.g. rape) to justify the feeling of discomfort that one female classmate felt in my presence. Of course, those instances were used to blame me as the attacker -- so it seems that that rationale will be employed to condemn me regardless of my position in any given conflict!

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