I have never been a good writer. I always thought someday I would like to write a book, but the fact is I am a crappy writer. I went to public schools and yes people in public schools do learn to write but I never was required to write much in public school or when I went to college or grad school. But I digress, the piece below is not only well written but well thought out. The following piece appears on the American Thinker. I of course agree with the sentiments of the writer.
Cathy
Spelling and grammar errors as well as typos are left as an exercise for my readers.
Sympathy for the Devil
By Robin of Berkeley
October 01, 2009
How concerned should we be about Obama? Is he a potential dictator with a weird cult following who could destroy this country?
To put it more bluntly, does Obama have the potential for inflicting evil on us? Or, if he's a puppet, are the ones holding the strings malevolent?
These may be the most crucial and urgent questions of our times. Is Obamaphobia a legitimate reaction to an angry president with a vendetta, surrounded by psycho czars? Or is the imagination running amok?
Given that I have a stack of books on my desk about evil, let's take a look at how the experts define it.
Dante: Evil is the "sins of the wolf;" an inner black hole so vast that nothing will fill it.
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: "Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, and destroy innocent others -- or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behavior."
Philosopher Hannah Arendt: She coined the term the "banality of evil," after Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann was pronounced normal by psychiatrists.
Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie: "Evil people are chronic scapegoaters."
St. Augustine: Evil is "an essential nothingness."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "An absence of light; shade; no essence."
Goethe: Evil is "to render invisible another human consciousness."
Baudelaire: "The Devil's cleverest wile is to convince us he doesn't exist."
John Milton: "A tortured soul who makes others dance to the music of his own despair."
But to discern evil, we need to go beyond the guidance of the experts. We must decide with our own eyes, ears, and nose, whether a person passes the "stink test."
Humans possess an extraordinary sixth sense -- our intuition. St. Jerome called intuition, "synderesis:" an infallible God-given ability to distinguish between good and evil.
Yet, we're told not to trust our gut because it's not nice to be judgmental. In these politically correct days, where everybody is good, even terrorists, we're supposed to dismiss our intuition, shove it underground, lest we offend anyone.
Thus, if Obamaphobia gives us insomnia, headaches, or the heebie jeebies, it's all in our heads. We're being paranoid.
But isn't this how the Soviets dealt with dissidents? The leaders labeled them paranoid, and then had their fiendish psychiatrists forcibly drug, shock, and hospitalize them.
As the expression goes: you're not paranoid if someone is following you.
Criminologist Gavin De Becker, in his seminal work, The Gift of Fear, urges us to never ignore our intuition. Most of the time, victims sense that their attacker is a threat but ignore this inner knowing.
De Becker's wise words:
Can you imagine an animal reacting to the gift of fear the way some people do, with annoyance and disdain instead of attention? No animal in the wild, suddenly overcome with fear, would expend any of its mental energy thinking, "It's probably nothing." . . . We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore -- and even ignore -- survival signals.
I think that deep down most of us know who is good and who is evil -- who will bring joy and who will usher in disaster.
Because many of us have been touched by evil at some point in our lives. And it changes you; it pierces your soul. Because you behold something so startling it leaves you breathless: that there are people, sometimes in your own family, who wish you harm.
People ask me how I could go from Left to Right so quickly, and I've written about the main factors. But, now that I contemplate evil, I realize I left out the pivotal reason.
It's because I saw evil up close and personal starting from a young age. And when you're exposed to danger when you're little, and you don't push it away or blame yourself, something essential in you is altered; you're able to see what many others conceal.
I saw this darkness first in the devilish laughter of my brother when he realized we were alone in the house and he could terrorize me.
And I saw it again in my middle school, where the liberal experiment of forced busing unleashed a torrent of hate and mayhem. When roars of "f---cking white bitch," and assaults and fondling were as commonplace as English class.
And after I moved to squalid New York City in the late 70's, and lived through the reign of Mayor Dinkins, I saw it in the uncontrolled assaults on the citizen's bodies and souls.
I saw it on the streets of Berkeley when, on a perfect, blue sky day, a man smiled that same devilish grin before he mugged me, breaking my nose and blackening my eyes.
And when a friend glossed over my mugging because the assailant was black ("He's a victim too,"), I saw evil there.
I've seen it professionally in the face of the man who molested all five of his children; and in the visage of his wife, who chose to stay with him and was pregnant once again.
And now that I'm writing for American Thinker, I see it in some of the trolls, although not all of them. Some are just jerky people who write drivel like, "I just wasted five minutes of my life," and "You're a fake."
No, I'm talking about the people who post comments aimed not at disagreeing or offering an alternative viewpoint. They're designed to destroy my humanity.
They can't defend Obama, so they go after me. They call me paranoid or narcissist. They accuse me of throwing my dead parents under the bus. Or of betraying my Jewish ancestors by embracing other religions, like Christianity.
Or this bile: the person who wrote that she/he's glad I'm writing because it's therapeutic, since obviously I'm psychologically disturbed and could be a danger to society.
Fortunately I'm a therapist so I know who these people are. I can diagnose them a mile away. I've worked with them before, although each time, they chill me to the bone.
Having some hate spewed in my direction, I think of Sarah Palin and the wilding she endured.
And I think she resigned because, when her church was torched, her body ogled and threatened, and her children debased, she looked into the face of evil.
She saw something so dark and blood curdling that she did what any God fearing, God loving person would do: she put up her hands, yelled "Stop," and got out of there as fast as she could.
Because evil is the most dangerous of the toxins. It can harden, and infect, and change a person before he or she knows it. Evil desecrates the places inside that are holy and sacred.
More and more, each day, I smell the stench of wickedness. It's omnipresent in our government, and it's spreading like wildfire throughout the land, threatening everyone in its path.
M. Scott Peck so eloquently captures the consequences of evil in high places: "The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature sick society."
We have a man who has been privileged with the greatest honor, the Presidency, and what does he do? Does he demonstrate an ounce of gratitude or humility?
No, he betrays us in the most profound way possible: by not protecting and defending us.
Obama is doing to the American people just what his caregivers did to him when they dragged him around like a rag doll, and exposed him to a pervert like Frank Marshall Davis. Now Obama's a rage doll who's throwing us to the wolves.
People claim Obama isn't a serious threat because his personality is not like Mussolini or Che. He doesn't have the fire in his belly to be a true dictator.
But I will share with you a surprising truth I learned after working in the child abuse field: severe neglect is even more traumatic than serious physical abuse (not sexual abuse, though). People can be mortally wounded by crimes of omission.
Abuse is terrible but at least the abuser cares enough to pay attention, to know the child is alive. With neglect, the people who should care, don't give a damn; leaving the child abandoned and unguarded in a perilous world.
What worries me the most about Obama is this: the part of him that should want to shield us from harm seems chillingly absent.
The economy is tanking -- Obama laughs. We are accumulating crippling debt -- he and the other Democrats go on a spending spree.
Millions take to the street for a peaceful 9/12 march. He doesn't notice. We oppose the government controlling our lives, especially health care, but he rams legislation down our throats anyway.
Our allies have started to realize that Obama doesn't care about them either. He snubs Gordon Brown, returns a statue of Winston Churchill (how disturbing is this?), and insults the Brits with DVDs and iPods. He betrays the Poles and the Czechs, and leaves Israel hanging from a limb.
Obama does have sympathy for the devils, though, the Chavez's and Castro's of the world. Maybe he views them as brothers, fellow victims of the monstrous United States. Perhaps Obama is all Vive le Revolucion.
There are endless red flags, aren't there? The covert government of antisocial Czars; the cozy ties to Bill Ayers, maybe George Soros. And who knows what else, because Obama's private world has been hermetically sealed.
So is this what am I saying: that President Bare Heart is at the helm, with a bunch of loose cannons possibly running the show? That he's giving a wink-wink to miscreants both here and abroad?
That the New Weird Order is starting to unhinge the already unbalanced, and bring new, vulnerable people, into its fold?
That Obamaphobia is real, and we ignore it at our peril?
Yes.
But don't listen to me. Don't listen to anyone: not the mental midgets who call you "racist;" not your brother in law who says you're nuts; not the Talking Heads who paint you as stupid trash.
Pay attention to no one, to nothing, except the light of truth revealing itself to you.
"Truth crushed to the earth will rise again:" William Cullen Bryant
A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley.
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